#lemko

Lemko

so i’m lemko and lule sámi. i am very connected to lemko and rusyn culture as a whole. i grew up with it and my baba was around to teach me (as best she could). i feel warm and at home wearing krywulka and dancing to lemko kolomyky. i remember fondly making pysanky with my baba and my siblings before easter and hearing the starci wsi call us chopchilitky or psotyty. i love that side of me.

i feel very differently about the sámi side of myself. my áhkku died when i was very young (he was a firefighter. boahtte ráhkisvuohta) so i really have no memory of him besides what others tell me. when my parents got married, they decided to leave my father’s indigenous cultures behind in favor of becoming something more „american”. my father, while he doesn’t stop it, always tries to persuade me to give up the cultural practices i love so much. my mom (whos just german) doesn’t really care (i think she just doesn’t understand completley). my only connection was my baba and my tetka.

i had no clue i was sámi for a long time. my tetka would sometimes say things about it but not ever directly? if that makes sense? she is way more connected to lemkivshchyna. it was only when started looking at our last name that i actually found anything concrete about it. i learned my ancestors were lule sámi, boazu-mánná, salmon guolmmát and čievrie-mánná mostly around the southern sápmi areas (lule, pite and southern sámi areas).

i learned about my ancestors une and kelu and how their sámi names weren’t used on paper — instead using swedish ones. i learned of joen and marit and how most everything about them has been lost besides the fact they were well respected. I learned of dordi, the only woman in her family to use just her sámi name. I learned of golin and kälug, the tanner and the farmer on paper. i learned of the gädda family, who were half swedish and half sámi thanks to their mother, seljá. i could go on and on but i’ll stop here.

i learned then that having sámi ancestry is a very different thing when you can think of real connections to sápmi. it became real for me. my áhkku turned from an abstract idea to a real part of this community. but what am i supposed to do with that? i didn’t grow up around any sámi or on sápmi. i am about as disconnected from the culture as i could be in that moment. i think that fueled the idea in my head that i wasn’t going to ever reconnect. that i had no right to. i still feel like that partially. but i also think of the generations of sámi that came before me. that i am lucky to call my ancestors. i think of dordi and her half assimilated family, i think of joen olkurri and seljá gädda and the pajari women (who had very long swedish names, and refused to remove pajari from them), i think of the flar’s and the kuse’s and how all of my sámi ancestors must’ve felt too.

i only recently decided that i should be proud. i am certainly different from most sámi women, i don’t live on sápmi and my language skills are trash but i have a newfound fire to find a place in the sámi community (whatever that may look like) and learn and find that fire i have seemed to get so naturally in the lemko community. something within me is deeply connected to sápmi, and only gets bigger with my reconnection.

a little bit about me: i’m a 19 year old girl living in the united states. i go to university, and i study nursing and public health. and i’m tired of how much of american culture is driven by marketing, capitalism, and consumerism. from valentine’s day, to halloween, to even christmas, american culture just seems driven by a marketing motor, just designed to sell us a product, not a connection or experience. yes, some american traditions are nice. but i want something deeper, something less superficial. so i decided that maybe “de-assimilating” myself would work. i want to connect to the culture of my ancestors, the very immigrants who came over to this wretched country and were pressured to assimilate: to lose their language, their food, their holidays, their customs.

my roots are mainly alsatian, german (franconian and baden), lemko/rusyn from poland, belgian (flemish), french canadian, and irish, though i also have ancestors from austria, switzerland, and luxembourg as well.

Folk culture is a constant familiarization with death 

``get that damn oxygen thing away from me, I know when it’s time`` 

``folk culture is a constant familiarization with death.``

``he died pretty young, lung cancer. I stopped smoking that day`` 

``folk culture is a constant familiarization with death.``

``When the church closed for good last summer amidst a pandemic, eight worshippers remained.``

``folk culture is a constant familiarization with death.``

``Man, being one of the elements of the "cosmic" puzzle…dies and is reborn anew.``

``folk culture is a constant familiarization with death.``

`` It’s my old man’s birthday today, he would have been…`` 

``folk culture is a constant familiarization with death.``

That is why I feel the coal they mined under my nails

``folk culture is a constant familiarization with death.``

That is why, if I just sit a little too still for a little too long, I feel my lungs become just as blackened

``folk culture is a constant familiarization with death.``

On the second floor of the Ukrainian Museum in the East Village, visitors are transported to the distinctive landscape of the Carpathian Mountains through more than 100 watercolors and sketches by the self-taught Lemko artist Nikifor (1895–1968). Born with a speech impediment that made him unintelligible to many people, Nikifor turned to drawing as a means of communication. He almost obsessively depicted the world around him, creating anywhere from a dozen to 100 sketches and paintings a day.