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(Kurt Seaberg) I traveled to Norway in 2009
and I was in this town called Kautokeino,
way above the Arctic Circle.
It's a heavily populated with Sami people,
and I walked into this bar and the first thing I saw was,
is that my artwork?
It was framed and on the wall and it just blew me away
because I had no idea.
So Sami Land or Spmi is the northern part of Scandinavia
and it spreads across 4 countries,
Norway, Sweden, Finland, and part of Russia.
But the Sami are the indigenous people of this area.
They've been there for at least 10 perhaps 20 thousand years,
and they're considered to be the only indigenous group of people
still living in Europe.
I started making Sami images;
I was working on a Sami American newsletter
with a number of people who also had Sami in their heritage,
making illustrations.
Plus my father was a visual artist too
and he made a lot of portraits of Sami people
and so I think I got inspired by that.
So it was all one piece;
I was starting to learn about my own background,
I was learning about the Sami people.
After I'd compiled, you know, a good number of illustrations,
I hit on this idea of well, I could make a calendar
and use my own illustrations along with my father's.
And I made it a bilingual calendar,
and it was in English and Sami.
I started collecting historical facts and important dates
of famous Sami cultural figures and things
and I kept doing this every year, and I would learn more
and I kept adding more information to the calendar,
wrote little stories, and I had pictographs
of ancient Sami rock carvings and symbols off the Sami drum
and I just kept adding all this stuff to it and pretty soon,
I'd put together a, it was almost like a book,
you know, and people started using it
like an educational tool at schools in Norway and Sweden.
They would write back to me and say
oh, we use your calendar in our classes.
And cause they would tell me that, you know,
we've never seen anything like this,
to have all this information all in one place.
And that was a great compliment to hear that.
guitars play in bright rhythm