Dayna Bateman
Deracination, Or How to Disappear
Winner of the 2025 American Literary Review Award in Essays, Judged by Jaquira Díaz
deracinate /dɪˈrasɪneɪt/ 1. uproot. 2. to remove or separate from a native environment or culture. especially: to remove the racial or ethnic characteristics or influences from
A.
As a kid, I was an anthropologist. When I landed at a new school I studied how normal was done through the gestures of others and I put it into play, getting it wrong more often than I got it right.
B.
“Bitch,” Suzie said in the seventh grade, sometime after she decided to be my friend. “Something about your face,” she explained, as we walked home from the bus when I was still the new girl. (I was always the new girl.) “I thought you were a bitch. But then you shared your M&Ms and I changed my mind.”
C.
Cladonia Rangiferina is the Latin taxonomic name for reindeer moss, which isn’t moss, but lichen. Like all lichen, it is rootless and cannot suckle the soil. It branches to survive but does not leaf out, and its branches extract nourishment from the air, the sun, and the rain.
D.
“D is so normal for growing up a nomad,” his mother said, not to me but to her son, my high school boyfriend. He told her about the moves my family had made, all over the country, following my dad’s job. Following the music. And because I loved him, my high school boyfriend, and because I wanted nothing to separate us, I heard nomad as something I had done wrong. Something to put right.
E.
Eallu is the herd and boazavázzi are the Sámi reindeer walkers who follow the eallu across the eight seasons of the Arctic, in pursuit of the lichen that drinks the wind, that blankets Sápmi, that feeds the herd.
F.
“From the far, far, far North,” my grandmother’s father said when he tried to describe to his daughter the place the family left in Norway for Chicago, without saying who they were, because so few Sámi said who they were once they came here.
G.
Genus and species, which form the bedrock of the binomial classification system by which we order our civilized world, were developed by Carl Linnaeus, a Swede, who as a young man made botanical observations in Sápmi, a place he called Lapland. A place everyone called Lapland, except the Sámi community, who called it home.
H.
Homo, meaning Man, described the many genders of humanity in 1758 when Linnaeus published his 10th edition of the Systema Naturae. In his branching taxon, Linnaeus ordered “the varieties of Man” according to the four major continents of the colonial imagination: Europe, Asia, America, and Africa. He conjoined these geographies with Galen’s Humour Theory of Temperament to define, with alarming confidence, specious human “types” derived from climate. He flattered the people of Europe, Homo Europaeus, as sanguine optimists. He typecast the men of Africa, Homo Africanus, as submissive and phlegmatic. Homo Asiaticus he mistook for melancholic, and the Indigenous communities of America, Homo Americanus, he tut-tutted as hot-tempered and unyielding.[1] His error provided the foundation for scientific racism (which is by no means scientific) and persists, in some circles, to this day.[2] (See: Trump, Donald, Shithole Countries (2018).) Also in the tenth edition, to describe the First People of Scandinavia, the Sámi, and those many others around the world who were, well, different from their Continental cousins, Linnaeus created a new category: Homo Monstrosus. That is: He called them monsters.
I.
If Indigenous describes the First People of a place, how are First People described once they have fled from that place?
J.
Joik, the Sámi song tradition, is spelled with a “J” that sounds like a “Y”, which evokes my beautiful grandmother Margaret, her almond eyes bracketed by laughing guillemets when she joked of how Lena told Ole: “Just when I learned to say jelly, they changed it to yam.”
K.
Known as the Father of Taxonomy for his carefully ordered hierarchies, I did not question Linnaeus as my guide when, as a graduate student of Human-Computer Interaction, I learned to construct rational information architectures that aligned with the workings of the Western mind. Branching categories of inevitable associations: If X, then certainly, Y. We called this scientific too.
L.
Lapp is an exonym, a name from the outside. Conferred by Norwegian nomenclaturists for whom “lapp” meant “patch”, it describes the much-mended. The impoverished. Like other exonyms—Rainier for Tahoma, McKinley for Deenaalee, Pikes Peak for Tavá Kaa-vi—Lapland does not rhyme with the place it describes.
M.
My nipples are brown, my husband’s are pink.
N.
Norwegians are such nice folk (Reader, I married one) and their governance seems so fair, it’s hard to imagine why they did all this: the compulsory boarding schools, the silencing of the joik, of the Sámi language, the Arctic land encroachment, the my-way-or-the-highway habits of Norwegianization. All of it just another word for Civilization, all of it just another way to say you are Savages.
O.
Only in America could a monster pass for a White man.
P.
Passing for White, passing for Norwegian-American for my nomadic ancestors looked like a good job at the box factory, a mortgage on a small house up the hill. It meant regular attendance at the Lutheran church in Norway, Illinois. Passing meant a new language. Passing came with new names.
Q.
Quiwe Baarson was a Noadi in the far north of Norway’s Altafjord. He sold promises of good winds and fair sailing to fishermen. Like all weathermen, sometimes he got it right, and sometimes he got it wrong. When fair weather turned foul in the autumn of 1625 and five men drowned, the widow of one accused Quiwe of Sámi sorcery. He was found guilty of witchcraft and executed by immolation because burning ensured that his body could not be resurrected to find a home in heaven. Instead, it would wander.
R.
Race—a word that describes a competition in which there is only one winner—gained favor in the 1800s as a way to describe human differences along the imagined ladder of capital-P-Progress. Progress, we taught our children then and still do today, is the climb from subsistence savagery to the plowed furrows of civilization.
S.
Sam was the name my grandmother’s grandfather took as his own when he melted into America and declared his intention to naturalize as a US citizen in 1874. Søren was the name he shed, having first taken it up in Norway when the government required him to trade his Sámi name for one of their own. I do not know his Sámi name. I cannot joik his Dovdna. A Sámi child receives their joik, their Dovdna, in their father’s arms when they are first named; when they are welcomed into this world. Like their name, their Dovdna contributes to their identity. Like them, their song will change as they grow. Their children’s children will learn their Dovdna, and their children too. In this way, the children come to know all who have come before them and all who look after them still.
T.
Tillie took her five-year-old grandson Gil to lunch in the Georgian Room of Seattle’s Olympic Hotel. They dressed up and wore white gloves. Tillie’s gloves hid her washerwoman hands. How long she must have saved to take her grandson to the Georgian Room. Gil was my father. Tillie was Sam’s daughter. How persistent she must have been to coax five-year-old Gil to stand on his chair and sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to the ladies who lunched. His beautiful voice (“like an angel,”my grandmother Margaret said when she told me this story), his feet on the chair, breaking with decorum. Savages.
U.
Under the stars, camped out in the backyard, my father sang to us. How I wonder what you are. Summoning us to pancakes on a Saturday he sang up the stairs: Oh What a Beautiful Morning / Oh What a Beautiful Day. He raised us in song. He bathed us in music.
V.
da Vinci wrote in his notebooks: “All the branches of a tree at every stage of its height when put together are equal in thickness to the trunk.” This is known as Leonardo’s Rule for Branches and while it’s not entirely correct it’s not too far from the truth. It describes the fractal nature of the branch, the descendant that ascends. By observing the trunk you can understand something about the capacity of its branches. The trunk, too, will continue to grow as the branches reach upward, leaf outward, each and all sustained from within through the shared sap flow that courses through the tree from the roots to the crown.
W.
When healing rituals were decreed, by Norwegian law, to be a certain sign of witchcraft in the 1590s, the number of Noadi convicted of sorcery suddenly swelled and Sámi soon made up sixty percent of those who were condemned to die.[3] With their deaths their healing drums fell silent too, their Goavddis, uniquely inscribed with signs that, when queried, could no longer reply.
X.
Ex post facto, the extinguished drums were collected by scholars, moneyed men, Homo Europaeus Albus, who displayed them in curiosity cabinets that smelled of tobacco and the earth of the New World.
Y.
Y is a branch, a fractal, a survival strategy. When growth in one direction does not provide adequate sustenance, the organism puts out new shoots to seek nourishment in a new direction.
Z.
-zation is a bound morpheme that in truth contains an “i”: –ization: the act of becoming, making, or making like. But because less than half of one percent of root words in the English language begin with the letter Z, and I need a Z to conclude my abecedary of deracination, I’ve found a way around. [4] I’ve stripped away the “I” that joins the suffix to the stem and transforms the noun into a verb. Trades the self for something else. And so it came to be, my forged family identity: Norwegianization. Americanization. Civilization.
[1]. “Linnaeus and Race.” The Linnean Society of London, 3 Sept. 2020, http://www.linnean.org/learning/who-was-linnaeus/linnaeus-and-race. Accessed 3 Apr. 2024.
[2]. US Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway speaks of encountering these same racial categories in the 1966 World Book Encyclopedia that was purchased by her grandmother to commemorate the year of her granddaughter’s birth. “2022 Windham-Campbell Prizes Ceremony.” YouTube, uploaded by Windham-Campbell, 1 Sept. 2022, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW3YxUG1xNc&t=1s.
[3] Willumsen, Liv H. “Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway.” 2008. University of Edinburgh, Doctoral thesis. Edinburgh Research Archive.
[4]. The number of Sámi and their descendants are estimated to number around 80,000 to 100,000 today, or 0.00125% of the global population. More rare than a leading Z in a world full of words.
Dayna Bateman is a recovering tech worker and an emerging writer whose work has appeared in trade publications like Multichannel Merchant and literary journals like the Colorado Review. A Tin House and Granta Memoir Workshop alum, she was awarded a Storyknife Writers Residency on the strength and promise of her memoir-in-progress about growing up on the spinning edge of the vinyl record business. True to her heritage as a Sámi descendant she grew up on the move across the Pacific Northwest, Hudson and Sonoma Valleys, and Rocky Mountain West. She now lives in Chicagoland with her partner of a quarter-century and their cat, Oscar.