Blackness at the Edge of the World Making Race in the Colonial Arctic

This essay juxtaposes the anti-Black imagery of the Sámi printmaker John Savio (1902-1938) with images of Sápmi by the US artist William H. Johnson (1901-1970). Their critical comparison contributes to an approach that Tiffany Lethabo King calls “configuring and enfleshing the spaces and cracks where Black and Indigenous life caress each other.” By framing the production of both artists within a global history of Blackness in the colonial Arctic, I explore their mediations of a primitivist pictorial language as racialized subjects from distinct, yet intertwined positionalities.


Produced in Sápmi, Hoppla, We're Alive! brings Black and (non-African)
Indigenous relationality beyond the spatial confines of the Americas, engaging instead the transcultural geographies of the Circumpolar North. Paying critical attention to this distinct geography can help locate the print within what Noelle Belanger and Anna Westerståhl Stenport (2016, 10) have called "the constitution of a history of Arctic color, which includes blackness at the center of polar representations". They rightly conclude that the Arctic's "long history of metaphorical 'whiteness'" has obscured the relationships between Arctic resource extraction and the ships of enslavers (2016,(22)(23). Elsewhere, Helga Hlaðgerður Lúthersdóttir (2015, 330) has demonstrated how the works of Black British directors John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien "creolize the notion of whiteness in Arctic imagery" in the twenty-first century. A pivotal, but lesser known contribution to this "creolization" of the Arctic is the legacy of William Henry Johnson, a United States artist who traveled in and painted Sápmi at the same time that John Savio created his vision of Blackness in the 1930s. Often affiliated with the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson lived in Scandinavia for some eight years, primarily in Denmark, but also traveling extensively across Norway and Sweden.
Scholars working at the intersection of Black and Native Studies have long sought to complicate and transcend such presumptions of solidarity, comparison, antagonism, and incommensurability between these groups. Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith (2020, 21) have recently advocated for taking an "otherwise stance on Black and Indigenous relationality," one that is processual and full of "growing pains" as it strives towards a relationality that is "joyfully unbound" rather than fixed. This future-oriented focus provides an opportunity to break from the stable coordinates that may otherwise map the work of Sámi anti-Blackness or Black engagement in Sápmi. In other words, such an approach investigates the complexities of racial thought at work in Savio's print or Johnson's paintings without that critique being the sole end of the inquiry.
In what follows, I juxtapose John Savio's woodcut with William H. Johnson's Sápmi imagery in the hope of contributing to Tiffany Lethabo King's (2019, 13)  Croix, whose escape to Iceland circa 1805 demonstrates how Black fugitivity could set the North Atlantic as a site of liberation.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, white settler discourse imagined the Arctic through a frontier mentality, casting the region as a notoriously impenetrable landscape that resisted easy traverse. Polar explorations gained increasing currency with the establishment of the International Polar Year in 1882, fomenting international collaboration in Arctic and Antarctic research that continues to this day. Anti-Blackness featured prominently on these explorations, as blackface minstrelsy was a popular mode of entertainment on these explorer vessels (Blum 2019, 122-123). In 1909, a pivotal breakthrough would profoundly shape discourse about the relationship between race and polar exploration when parka-clad Matthew Henson planted the United States flag into the frozen earth of the North Pole. With the pivotal assistance of Inughuit guides Ooqueh, Ootah, Egingwah and Seeglo, the United States explorers Matthew Henson and Robert Peary described their "discovery" of the North Pole-they were actually still in Kalaallit Nunaat-as a triumph of American ingenuity and civilization. In 1912, Henson capitalized on his newfound fame and published a memoir titled A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. With an introduction penned by Booker T. Washington, Henson's memoir adopted settler discourse to promote US Progressive-era ideals of racial uplift, casting himself as "a lowly member of my race, who had been chosen by fate to represent it, at this, almost the last of the world's great work" (quoted in Foy 2012, 20). As explored below, Henson's legacy as a Black explorer would come to bear implicitly and explicitly on William H. Johnson and his visual production.
In the decades between the establishment of the International Polar Year and the 1909 "discovery" of the North Pole, Sámi men would also play pivotal roles in Nordic desires to claim primacy over these struggles for discovery. has made a brief suggestion that the image under question could be "a satirical or ironic response" to the interwar prevalence of racial biology and eugenics, those pseudo-scientific practices that pathologized Sámi bodies, uprooted families, and fomented longstanding trauma. Such political and social contexts are crucial, but they do not address the issue that Savio's print brings to the fore: the collision of Blackness and Indigeneity.
According to Savio's friend and first biographer Hans Nerhus, the artist Tourists want to take home something that gives an impression that they have traveled to some unknown part of the earth" (quoted in Nerhus 1982, 81). Latent in Savio's commentary is a frustration that settler society renders his Indigeneity as never-modern, thus precluding his full participation as a professional artist. Given the fraught racial politics of Hoppla, We're Alive!, it is tempting to speculate on Savio's thoughts on the German appropriation of African art, but his connection between tourism and primitivism has more immediate relevance here.
In 1929, the Swedish artist-cum-adventurer Ossian Elgström characterized Sápmi as a place of "barracks and a Wild West life of card-playing, drinking, and frequent brawling," where "streets and water lines, electric lights and a movie theater" appeared as "the realm of the Sámi narrowed" (quoted in Dubois 2014, 45). For Elgström, whom Hanna Eglinger (2021)  Savio's use of the woodcut also stakes a claim about racial embodiment. The artist always faced a settler relationship to his work that interpreted any visual choice as informed by his identity. Long entangled with notions of authenticity, the woodcut's handcrafted manufacture realized a physical engagement with the image that disrupted streamlined machine printing. By embracing roughly hewn grooves and cuts as tools of aesthetic expression, early twentieth-century artists framed woodcuts as the primitivist medium par excellence. Moreover, through signifiers of tropicality-the palm trees, the grass skirts-he displaces himself as maker from the colonial Arctic. In an earlier attempt at grappling with this image, I suggested that Savio "revels in poking fun at the anthropological gaze of the state" (Pushaw 2021, 63). This reading was indebted to my interest in understanding Savio's relationship with Nordic racial biology, but my view has now become more ambivalent. Building on Philip Deloria's Indians in Unexpected Places, Sámi scholar Veli-Pekka Lehtola (2018, 8-9) has stressed the urgency of restoring modern subjecthood to Sámi in the early twentieth century. For Lehtola, key to realizing this modernity is honing one's sensitivity towards the prevalence of "interethnic politics" in evaluations of Sámi cultural production (2018, 11). In a 1974 speech, Alf Isak Keskitalo (1994, 17)  Leben! mirrored Toller's dismay at the complacency of his former revolutionary comrades in the Weimar Republic. As a headline in The New York Times declared, producer Erwin Piscator's "startling modern stage technique" defined the play's significance (Trask 1927, 4). Piscator had replaced static painted backdrops with dynamic film clips of World War I, newsweeklies, and official archives. The critic writing for The New York Times predicted that this use of film in modern theatre "will leave an indelible impression on the stage direction of the future" (Trask 1927, 4). In Norway, the paper Arbeiderbladet devoted a full front-page spread to the "revolutionary" play, stating, "With Hoppla, wir leben! Piscator broke a new path, swirling the spectators in a round dance […] neither theatre, cinema, review nor newspaper, it was a combination of them all" (Olden 1927 Powell (2011, 27) has evocatively described as "textured, energetic brushstrokes in tandem with a quaking, topsy-turvy perspective". The couple married in Kerteminde in 1930. In numerous interviews throughout the decade, Nordic newspapers would routinely call him Chinosmaleren, the Chino painter, because Johnson told journalists that his father was Black and his mother was Native American (Powell 1991, 79-80). Originating from caste classifications in colonial Mexico, chino signified the offspring of a Black father and Native American mother, precisely the genealogy that Johnson touted. Art historian Richard Powell (1991, 5), Johnson's most thorough biographer and dedicated champion, has explained that Johnson was notably lighter skinned than the rest of his younger siblings, perhaps because "interracial connections-covert or overt, forced or free-had a far longer and broader history in South Carolina [where Johnson was born] than Fisherman, ca. 1930Fisherman, ca. -1935 Hand-colored woodcut, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. residents cared to acknowledge". Powell neither confirms nor denies Johnson's Indigenous roots, but what makes this heritage so fascinating is that Johnson seemed to discuss it only while he was living in the Nordic countries. By evoking a combined Native American and African heritage, Johnson recalls the trajectory of Edmonia Lewis, a nineteenth-century US sculptor of mixed Ojibwe and Black ancestry, who, like Johnson, advanced her professional career to a large degree in Europe. Whereas Lewis racialized her Neoclassical figures as white in order to distance her authorship from her multi-racialized self (Nelson 2007;Buick 2010), Johnson purposefully cultivated a mixed-race persona as a promotional strategy to lend credence to his use of a primitivist pictorial language. Both attained critical success for doing so.

Johnson as Painter-Explorer in Sápmi
Long before Johnson arrived in Sápmi, he had already espoused that "primitives can be found all over the world" (quoted in Powell 1991, 78 Johnson (Jelsbak 2019). American art historian Jacqueline Francis has argued that Expressionism's distorted aesthetics "resonated with an audience's internalized ideas about ineffable racial essences" in the interwar period (Francis 2012, 78). In this reading, the "ineffable racial essences" of Johnson's white Danes oozed from the thick, coagulated paints coating the surface of the canvas and the sharp angles of woodcuts.
In January 1935, Johnson and Krake traveled from Copenhagen to Oslo. After Krake had helped arranged an exhibition for Johnson at the Blomqvist Gallery, Johnson revealed that their plans were "to experience the real Norway" (Powell 1991, 93). They had planned to stay with Krake's family in Volda, arriving in the summer later that year. Powell's description of Johnson's two-year stay in the Volda region warrants some investigation. He writes, "Johnson's journey into the Scandinavian hinterland offered the artist a chance to celebrate his primitivist affinities for the north via his paintings of regional views and folk types […] He tackled the primordial forms of western Norway not as an aggressive conqueror, but rather as an attuned spirit" (Powell 1991, 96-101). Powell's reading of Johnson's engagement of the Nordic landscape is indebted to a discourse of primitivism that influenced Anglophone writing on Nordic modern painting in the 1980s and 1990s. As I have argued elsewhere, this art historiographical tradition has reproduced an elevation of the "primitive North" that paradoxically conceals Sámi presence despite its centrality to settler colonial discourse (Pushaw 2019).
Although the Volda region that Powell analyzes is not part of Sápmi, one must be aware of the pitfalls of understanding Johnson's Sápmi images through this analytical lens, since recent scholarship on the artist has devoted little attention to his Sápmi landscapes (Stokes-Sims 2011).
When Johnson painted Midnight Sun, Lofoten in 1937, he knew he was on Sámi land. A folder in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. contains a striking group of postcards that proves as much [4]. One postcard, labeled "På Fondalsbraeen, Svartisen, Nordland," captures pointy peaks of glaciers, and black ice that has enveloped dark-colored stones. Adjacent to these angular mountains of ice is another photograph of three Sámi men standing in front of a boat at a harbor. This coastal area of Sápmi witnessed a longer legacy of integration between Sámi and Norwegian populations, working side by side as fishermen. Given Johnson's earlier interest in primitive fisherfolk, one might presume Johnson would have created similar images of Sámi fisherfolk in and around Lofoten, but his production in Sápmi was mostly devoid of people, focusing instead on angular landscapes bursting with color. These geological giants crest like waves that have petrified-each daub of pink, orange, and lilac a striation of the history of the earth-before crashing into the shore. While the topos of the unpopulated landscape often suggests Indigenous erasure, contemporary Sámi writing about these particular landscapes reveals a different narrative. In his defining 1910 Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sámi), available in English translation as early as 1919, Johan Turi (2011, 4) specifically writes about "the dangers of the coastal mountains." And these days the Sámi must keep their reindeer confined high up in the mountains or beneath summits where there are many perils for the reindeer.
And it is perilous for people too, for the slopes and peaks are so high and between them ice sheets and crevasses since the very beginning of the world.

Some of those [crevasses] are so deep that no one can find their bottom. […]
When it gets hot, the reindeer head up onto high glaciers where people cannot follow, and because of the mosquitoes and the heat they head even higher up the slopes and the reindeer who are highest kick loose some stones. And when one stone comes loose, many stones begin to roll and many reindeer are killed in this manner as well. And if a person is down below, it is the same danger for him as well". (Turi 2011, 14) Turi describes the landscape as a space traversable almost exclusively for otherthan-human beings. Understanding such a perilous place, where Johnson "worked like a madman" and "climbed up and down every day to paint that view at night" (Powell 1991, 107), suggests an environmental danger wherein Johnson's act of Arctic painting reconstitutes Matthew Henson's Arctic exploration and "discovery." Though Henson deployed settler discourse to demonstrate his supremacy over Inuit (Totten 2015, 63-65), Johnson's bravado painting in the color-bursting Arctic materialized a more lateral relationality. When a Norwegian paper ran the headline "A Man of Sioux Heritage with Blonde Wife at the Art Society Exhibition," it reproduced a large photograph of Johnson standing before Midnight Sun, Lofoten (Adresseavisen 1937). Through his public assertion of Sioux ancestry, this African American painter of Sápmi created a critical framework for understanding his oeuvre as the very materials of Black and Indigenous relationality in the colonial Arctic: one as unbound as the radiant colors and expressive lines of his own painterly practice.