Estonia

Prior to colonization, Estonia was a land of small settlements, villages, and farms. That all ended in the Thirteenth Century with the northern crusades (a topic for another day). The year my father was born, 1918, Estonia declared independence and by 1920 was the Republic of Estonia, an independent country.

Image by Wolfgang Eckert from Pixabay

During the first period of independence that lasted until 1939, Estonians sought to reclaim, re-imagine, and/or reinvent the authentic Estonian spiritual beliefs.  After seven hundred years of colonization and subjugation sorting out Estonian traditions from those of the Germans, Danes, Swedes and Russians was not easy. Then of course there was the conversion (forced and/or voluntary)  to Christianity

As the Estonians started to re-create a culture that was grounded in independence, one strategy was to reject the imposed Christian belief system in favor of the creation of a uniquely Estonian religion. And thus Taarausk (Taaraism) was born. Following the Christian concept of one god and referencing the god,Tharapita, from the writings of Henry of Livonia during the Northern Crusades, this new religion was focused on creating cultural and intellectual freedom to live up to the ideals of political liberty. Then came fifty years of Soviet colonization. Finally with the restoration of independence Estonian culture creators could resume the work that was interrupted by World War II.

Since the early 1990s, Estonia has been engaged in the type of intentional myth making employed by colonized and colonizing cultures.  When a culture has been colonized and then regains independence, the people cannot go back to who they were before the colonizer imposed an alien structure of economics, politics, culture, and relations to other peoples. The culture is forever changed. However, as George Orwell so astutely noted in his short story “Shooting an Elephant” the colonizers are also forced to alter their behavior and, of course, their myths to justify their actions. Because in the end, we use our mythologies to justify our inhumanity.

I find Estonian mythology fascinating, not just because I am half Estonian, but because the people are re(imagining) a past that may or may not ever have existed. They are actively defining for themselves what it means to be Estonian now after so much trauma. I ,as someone who is ethnically, but not culturally Estonian (having been born and raised in the USA with a father who kept Estonia and Estonian culture as a privately held part of his life), may not be living the Estonian myth making process engaged in by those who remained in Estonia after World War II, but I live in a culture where myth making is also an ongoing process, where many culture workers are trying to reveal the layers of colonization of the first people of this land and in which I am part of the colonizing culture.

Of course, in the USA, there are still people clutching to the mythologies created to justify colonization, imperialism, and slavery.  Therefore, we have many competing mythologies trying to claim cultural space.  If the dominant culture in the USA was traditional for the people who lived on this land since time immemorial, then the myth making process would be evolving slowly over time. However, the dominant culture in the USA is squarely in the Western culture space where individualism, capitalism, the nation state rule and “newness” is more profitable than what happened ten or thirty years ago.

Therefore, I suggest that the USA as a nation state has no precolonial culture.

Oh my! No wonder we are a nation adrift.

Stealing the culture of the indigenous is not an option, although some non-indigenous people do.

Trying to import your or your ancestors culture is an option and one that my Swedish mother excelled at as I was growing up. Although in my opinion, culture is tied to land. Just as celebrating Lucia Day in sunny San Diego doesn’t have the same impact as it does in dark and snowy Sweden. With thousands of competing cultures, who wins?

Image by Bilge Can Gürer from Pixabay

The culture of the USA is built on settler colonialism and many residents of the USA have ancestors that came over two, three or even more generations ago.  Many people are a mixture of a dozen or more ethnic groups. This is what creates instability of culture as current and future culture always has roots in past culture, but with so many past cultures, it is no wonder that culture wars are on-going in the USA.

While Estonians have ten thousand years of culture creation that stems back to the retreat of the last ice age and no doubt shares traits with neighboring cultures, the era since the 13th century experienced a mingling of Estonian and the cultures of colonial powers. Since the retreat of the occupying powers, Estonia also has experienced challenges untangling the threads of its history and culture as we are experiencing in the USA.

Yet I have to ask, is there any opportunity to create a post colonial culture on occupied soil or are countries like the USA doomed to fail because there is no precolonial culture to inform future culture creation as there is in Estonia?

In California, I live on the land of the Kuumeyaay / Iipai-Tiipai.  I am aware I am living on someone else’s ancestral land, I am part of a community group that cares for the creek and salt marsh by my home, and I do my best to honor the land and the culture that lived in harmony for thousands of years in this area.

Emajõgi (Mother river) from Kaarsild (Arch bridge) in downtown Tartu.

In Estonia, I walked on my own land. The land upon which my father grew up. I imagined him swimming in the Emajõgi (Mother River) in Tartu where I was living and he was born and raised.  Tartu is the land in which my grandparents graves are nestled.  As I walked the streets and woods in and around Tartu, I imagined my grandparents walking these same streets. I imagined my father being part of a korporatsioon or fraternity when he attended Tartu Ülikool (University of Tartu).

In the USA, many people can claim that they are walking on the land where their parents and grandparents lived and maybe even died. The difference for me is that in Estonia, I was living on the land of my ancestors going back thousands of years. Perhaps even to the first people who settled this land after the glaciers retreated ten thousand years ago. The Estonians are the people who lived on the land since time immemorial and I am one of them. With a language not related to Indo-European languages and a unique culture that has modified by colonization, the Maarahavas or people of the land are descendents of the first peoples.

The trees seemed to speak to me, to tell me all the things I didn’t know. The river cradled me and revealed a life that could have been mine except for the ways of humanity. I experienced a deep seated connection to the land via my emotions that was an ache akin to the longing for a lover’s touch. The compulsion to touch and be touched by this land is so opposite from how I feel about California.  Understanding the land intellectually is so different from touching land that your ancestors died on, worked on, were enslaved on. And yet I know the land of California, its plants and animals, the mountain peaks and the desert wildflowers in spring. California is one of my homes and now Estonia is another home.

I learned about traditional farming practices that took place for thousands of years and that sculpted the land. I saw how the tending of the lands is managed today to maintain all the habitats that people living, loving and dying with land for 10,000 years created.  Now, my experience of connection to land has deepened, shifted, grown more complex and more painful.

Image by Henri Apell from Pixabay

The net of colonialism is wide with tiny openings from which almost no one escapes.  Growing up in the USA I learned that we were the colonizers of the land upon which the nation sits.  Despite the emergence of the USA out of the belly of other colonial powers, those who founded the USA continued the same practices as the British, French, Spanish. and Russian powers that began the occupation of North America.  As has happened again and again throughout history, the new rulers are the same as the old rulers.

Growing up in California in the 1960s and 1970s and going to university in the 1980s, my cultural milieu was the Civil Rights movement, Second Wave Feminism, Post-Colonialism, Post Modernism and post post. My parents were immigrants to the USA and as such I was positioned as the colonizer who took the land and forced the indigenous people to adopt Western lifestyles under penalty of death.  Therefore, I adopted the position of supporting those who had been colonized while not understanding the complexity of colonization despite years of study.

Then I came to Estonia, the land of my father. Estonians are the indigenous people and have been colonized for almost eight hundred years, excluding the period between the twentieth century’s world wars and the last thirty two years.  And I am half Estonian.  Wow!

In Estonia, my veil of separation between the colonizer and the colonized has fallen.   I am at once the victim of centuries of colonization and coming into a colonized country as an someone from an imperial power.  I feel lost. Before I came to Estonia, I knew the basic outlines of Estonian history.  Yet as I walk on the land my ancestors walked on I am learning different types of knowledge.  I am learning as someone whose history and ancestors are part of this story and as someone coming from the USA into a small country that has fewer people than the city in California in which I had been living.

Intellectual understanding of one’s role in the industry of colonization is not the same as walking in the colonized lands.  The added benefit of Estonia is that it has not been colonized by the USA, so I could experience one part of the equation without my embeddedness in another part.

One aspect of colonization is forcing the colonized to speak the colonizers language. Yet Estonians have maintained their language and here I am studying it. It’s a different way of thinking than American English and in my learning journey, I am slowly coming to understand that.

For approximately 700 years, German nobility, merchants, and clergy ran things in Estonia, no matter if the land was under the control of Germans, Danes, Swedes, or Russians. That is until WWII, when the Soviet Union became the occupying power creating an exodus of Baltic Germans to the motherland of Germany. Baltic Germans where the German nobility who lived in Estonia for generations and ran the government, controlled the serfs (the Estonians), and whose language was German.

Those few Estonians who rose about the class of house-hold servants, serfs, or artisan culturally assimilated into German norms and language. Even Estonian folklore studies originated from occupiers.  Yet through all this, Estonians maintained their unique language.

I can see things here that are invisible to me in the USA.  In Estonia I feel the emotional trauma of having to fit into a system that someone else dictated. And that someone else kept changing: German, Polish, Swedish, Russian, Nazi, Soviet.  And yet the people survive.

I come from a place of privilege as being white in the USA aligns one in the position of the colonizers because the benefits of being a colonizer are automatically bestowed on you.  Of course being a woman, I am also subject to the discriminatory practices and limitations placed on women by the colonizers. Yet in Estonia, I am perceived as Estonian by most people who speak to me in rapid Estonian until they realize I am a second-language learner. When I explain my father was one of the many who fled the Soviet occupation to avoid death or banishment to Siberia, then I become a cousin of Estonian culture.

I can see so much here in Estonia and this an intrinsic part of culture in the USA.  I am grateful for this new perspective.

Photo of Karin at the Ceremony

Today is Estonia’s Independence Day and today we celebrate one hundred and five years since declaring independence. Independence from Russia and the German overlords wasn’t achieved on this day in 1918, but the declaration of independence known as the Manifesto to the Peoples of Estonia (Estonian: Manifest Eestimaa rahvastele) was first read in the town of Pärnu on the 23rd of February, then printed and read in Tallinn on the 24th of February 1918.

From the Manifesto:

Never in the course of centuries have the Estonian people lost their ardent desire for independence. From generation to generation the secret hope has endured in Estonians that despite the dark night of servitude and violent rule by foreign peoples the time will come in Estonia “when all splinters, at both end, will burst forth into flames” and when “Kalev will reach home to bring his children happiness.”

Read the full manifesto here.

While Estonian counts 105 years of independence, the country was occupied for almost half this time by the Russians, Germans, Nazis and Soviets.  The restoration of independence only happened on August 20, 1991 a mere 32 years ago. As you can imagine, many of the people who brought about the current era of independence are still alive. The blue/black/white flag predates the first period of independence and was born out of student organizations in the 1800s.  According to one of my teachers, even dressing in blue/black/white colors during the Soviet Occupation was grounds for arrest and being sent to the gulags.  Yet people still kept their flags!

Today, I joined in celebrations at Tähetorn (the legendary observatory), a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I am disoriented as in the USA I don’t celebrate Independence Day in the rah rah barbequing beer drinking fireworks way common in the USA. Instead, I go to the woods to pray for world peace and celebrating Interdependence Day.

Today is new to me, but as my father was born during the period of the first independence struggles and named after an Estonian hero, I am embracing the holiday and sitting with the conflicting emotions and sadness because my father was never able to return to his homeland.  When you are a very small nation, independence is not given and for most of recorded history Estonians were the peasants and serfs, ruled over by Danes, Swedes, Germans, and Russians – although in the Swedes favor, they abolished serfdom when they ruled the country.

Enjoy my photos from today and my greatest wish is that all peoples in every nation no matter how small be free to live peacefully as they wish.

As Doctor Seuss’ Horton said:

Do you see what I mean?… They’ve proved they ARE persons, not matter how small. And their whole world was saved by the Smallest of ALL!

Estonians at the ceremony