Tales of a Sámi
The Sámi people are storytellers. Throughout time the Sámi have passed on their oral history through telling stories to each other – often this was as the families gathered together in the evenings in their goahti or turf huts.
My father did the same, but he recorded his stories onto cassette tapes. He left his tape collection with me, and asked me to pass his tales onto others.
I have many memories of my father telling me his stories as I was growing up. He was a commercial fisherman on the west coast of Canada. On weekends, I would spend my days in his boathouse, as he repaired his nets. And there was always a story or 2 to listen to as we drank his boiled coffee and enjoyed my mother’s baking. The stories ranged from his early days growing up in Sápmi to his days in the merchant marines, and to his fishing adventures on the west coast.
In the 1960’s – 1970’s my Dad started to record the tales of his life onto cassette tapes. Often he couldn’t afford new tapes, so his friends would bring him some of their old tapes – he would record over old Elvis tapes, country music tapes and whatever he found. A few months before he passed away, he pulled out his cardboard box of tapes and asked that I pass these stories on to others when the time comes.
I have attempted over the years to make copies of them, and to transcribe them all. The stories are spoken in his Finnish dialect of ‘Finliska’ ( a Canadian term for a blend of Finnish mixed in with some Canadian English) This was difficult to do as recording and typing the translations was very slow and difficult. The technology has changed now with the introduction of better digital recording equipment and AI language tools, so I have started to work on this project again.
Some of the cassette tapes have deteriorated over time so the sound quality is poor. I am finding that with some of the tapes, I have one chance to re-record them, and they self-destruct. (much like Mission Impossible…)
His tales range from his early days growing up in Petsamo, Finland – (Pechenga, Russia), to immigrating to Canada and working as a commercial fisherman on the west coast of British Columbia.
In these tales of his life, I note that he does refer to himself as a ‘Lappi’ – Laplander. To him, this was not a ‘derogatory’ term as it is sometimes considered to be in modern times. A Lap or Lappalainen was just what he was. He didn’t really understand why he was treated badly by others. Sámi life was very difficult and challenging in those days. The north was a harsh climate, winters were long and resources were few. Life was lived on a day-to-day basis and the Sámi used whatever was available to them.
YouTube
I will be posting these stories as YouTube videos onto my YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/@Paivatar.
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This will take awhile to do. For example, the first video has taken about 2 weeks to complete 10 minutes of his first tape.
The stories are narrated by my father (in his voice).
It has been quite a struggle to try to clean up these old cassette tapes but I think I have now found a solution.. thanks to new developments in AI. – Yes, computers talking to you are a bit scary, but for this purpose of cleaning up old cassette tapes, the technology seems to work quite well.
ElevenLabs.io
I used Software from ElevenLabs
One of the software features is called ‘Voice Isolator’.
I copied a 45 min cassette tape into the software, and a few minutes later, a clean copy of the file had been created. The difference in results can be seen by listening to some of the early versions of the Tales of a Sea Sami and the later ones.</p. Because all of my dad’s recordings were spoken in Finnish, ElevenLabs also has a text to speech conversion. I translated his Finnish words into English, and then used the Text to Speech module of the software to convert the file in spoken English – in a reasonable replica of what my father’s voice would have sounded like in English. He was multi-lingual (Finnish, English, Russian and perhaps bits of other languages as well.
Now I will be able to work on
the project that my Father asked me to do – to copy and distribute his stories so others will know about his adventures.
I was able to create a 1 min sample file of one of my dad’s tapes. I uploaded this to ElevenLabs Voice file. This file was then used to convert the written English version of the text file into Spoken English using an AI version of my Father’s voice.
There are several cassette tapes in this basket – and I am not sure what’s on them so this will be interesting. He did often tell me stories about his early days in northern Finland/Russia, of his adventures in the Merchant Marines during WW2, and of his life as a fisherman on the west coast of British Columbia.
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Categories: Tales of a Sámi
