Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The Horn Book Magazine

Crossroads: the Dorothy Briley Memorial Lecture.

Article Excerpt
The 2003 Dorothy Briley Memorial Lecture provides me with the opportunity to exercise a bit of healthy self-criticism, which I believe all people and nations should do once in a while--and particularly before crossing boundaries.

My country, Norway, which I love dearly and therefore criticize all the more honestly, is today one of the richest nations on earth, thanks to the offshore oil we began extracting in the 1970s. I, along with many Norwegians, hoped that this once-in-a-nation's-history golden opportunity would be used by our political leaders to do wonderful and amazing things. Boasting a stable welfare state, a high standard of education, and a still-strong social democratic political system, we could afford to think big and far ahead.

Alas, so far Norway has behaved like any other rich, self-centered, intellectually lazy nation; we consume more and faster, and complain louder about everything under the sun. Asylum-seekers from non-Western countries in particular are the cause of grumbles. Like many European countries, we also seem to be secretly hoping that it soon will be politically acceptable to scrap the UN charter on refugees, implant electronic surveillance chips in dark-skinned persons (particularly Arabic speaking) who land on our doorstep, whether legally or illegally, and concentrate them in enclosures that no one has the guts to call camps. Despite these disappointments, I will not stop hoping and working for real change. This I owe to our descendants.

Writing my novel The Abduction was truly a journey of illuminating dark corners of my own country's history. The idea came from a painting portraying four desperately bewildered Inuits in Bergen, Norway, in the year 1665, the youngest hardly more than thirteen when she was abducted from Greenland. Her defiant stare spoke starkly of her feelings about being captured. Her eyes haunted me while I searched for recorded abductions of Inuits from Greenland to Norway, Denmark, Holland, and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I found traces of 150-200 abductions from Greenland alone. (Just how many Inuits and Indians were abducted from Siberia, the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, Canada, and parts of the Amerindian continent remains unknown, but the number is...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!