pot-au-feu
Notes & Further Reading
Thank you for reading! Here are a few links from the too-many tabs I’ve had open for the last several months. If there’s anything else you’d like to know more about, please feel free to message me here or ask on AO3. Otherwise, here are some bits I found interesting.
I chose to set this story in Europe rather than North America but wanted to maintain Silna’s heritage in a way that felt organic (with a little nod to Nive Nielsen’s background as well). You can read about the different indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle here and Inuit culture in Greenland here. If you’re interested in the experience of Greenlanders in Denmark, this was a good article.
For language, I relied on the Oqaasileriffik [Language Secretary of Greenland] which maintains many links to online dictionaries. I specifically used Christian Wilhelm Schultz Lorentzen’s Dictionary of the West Greenland Eskimo Language (1927), an English translation of Den grønlandske ordbog – grønlandsk dansk [The Greenlandic Dictionary – Greenlandic Danish] (1926). It has been transcribed into new and old Greenlandic orthography and the Excel data file can be downloaded directly here.
Indigenous land management and stewardship is absolutely fascinating and varied across the globe. Two academic articles worth looking at are: Joe McCarter, Michael C. Gavin, Sue Baereleo, and Mark Love, “The challenges of maintaining indigenous ecological knowledge.” Ecology and Society 19, no. 3 (2014) and Paul Nadasdy, “Transcending the debate over the ecologically noble Indian: Indigenous peoples and environmentalism.” Ethnohistory 52, no. 2 (2005): 291-331.
Kissa is very much based on Fäviken Magasinet in Järpen, Sweden, which closed permanently in December 2019. You can watch chef Magnus Nilsson make Silna’s “porridge filtered through the forest floor” here. His Mind of a Chef episodes on Netflix are also worth seeking out. Trailer here.
Traditional Estonian smoke saunas are classed as intangible cultural heritage. You can see what they look like and how they’re heated here.
History of Jews in the Pale of Settlement and later, the Soviet Union. You can read a bit about the Bukharan Jews of Uzbekistan here and here.
Finally, the epigraph is from Jean Antheleme Brillat-Savarin, widely considered the first “food writer,” who coined the aphorism “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es” [Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are]. It all comes full circle in Terror fandom, let me tell ya.
