Rematriating Myth: Art, Ritual, and Cultural Continuity

Across cultures, myth has never been confined to texts alone; it has lived through song, image, ritual, performance, and story. Yet colonialism and modernity have fractured many mythic traditions, leaving cultural wounds that continue to shape identity, spirituality, and belonging. This course examines how the re-creation of myth through art, ritual, and storytelling can serve as a powerful method of cultural healing and ancestral reconnection. In this course, Freia centers Sámi mythology, cosmology, and cultural practices, examining how contemporary Sámi scholars, artists, and cultural practitioners are engaging in cultural recovery, continuity, and rematriation—revitalizing suppressed myths and spiritual practices while adapting them ethically for the present. Drawing from her own positionality as a Sámi-American scholar and artist, Freia explores the challenges of reclaiming ancestral traditions outside one’s original homelands. Participants will be invited to explore how mythic reclamation can be approached across cultures through respectful engagement with their own ancestral stories, symbols, and spiritual lineages. Through guided discussion, creative writing, collaborative myth-making, and reflective exercises, participants will actively engage family and cultural myth as a living practice, examining how story, symbol, and ritual can become tools for personal meaning-making, cultural repair, and collective healing in the modern world. In this 3-week course, participants will become myth-makers and myth-bearers. They will utilize family objects as sacred symbols, utilize movement and song, and enter the written mythic landscape as an active character--reclaiming and retelling their own mythology. Together, we will rematriate our stories. This course will take place over Zoom and be recorded for those who cannot attend live. Mondays, April 13-27 7pm to 9pm ET (4pm to 6pm PT) Regular Registration $125 ISM Members $100 (email info@ismythology.com for code)