Forcible displacement of the Sámi in Norway and Sweden

 

Photo of Sámi herders in the 1920s

  In April the University of Minnesota Press will release  the powerful book The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow, by Elin Anna Labba, and translated by Fiona Graham from Swedish. 

An essay by Labba is available now online in the journal Places.

 

More than a hundred years have passed since the Sámi were forcibly displaced from their homes in northern Norway and Sweden, a hundred years since Elin Anna Labba’s ancestors and relations drove their reindeer over the strait to the mainland for the last time. The place where they lived has remained empty ever since. We carry our homes in our hearts, Labba shares, citing the Sámi poet Áillohaš. How do you bear that weight if you were forced to leave? In a remarkable blend of historical reportage, memoir, and lyrical reimagining, Labba travels to the lost homeland of her ancestors to tell of the forced removal of the Sámi in the early twentieth century and to reclaim a place in history, and in today’s world, for these Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia. 

 Advance Praise:

"To think that someone can write so poetically and beautifully about something that hurts so much . . . It is a staggering read, and we cry. Thanks to Elin Anna Labba, no one can turn a blind eye to the abuses committed by the Swedish state against the Sámi people. The suffering remains with many, but the truth has finally been told."—Ann-Helén Laestadius, best-selling author of Stolen

 

"The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow speaks through the forced displacement of the Sámi from their beloved homeland to make a gathering place of stories, images, joiks, and letters, singing the contours of Sámi resistance through time, through the forest, and through Indigenous sorrow."—Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

 

"The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow, a book about the Sámi refusal to be wholly dispossessed, is a beautiful addition to the global Indigenous literary tradition. Elin Anna Labba tends to the poetry of everyday thought and reminiscence and, in so doing, offers up an idiom of land that is endlessly moving. A work of collective testimony, a remapping of Swedish history, an archive in and of itself, and, by its end, a vital rallying call."—Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus

 

"Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, several hundred members of Sámi reindeer-herding families were uprooted from their homelands in northern Sápmi and forced by the Norwegian and Swedish governments to relocate farther south in Sweden. A descendant of one of the families, Elin Anna Labba tells this wrenching, forgotten history with tender attention, using interviews, photos, and documents. A crucial contribution to Indigenous and Sámi history, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow is heartbreaking, infuriating, and necessary reading."—Barbara Sjoholm, author of From Lapland to Sápmi: Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture

 

 

Places: