Suõmmkar

Last August I was lucky enough to get a personal tour of Ä´vv Saa´mi Mu´zei, the Skolt Sámi Museum in Neiden, Norway, by the new director Hanna-Maaria Kiprianoff. As it turns out, she is one of two female vocalists in the group, Suõmmkar, which combines the traditional lyrical and dance music of the Skolt Sámi with contemporary sounds of folk and world music.We walked through the exhibits of this beautiful museum space and then Hanna-Maaria announced she would sing me a song, a leuʹdd, a song genre specific to the Skolt. The leu'dd is not the joik associated with the Sámi in the Nordic countries. The leu'dd, at least as far as I grasped the term from Hanna-Maaria, is more of a ballad, a story about people and their lives. I didn't understand a word of the song, but emotions came through. 

In his paper, "Historical Skolt Sami Music and Two Types of Melodic Structures in Leu'dd Tradition," Finnish ethnomusicologist, historian, and musician Marko Jouste writes that the leu'dd is an indigenous musical genre "which is used to describe and comment on Skolt Sami life, both as 'history' and 'present,' so that the leu'dd's form a bank of shared memories of the Skolt Sami society." In addition to being a university lecturer in Saami Cultural Studies at the Giellagas Institute of University of Oulu, Marko Jouste is also a member of Suõmmkar. 

Suõmmkar started performing in 2016 and has sung on stages in Finland and Norway, including the Riddu Riđđu festival at 2018. Their first album, also called "Suõmmkar" came out in 2018. I was able to buy the CD in the gift shop and have listened to it a number of times now back at home. The text of the songs is printed in Skolt Sámi and English (Hanna-Maaria is fluent; she told me she spent five years with her family as a child in Canada). 

The second song on the album, "Äʹrbbvuõtt," or "Tradition" begins with these lyrics (in English translation).

I don't want to  forget my family's language

it isn't too late to learn it

Though I didn't get to learn my tradition naturally

I will now take it back, it's a part of me. 

 

Skolt Sámi is one of the world's critically endangered languages. It's spoken by between 300-400 people, largely in  Sevettijärvi region in northern Finland, and by a few elderly Skolts in Russia. Hanna-Maaria Kiprianoff, who has lived in Sevettijärvi, is one of the very few speakers in Norway.

Members of the band Suõmmkar