That is Sámi history. Tiny shifts in vegetation, a slightly
raised patch of earth, goahtis razed to the ground. Our story is the
plaque never erected, the chapter left out of the history books.”
–Elin Anna
Labba, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow
In her hauntingly lyrical documentary book from 2020, The
Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow (Herrarna satte oss hit), Sámi author
Elin Anna Labba assembled a mosaic of interviews, poetry, photographs, and
fragments of official letters to create a chapter of a history book never fully
written: the story of how the migratory reindeer Sámi were forced, beginning in
the 1920s, through the collusion of Swedish and Norwegian states, away from
their traditional northern homelands of Karesuando and Jukkasjärvi to Southern
Sweden. Awarded the prestigious August prize in Sweden and published in an
English translation in 2024, the book’s combination of historical fact, narrative
memories, visual imagery made for powerful reading. Labba was both present in
her family history as a granddaughter of those people who were forcibly
displaced and as a recorder of other people’s stories of some of the same
events.
Some of these stories were neither forgotten nor unknown.
Throughout the years, they were recounted informally in families and more
formally in legal documents and newspapers such as Samefolket (The Sámi
People). These stories were mentioned in passing in museum exhibits and
in the popular nonfiction of Swedish ethnographers,
like Ernst Manker. But most of the voices that could speak personally of loss
and pain, the voices of ordinary Sámi people, were often missing—“people,” as
Labba writes, “who have bound their wounds with silence.”
 |
| Elin Anna Labba |
Elin Anna Labba is a Sámi journalist from the Swedish side
of Sápmi. Born in Kiruna and raised west of Jokkmokk, now living in Norway with
her reindeer-owning family, she has been able to move intentionally back and
forth across the border, creating a career for herself as an editor and
journalist. She worked as editor-in-chief of
Nuorat, a magazine Sámi
youth. At one time she was also the project manager at the writer's center
Tjállegoahte in Jokkmokk. With
The
Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow, she dedicated many years to gathering
information, materials, and especially interviews with elders who held memories,
with the intention, she has said, to “write my own family back into existence.”
Now Elin Anna Labba is back in English with a new work, The
Home of the Drowned (Far inte till havet), in a fine English translation by Elizabeth Clark
Wessel (both of the books discussed have been published by the University of Minnesota Press).
 |
Suorva Dam, Lake
Akkajaure, Ernst Manker, 1939, Nordic Museum,
Stockholm
|
The novel takes place in Northern Sweden in the mid-twentieth century. The setting is the area around a vast lake created by the
initial construction of the Suorva Dam in Stora Sjöfallet National Park, Sweden,
around the headwaters of the Lule River. This once-wild river is known for
fifteen hydroelectric power plants, all of which came on line in the twentieth
century. Before the first dam was built in 1923 and smothered wetlands and
smaller lakes to form the reservoir called Lake Akkajaure (Áhkájávrre in Lule Sámi),
there were many small siida villages on the shores, with turf goahtis for
summer living and fishing. These structures were submerged as the lake
increased in volume, causing the Sami inhabitants to build new villages higher
up on the mountains. In 1939 and 1942 the dam was raised, flooding the new villages,
and again in 1970. Most of the action of the novel happens around the wartime raising
of the dam with the final chapters taking place in the seventies, when Sámi
political awareness was quickening.
Labba doesn’t name the Swedish place names on a map: for the
Sámi who once migrated with the reindeer from the winter grazing areas around
Jokkmokk up to the mountains in spring and summer, the landscape had other
names, Sámi names that were descriptive and evocative of events or memories. In
the novel, the giant reservoir is known just as the lake. Once it was
surrounded by forests and once it was full of fish. For centuries the Sámi followed
the reindeer west into these mountains now near the border to Norway and spent
the summer fishing, trapping, tending the herds, picking berries. This was the
life that Rávdná and her sister Ánne
had known most of their lives, but it is changing, and nothing will be the same
for Rávdná’s daughter, Ingá. Ingá’s childhood memories begin with the first dam
and continue throughout her adolescence and adulthood with the subsequent raisings
of the dam, so that more and more of the land is taken. Her first home is flooded
and then a second house, which Rávdná builds herself.
 |
| Ernst Manker, 1940, Nordic Museum |
All this is history that was mostly ignored by the Swedes as
it was happening in the mid-twentieth century. Hydroelectric plants were
necessary, it was argued, for the industrial growth of the country. One of the
few Swedes to document the flooding of the Sámi territories and homes was Ernst
Manker, the director of the “Lappish Department” at the Nordiska Museet in
Stockholm and a renowned photographer.
The Sámi poet Paulus Utsi (1918–1975) also wrote
about the dams and flooding of the villages in his poem, “Shoreless Shore:”
I don’t understand anything
My heart is heavy
Just look around
Whole villages are gone
The strangers have fooled us
Their greed has no limit
I found Elin Anna Labba’s novel terribly sad at times, but
in the sadness was also so much artful shaping—in her language and use of imagery—that
I found myself pulled into the highly visual and sensory story. She is attuned
to the Sámi tradition of making beauty, in household utensils and clothing, in
placing windows where the sun will come inside in just the right way. The
character of Rávdná, in particular, with her stubbornness and fighting spirit
is vividly shown, in her own voice and in the voice of her daughter, who is
often more frightened and more passive, but also strong in her own way.
This novel doesn't have a happy
ending, yet it's is not a resigned narrative but one of fierce if often hopeless opposition
to the power of the state and the “Company” that's building the dam and
destroying the landscape to create energy for factories and homes in the south
of Sweden. Sometimes people paint the Sámi as victims, but I don’t see
them that way. It’s not easy to stand up to forces so much greater than oneself
and one’s community. In The Home of the Drowned we see those forces of
authority and greed clearly. We also see resistance in the face of bullying and
dishonesty from the bureaucrats who carry out the orders of the state, a resistance
that, over the last fifty years, has led to a strengthened Sámi defiance to those who would take
and destroy their lands, rivers, and lakes. Yet a novel is not a manifesto. Readers, I suspect, will be deeply moved by the simplicity and
ordinariness of the characters and the beauty of the writing as much as by the
message of endurance and survivance.
Elin Anna Labba will be visiting the U.S in September. If
you’re lucky enough to live in D.C., New York, or Minneapolis, you can hear her
speak about her novel. If you can’t get there, you can also hear her in this
podcast interview with Lori Walsh at South Dakota Public Radio.
Tour Dates and Locations
Washington, D.C.: Monday, September 14, 2026 – Book
talk at the House of Sweden.
New York City, NY: Tuesday, September 15, 2026 –
Discussion and presentation at Scandinavia House.
Minneapolis, MN: Thursday, September 17, 2026 –
In-conversation event with Dr. Àila O'Loughlin at the American Swedish
Institute.
