Áilu Valle Raps about Consent in Sápmi

 

Áilu Valle, Sámi rapper

The other week I happened across an article in the sometimes staid British newspaper, The Times, about a Sámi rapper who, on the urging of well-known Sámi scholar Rauna Kuokkanen, came up with a way of reaching more Sámi people, particularly young folks, about the important idea of consent, or lohpi. The track was released as a single a few weeks ago on Midsummer.

The concept of consent is widespread in certain circles in Sápmi when it comes to the current mania for extraction of natural resources in the Nordic countries, especially dams, logging, mining, wind farms, and all the infrastructure that comes with these projects, such as roads and power stations, so many of which despoil the landscape and interfere with reindeer herding and fishing, not to mention the sense of space. Consent—that is, informed consent, not manufactured or coerced consent—is a crucial aspect of negotiations between the Sámi and state and local governments and corporations around development.

Kuokkanen, from her perch at the University of Lapland in Finland, is a major voice for Indigenous self-determination and feminist theory in the academy. Her 2019 book from Oxford University Press, Restructuring Relations: Indigenous Self-Determination, Governance and Gender is a text I read and quoted from in my own book, From Lapland to Sápmi in the chapter “Returning.”

She’s written many papers as well, but this time around, according to David Mac Dougall in The Times, she thought, Why write a paper when a Sami musician could rap about it instead?

This led her to Áilu Valle, a rap artist based in the town of Inari, in the north of Finland. Valle apparently thought for quite a while how to approach the subject before deciding that he not only had to talk about consent being given by the Sámi, but about consent being required from everything and everyone who lives on the land and air and waters of that place. As Mac Dougall writes:

Instead of simply explaining the definition of consent, Valle described a scenario where consent did not come only from people, but also from the animals, trees and landscapes of Sapmi, the traditional Sami homeland area. 

 “Oh, you are interested in coming to this place? First show it to the mosquito, the tern and the woodpecker, the eagle and the bear, the trout and the grayling, the rapids, quiet waters, the rocks and hills,” he raps. 

And Valle tells the listener in no uncertain terms, “If we haven’t given permission, you don’t have consent. And with no consent, there’s no pipeline…If you didn’t ask, you’re not even allowed to be here.”

The whole mesmerizing performance of Lohpi in North Sámi with English  is on YouTube.