Elin Anna Labba’s The Home of the Drowned

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.

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New York City, NY: Tuesday, September 15, 2026 – Discussion and presentation at Scandinavia House.

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Minneapolis, MN: Thursday, September 17, 2026 – In-conversation event with Dr. Àila O'Loughlin at the American Swedish Institute.