Join us on February 25 for a virtual book talk with Sámi author and journalist Elin Anna Labba on her new book The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow! With moderator Mathilde Magga, she’ll discuss her research and writing on the forced displacement of the Indigenous Sámi from Norway and Sweden in the early 20th century, told through a remarkable blend of historical reportage, memoir and lyrical imagining that was awarded Sweden’s August Prize for Best Nonfiction in 2020. This event is co-presented with National Nordic Museum in Seattle and will take place online. *A Zoom link will be emailed to all attendees immediately after ticket purchase.*
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? Labba travels to the lost homeland of her ancestors to tell of the forced removal of the Sámi in the early 20th century and to reclaim a place in history, and in today’s world, for these Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia.
When Norway became a country independent from Sweden in 1905, the two nations came to an agreement that called for the displacement of the Northern Sámi, who spent summers on the Norwegian coast and winters in Sweden. This “dislocation,” as the authorities called it, gave rise to a new word in Sámi language, bággojohtin, forced displacement. The first of the sirdolaččat, or “the displaced,” left their homes fully believing they would soon return. Through stories, photographs, letters, and joik lyrics, Labba gathers a chorus of Sámi expression that resonates across the years, evoking the nomadic life they were required to abandon and the immense hardship and challenges they endured: children left behind with relatives, reindeer lost when they returned to familiar territory, sorrow and estrangement that linger through generations.
Starkly poetic and emotionally heart-wrenching, this dark history is told through the voices of the sirdolaččat, echoing the displacements of other Indigenous people around the world as it depicts the singular experience of the Northern Sámi.
“Sámi journalist Labba makes the trauma of the forced removal of her people from northern Norway and Sweden both palpable and painful in this profound debut history” (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review)
“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)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elin Anna Labba is a Sámi journalist and was previously editor-in-chief of the magazine Nuorat. She works for the Sámi Authors’ Centre, whose mission is to strengthen and make visible Sámi literature. She received Sweden’s August Prize for Best Nonfiction as well as the prestigious Norrland Literature Prize.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
Mathilde Magga, a Sámi woman from Tromso in northern Norway, has spent the last five years studying in the Seattle area. She earned her BA at Pacific Lutheran University in 2020 and her MA in English literature with a focus on Indigenous literature from the University of Washington in 2022, and will continue there with her PhD in literature in 2023. She is working on a book project that she hopes to publish in both Norwegian and Northern Sámi.