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In the year 1919, Sweden and Norway agreed on a reindeer grazing convention that proposed to limit the number of reindeer allowed to cross the border. This convention also insidiously determined the number of people to be displaced from their homes on the Atlantic seaboard. The Sámi people represented an Indigenous group inhabiting large northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and of the Kola Peninsula in Russia from time immemorial. Their existence was governed by the Lapp Codicil which acknowledged the Sámi as a separate people with rights over the land and the right to fish, hunt, and herd reindeer.

The Swedish-Norwegian convention commenced a brutal forced displacement of the people who had nurtured a precocious bond with their land and nature, a bond that made them indistinguishable from their environment. This forced displacement, termed Bággojohtin or Sirdolaččat, in Sámi terms, resulted in a heart-rending migration of entire families with disastrous and intended consequences.

Elin Anna Labba (or in Northern Sami: Joná Gusttu Elin Ánná), a Sámi author and journalist and multiple prize-winning authors describes in a poignant and plangent manner, the forced migration of the Sámi in The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow. Based on interviews conducted with people having experienced the perils of forced deportation and drawing on records maintained by the ‘Lapp Bailiffs’ (designated authorities possessing the wanton power – but no accountability – to decide and determine the locations to which families should be deported), Anna Labba weaves together a mournful jeremiad of helplessness and injustice.

Forced to abandon their goahtis (hut or tent of three types of covering: fabric, peat moss or timber) and haul all their meagre belongings over distances making up hundreds of miles, the Sámi lose people and reindeer on the way to both the vagaries of nature and the exertions on the body. Those who manage to reach their allocated designations face scorn and ostracism from the more ‘modern’ inhabitants occupying the new land. The Sámi children are mocked at school, called names, and accused of bringing lice into the classroom.

Sámi people forced to migrate to Norway were at the receiving end of what professor of cultural studies Ivar Björklund, terms, Social Darwinism. Viewed as archaic and medieval, “they were regarded as people who had nothing to do with us, as foreign nationals with a culture that was dying out. It was thought to be just a question of time until they disappeared anyway. Quite simply they correspond to all the ideas about ‘the other,’ people who are different from us, who we want to distance ourselves from.”

The Sámi people have been passing down from generation to generation, the chanting song that has survived the test of time. Popularly known as ‘joiking,’ some of the oldest joiks we know today were recorded by priests and missionaries in the 1700s and 1800s. But as one of the Sámi migrants Inggá Biette experienced, there was barely any joiking at all since the migration. In the haunting words of Anna Labba, “Its as if the words catch in his throat or the wind cannot carry them. He’ll joik only when he meets someone from back home or when there’s no one to hear.”

The Sámi are also humiliatingly subjected repeated ‘racial biology’ examinations prior, and subsequent to their forced relocation. They are photographed from the front and in profile. “Naked, serious faced and with their mouths closed.” Protesting Sámi are either fined outrageous sums of money which can only be produced by either selling or slaughtering reindeers or as Biito Biera experienced firsthand, issued dire threats of being forcibly herded south by other reindeer herders. The expenses to be incurred in conducting this heinous threat would need to be borne by Biito Biera, the individual threated to be displaced!

A Sámi says that the downy birch does not break in two; it merely bends. One bears one’s hurt alone for breaking down does not make life more easy or expedient. The grieving person’s tears should fall unseen on her shawl. This resilient philosophy forms the cornerstone of the word – birget -surviving and coping. “Each year the reindeer must survive the winter: that is what matters, not people’s feelings.”

The tears of Ándom Ovllá and Ristiinná, Gusttu Bierar and Marja’, Márggu Ántte Jouná, Nilsa and Gustu Inggá, and a thousand others were silently spilling their stories on weathered and worn-out shawls. However, such stories should not be allowed to die. They cannot be ignored as forgotten relics of a neglected history. Anna Labba does a monumental job in bringing to the attention of an oblivious world, a tapestry of precious shawls that joik in their own beautiful and inimitable manner, the treacheries, teachings, and tales of life.

(The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of The Northern Sami is published by University of Minnesota Press, and will be available on sale beginning 2nd April, 2024)

Thank You, Net Galley for the Advance Reviewer Copy!

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