The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sami
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The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sami

The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sami

By
Elin Anna Labba (Author) Fiona Graham (Contributor)  

Hardback

PRE-ORDER released 27 May 2024

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The deep and personal story-told through history, poetry, and images-of the forced displacement of the Sami people from their homeland in northern Norway and Sweden and its reverberations today More than a hundred years have passed since the Sami 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 Sami poet Aillohas. How do you bear that weight if you were forced to leave? In a remarkable blend of historical reportage, memoir, and lyrical reimagining, Labba travels to the lost homeland of her ancestors to tell of the forced removal of the Sami in the early twentieth 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 Sami, 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 Sami language, baggojohtin, forced displacement. The first of the sirdolaccat, or "the displaced," left their homes fully believing they would soon return. Through stories, photographs, letters, and joik lyrics, Labba gathers a chorus of Sami 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 sirdolaccat, echoing the displacements of other Indigenous people around the world as it depicts the singular experience of the Northern Sami. For her extraordinary work, Labba was awarded Sweden's most important national book prize in 2020, the August Prize for Best Nonfiction. 65 black and white illustrations
Elin Anna Labba is a Sami journalist and was previously editor-in-chief of the magazine Nuorat. She received Sweden's August Prize for Best Nonfiction as well as the prestigious Norrland Literature Prize. Fiona Graham is a British translator living in Belgium. She translated Elisabeth Asbrink's 1947: When Now Begins, which was an English PEN award winner and a National Public Radio Best Book of the Year.
  • Contributor: Elin Anna Labba
  • Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
  • ISBN13: 9781517913304
  • Number of Pages: 168
  • Packaged Dimensions: 151x225x10mm
  • Packaged Weight: 340
  • Format: Hardback
  • Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
  • Release Date: 2024-05-27
  • Binding: Hardback
  • Biography: Elin Anna Labba is a Sami journalist and was previously editor-in-chief of the magazine Nuorat. She received Sweden's August Prize for Best Nonfiction as well as the prestigious Norrland Literature Prize. Fiona Graham is a British translator living in Belgium. She translated Elisabeth Asbrink's 1947: When Now Begins, which was an English PEN award winner and a National Public Radio Best Book of the Year.

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