The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow

The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi

Elin Anna Labba, Fiona Graham

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English

University of Minnesota Press
31 July 2024

European history; Indigenous peoples

The deep and personal story-told through history, poetry, and images-of the forced displacement of the Smi people from their homeland in northern Norway and Sweden and its reverberations today

More than a hundred years have passed since the Smi 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 Smi poet illoha. 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 Smi 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 Smi, 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 Smi language, bggojohtin, forced displacement. The first of the sirdolaat, or ""the displaced,"" left their homes fully believing they would soon return. Through stories, photographs, letters, and joik lyrics, Labba gathers a chorus of Smi 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 sirdolaat, echoing the displacements of other Indigenous people around the world as it depicts the singular experience of the Northern Smi. For her extraordinary work, Labba was awarded Sweden's most important national book prize in 2020, the August Prize for Best Nonfiction.

By: Elin Anna Labba
Translated by: Fiona Graham
Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 225mm, Width: 151mm, Spine: 10mm
Weight: 340g
ISBN: 9781517913304
ISBN 10: 1517913306
Pages: 168
Publication Date: 31 July 2024
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Elin Anna Labba is a Smi 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 sbrink's 1947: When Now Begins, which was an English PEN award winner and a National Public Radio Best Book of the Year.

Reviews for The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi

"""To think that someone can write so poetically and beautifully about something that hurts so much . . . It is a staggering read, and we cry. Thanks to Elin Anna Labba, no one can turn a blind eye to the abuses committed by the Swedish state against the Sámi people. The suffering remains with many, but the truth has finally been told.""—Ann-Helén Laestadius, best-selling author of Stolen ""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 "