Description
ISBN: 9781517913304
Format: Cloth over boards
Year: 2024
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Description:
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