Two days after Christmas, Ann-Helén
Laestadius found herself being gently pummeled by reindeer.
Taking advantage of the bluish glow that
passes for daylight in Sweden’s far north at that time of year, she had left
her parents’ cozy kitchen and driven to the corral where her cousin keeps his
herd during winter. She was there for a photo shoot, but first, she had to help
feed the animals, extracting half-frozen tufts of lichen from a mesh sack as
the reindeer jostled her impatiently. Even after a close brush with the pointy
end of an antler, she looked on them indulgently.
اضافة اعلان
“For the Sámi,” Laestadius said, referring
to the Indigenous group of which she is a member, “reindeer are not just
animals. They are life.”
That lesson is at the heart of her novel,
“Stolen”, which came out in English from Scribner last month. It explains why
the book’s Sámi characters perceive the killing of their reindeer as a crime
not against their property, but against their people as a whole. And thanks to
the book’s success, it is also a lesson that Sweden, whose colonization of the
Sámi has been long and oppressive, may slowly be learning.
“Suicide is something that every Sámi family has been through,” Laestadius said. “I wanted people to know; this is what happens when you treat people like this, when they get so much hatred.”
An Indigenous people, the Sámi, who number
around 80,000, inhabit a vast territory that stretches across the Arctic areas
of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula. For centuries, their
language and culture have been forcibly suppressed by national governments that
also stripped their land rights and developed industries that threatened the
habitats on which their livelihoods and culture depend.
To this day, the Sámi are engaged in legal
and political struggles to protect their lands from mineral and timber
extraction, and their herding routes from energy projects. And although the
Nordic countries are widely perceived, both abroad and at home, as progressive
and egalitarian, many of the Sámi who live within their borders say they remain
targets of discrimination, racism, and — through their reindeer — violence.
Ann-Helén
Laestadius, a Swedish author, at the gas station and post office in Övre
Soppero, Sweden.
A case in point: After the Swedish Supreme
Court in 2020 granted the Sámi the exclusive right to manage hunting and
fishing rights in the area of Girjas Samby, near the Norwegian border, reindeer
killings (which had long plagued the community) increased markedly. It was an
expression, many Sámi believe, of anger among local Swedes who resented losing
their hunting rights to a people they had long denigrated. “They kill our
reindeer,” Laestadius said, “because they can’t kill us.”
‘I should be quiet about who I am’Born to a Sámi mother and a father who is
Tornedalian, another of Sweden’s ethnic minorities, Laestadius, 51, grew up
outside Kiruna, a mining city about 200km north of the Arctic Circle. Early in
life, she began internalizing shame about her identity, she said. Her mother
spoke Sámi with her parents and neighbors, but would switch to Swedish whenever
she went into the city.
“It is my sorrow that I don’t speak Sámi,” Laestadius said. “So it became even more important for me to have it in my books.”
“It made me automatically start to think
something is wrong,” Laestadius said of her mother’s code-switching. “We are
something wrong.”
That sense grew stronger once she started
school, she said, and faced bullying and rejection from the non-Sámi children.
“I started to realize that I should be quiet about who I am.”
Telling the reindeer herders’ storiesIn her 20s, Laestadius moved to Stockholm,
where she worked as a crime reporter for several Swedish newspapers. But
gradually, as both a journalist and then an author of young adult books, she
began looking back at the world in which she had grown up. Her first book,
published in 2007, was about a 13-year-old girl secretly studying the Sámi
language.
“Stolen”, her first adult novel, also
begins with a young Sámi girl. Elsa is nine years old when she witnesses the
malicious killing of her reindeer calf. As she grows up, the trauma of that
moment, coupled with other brutalities — ostracizing at school, a friend’s
suicide, a police force unable or unwilling to investigate the ongoing reindeer
killings — transmutes into rage.
Ann-Helén
Laestadius, a Swedish author, in Kiruna, Sweden.
Laestadius carried around the idea for a
novel for seven years, she said, but kept herself from writing it out of
concern that she did not have the right to tell reindeer herders’ stories since
she herself did not come from a herding family. But after two of her young
cousins — brothers — killed themselves, she felt she could no longer avoid
writing about the impact of imposed inferiority, she said.
“Suicide is something that every Sámi
family has been through,” Laestadius said. “I wanted people to know; this is
what happens when you treat people like this, when they get so much hatred.”
As she began talking to herders for
research, her sense of urgency grew.
“Everybody told the same story,” she said.
“I could feel their sorrow and their desperation.”
When a young herder gave her copies of a
hundred reports of reindeer killings that had been filed with the police
without any arrests being made, Laestadius had had enough: “I wrote this book
with a lot of anger.”
Sámi artists are activistsShe also wrote it with sensitivity and
insight for the subtleties of Sámi life. From the pride that Elsa takes in her
gákti — the traditional, ribbon-trimmed Sámi dress — to the embarrassing way
that tourists gush over her, “Stolen” illuminates a culture that many in Sweden
have long ignored or reviled. Sámi words dot the text — an intentional strategy
for overcoming the shame that prevented her own mother from teaching her the
language. “It is my sorrow that I don’t speak Sámi,” Laestadius said. “So it
became even more important for me to have it in my books.”
“It’s quite an extraordinary talent that she can write a story about something that is quite specific to a small culture, but that is interesting to a wider audience.”
Although “Stolen” is fiction, some Sámi
have found it a welcome depiction of their reality — including the reindeer
killings that many Sámi organizations are fighting to have classified as hate
crimes. “Ann-Helén depicts nuances in the culture that I’m not sure non-Sámi
would pick up on,” said Åsa Larsson Blind, vice president of the Sámi Council,
a nongovernmental organization that works to protect Sámi rights. “It’s quite
an extraordinary talent that she can write a story about something that is
quite specific to a small culture, but that is interesting to a wider
audience.”
“Stolen” won Sweden’s reader-voted Book of
the Year Prize in 2021, and is being adapted into a film for Netflix.
Laestadius is now part of a large community
of Sámi artists, musicians, and writers whose work contains political messages.
“Within Sámi culture, artists have always been activists,” Larsson said. “It’s
natural for them to express strong political statements through art, and it can
be more powerful too, because people tend to be more open to art.”
Reindeer in Kiruna, Sweden, on December 27,
2022.
Laestadius has seen some impact. Local
newspapers are covering the reindeer killings more frequently, and there are
signs that authorities may be paying more attention to the cases. “Usually they
never come,” she said of the police, with a wry grin. “But last summer when a
reindeer was killed in a little village, they sent a helicopter.”
She is still angry, however, and she still
has more to reveal. This month, her latest novel will come out in Sweden. It
depicts the brutal conditions at the boarding schools Sámi children were sent
to, and is based on her mother’s experience.
As the noontime sun began to set,
Laestadius posed for a few more pictures in the snow-clad village where her
“Stolen” is set.
“Now we have the opportunity and the power
to tell our story,” she said. “It is ours to tell.”
Read more Books
Jordan News