The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow

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.