A multi-generational saga courses across the pages of Ædnan, by Sámi-Swedish author Linnea Axelsson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel. The verse epic follows an Indigenous Sámi family who have herded reindeer for generations, as the forces of colonialism and modern development of their ancestral lands threaten their culture and livelihood. The story is told by a small chorus of characters from the 1910s through the current day, and we become especially close to Lise, who left her Sámi family, following her brother Jon-Henrik, to be educated at a residential school for “Nomad” children. This excerpt from Chapter XII takes place in the early 1970s, along the Great Lule River Valley, where the state-owned Vattenfall company was developing hydroelectric resources, and Lise is graduating into a world unimaginable to her parents.
. .
The river climbed silently up the hills
as soon as Vattenfall whistled it came creeping:
–
Streamed backwards up its deep channel and drowned the earth
When the great Suorva Dam for the third time was to be regulated
–
Entreaty
shone from Mama’s eyes
–
She explained clearly to the Swedes
that the fishing will suffer if the water rises
–
There was probably no one who understood what she was saying
– –
After the social studies lesson I went with the others to sit on the gymnasium floor
–
Almost all of Malmberget’s students had been dismissed from class
– To participate in the miners’ strike meeting
–
Someone had heard that Olof Palme was coming
that he would travel all the way up here
–
To the mining company’s and Vattenfall’s world the one that he himself had helped build
–
It is what he is guarding
It is all that he can see
–
The mine boss’s voice
flowed wildly above the crowded hall which was hot with bodies
–
His voice was so robust his conviction so intense
–
I glanced at Anne who was sitting beside me leaning against the wall bars
and she smiled back at me
–
Soon we would be leaving school too
–
And could start working join the union
–
You took the job you wanted that’s all there was to it
–
Switchboard cleaner or cook
with the old folks at the Pioneer or the children in day care
– –
I spend the weekend up at Mama and Papa’s
–
I stand with Jon-Henrik
–
Watching the river flow murky across the slope
–
That brushy slope
where he and I used to go it’s underwater now
–
How are our tracks ever to be heard Among the Swedes’ roads and power stations
–
It’s Jon-Henrik who says this he had also been drawn down to the dam
–
To work for Vattenfall as soon as school was done
–
I’m surprised when he says
That he’d preferred to have taken up with the reindeer
–
Been elected into the Sámi community
And learned to guide that wandering gray soft ocean across the world of the fells
–
Just as the lot of us were once taught at the Nomad School that this is what the Sámi do
that this is how we all live
–
He laughs and says:
–
Who knows what the spring flood will bring with it
this drowned earth may yet be fertile
More on this book and author:
Learn more about Ædnan by Linnea Axelsson.
Check out The Rumpus for a conversation between Linnea Axelsson and Susan Devan Harness about Axelsson's Sámi heritage and the decision to write Ædnan in verse.
Click here to read Linnea Axelsson's op-ed piece for LitHub on Scandinavia’s hidden history of Indigenous oppression.
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