
THE ROCKS WILL ECHO OUR SORROW virtual event with National Nordic Museum and Elin Anna Labba
February 25 @ 11:00 am – 12:00 pm PST

Elin Anna Labba will virtually join the National Nordic Museum on Tuesday, February 25, for a reading and discussion on her book The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi, at 11:00 a.m. PST.
This event requires a ticket ($5). Please RSVP by 9:00 a.m PST on February 25 to receive the Zoom link.
In a remarkable blend of historical reportage, memoir, and lyrical reimagining, Elin Anna Labba travels to northern Norway and Sweden, the lost homeland of her ancestors, to tell of the forced displacement of the Indigenous Sámi in the early twentieth century. Through stories, photographs, letters, and joik lyrics, she gathers a chorus of Sámi expression that resonates across the years, evoking the nomadic life they were required to abandon and the immense hardship they endured.
“Sámi journalist Labba makes the trauma of the forced removal of her people from northern Norway and Sweden both palpable and painful in this profound debut history.” —Publisher’s Weekly, starred review
“A crucial contribution to Indigenous and Sámi history, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow is heartbreaking, infuriating, and necessary reading.”—Barbara Sjoholm, author of From Lapland to Sápmi: Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture
“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
“The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow, a book about the Sámi refusal to be wholly dispossessed, is a beautiful addition to the global Indigenous literary tradition. Elin Anna Labba tends to the poetry of everyday thought and reminiscence and, in so doing, offers up an idiom of land that is endlessly moving. A work of collective testimony, a remapping of Swedish history, an archive in and of itself, and, by its end, a vital rallying call.”—Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus