Elin Anna Labba will join Cook County Higher Education on Monday, May 13 at 12:00 p.m. for a book talk on her new book The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi. This event is free, but requires advance registration here.

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.

"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

"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

"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