Elin Anna Labba will join Ramsey County Historical Society and Norway House on Zoom on Thursday, May 23 at 1:00 p.m. CST for a presentation 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.

"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

"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