What does it mean to be indigenous within a settler-colonial Sweden? Sámi Swedish writer Linnea Axelsson explores this concept, told in verse, in ÆDNAN (Knopf, 2024). The Sámi—previously known as Laplanders—still occupy their traditional lands, which sit within the present-day nations of Sweden, Norway, Finland and beyond. Some still herd reindeer, some still wear their traditional clothing, some have retained their language, but all have been impacted by the forced movement away from their land and into the foreign industrialized culture of the settlers. The events in ÆDNAN are based in truth, which makes this book a literary powerhouse.
We enter the story in 1913 as Ber-Joná and his wife, Ristin, move southward, having been forced from their traditional reindeer herding lands. Through the eyes of four generations, we begin to understand the ways a culture is pried apart, through land removal, Western religion, and forced participation in colonial boarding, or nomad schools. We also witness the changes upon the land as structures representing power: the dam on the Lule River forever changes the landscape and thus the people. All these events begin to fracture one generation from one another; the older generation experiences shame at their powerlessness, and a younger generation rises in angry protest seeking justice in the courts regarding their traditional lands and rights to manage them.
As a member of the Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana, I read ÆDNAN from the Indigenous perspective of the Sámi people and was astounded at how closely the settler colonial narrative matched ours, although ÆDNAN’s begins much later, in the early 1900s.
ÆDNAN’s power lies in its examination of colonial pressure on the family as well as the people through the redesigning of the land, tearing at the very fabric of tradition. Axelsson’s writing shows that although a return to tradition heals some of the scars, the culture is changed forever. How, she asks, can we create a space where both destruction and reconstruction exist together?
I had the pleasure of talking with Axelsson over Zoom about her Sámi heritage and its intersection with ÆDNAN, using verse to write this story, and what made her decide to write this novel-in-verse.
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The Rumpus: I loved this book. You introduce your first characters, Ber-Joná and Risten, as they are forced to leave their traditional lands. The book covers four generations and ends with Sandra, of the third generation, being buried. But it is the interior of the story, the story of their descendants, that shows how much the Sámi’s world has changed in one century, right?
Linnea Axelsson: Yes, in many ways. Of course, there are still people, especially in the reindeer herding families, that live closer to the traditional way, whilst people like me live in the city now. So it’s another way of living. Although cultural change has been in development for hundreds of years, I think my grandmother was a generation that really experienced a lot of becoming forcefully Swedish, and my mother as well.
Rumpus: How closely does ÆDNAN follow your families’ ancestral experience?
Axelsson: ÆDNAN is all fiction, there are no portraits of real people in the book. However, I use everything when I write, mostly imagination but also family history. Therefore, the book is filled with events and memories from my family. For example, my grandmother was forcefully relocated, and as a kid she experienced reactions similar to Ber-Joná and Ristin—the rage at the biological examination, for instance. And my mother went to the nomad school.
Rumpus: I loved the way you used verse to tell the stories of ÆDNAN’s characters. It sounds and feels like a very old way of telling stories. What made you decide to use this specific type of form for your book?
Axelsson: The answer to that is always so boring: it just came out of the idea of the work. When I start writing, I never know what the thing is going to be. It’s just something in your head that won’t go away, and you spend a lot of time trying to figure out: What is this? Who is this person? So the idea of verse started with the people in the book.
I also realized there was something important from the beginning, a notion of work: these people became herders, and they moved across the lands. I think the book asks questions about how work separates people, how men form one group and women and children form another group. With nontraditional work, that changed. I also thought of how different events in the state and politics changed the way of work—the way of life for these people. Therefore, when I began writing, I began with those people and the shape of the story grew from that, from them.
Also, the older generation in the book were quite reluctant narrators. They were quiet and reserved. The younger generations in the book saw and experienced the way older people deal with trauma. There’s this huge silence, no one wants to speak about what they’ve been through. Because their generation hasn’t experienced the things the older generation has, perhaps they are more willing to look. But it was the silence that really caught my attention and put my imagination to work. So it was that kind of quietness that really inspired the shape of ÆDNAN.It was the shape that made it possible to start telling their stories.
I’m pleased that you find it kind of like an old storytelling, because this oral tradition is quite important to me. And it is that feeling throughout the whole book that says an oral tradition is something you can add to a story that already exists, and you can now retell in a way.
Rumpus: ÆDNAN is filled with symbolism. When you talk about the quietness of the people, the sparseness of language used by the previous generation, I see that sparseness in the large amount of white space on the page. And although not many words exist on the page, they convey so much information.
Axelsson: Thank you.
Rumpus: ÆDNAN is broken into three sections: “The Land,” “The River,” and “The People.” In each section, time not only moves at a different pace but isn’t completely linear. For instance, in the first section, time moves forward from 1913 to 1964. In the last section, time begins in 2016 and ends in 1984. What intrigued me was the middle section, where time jumps around with no linear nature whatsoever. What’s going on there?
Axelsson: It’s so lovely you say that. This book came out in Sweden in 2018, and you have been the first person to point that out. You know, how things end up being is just intuitive. But when you look back, you can kind of start to intellectualize the shape and the narrative around its being.
I see ÆDNAN as forming a circle. The first section is a progressive time. Then this middle section moves more like water, it moves around. That is something I always come back to—how one experiences time—that the past is always coming back to the present and the present can become long or short. It is that kind of expansiveness in time that interests me. Then, as the last part moves backward, we form some kind of circle. The circle is very important in Sámi cultures, the tent is circular, the stones around the fires are laid in a circle. The seasons of the year are circular. You recognize it as a very basic shape in the culture. The love, the joy of tradition, moves in circles. That is something that influences my work.
Rumpus: That middle section also feels chaotic, a symbol of when the biggest changes occurred to Sámi culture?
Axelsson: That’s true. Yeah, that’s a lovely interpretation of it.
Rumpus: In ÆDNAN, you educate your readers about Sámi culture. You talk about the women wearing traditional clothing, called a gakti or the kolt. You also mention the term “yoik.” Can you describe what that is?
Axelsson: Yoiking is a kind of sung poetry, and it’s part of our literary tradition. Yoiks can bevery short, just four-line poems. You can create a yoik just about anything, for instance, a swan, and you only sing the word “swan.” And you break it down with sounds, different sounds. There can be long yoiks, about an event in the past, or often we yoik people. If the yoik is about a person, that person is in possession of the yoik. So if I yoik you, the yoik belongs to you, not to me. We also yoik mountains and rivers and forests and other things in nature. When we look into our history, we also have protest yoiks. For example, in the seventeenth century, some Sámi were forced to work in mines, and so we have some protest yoiks those people made that are still in our culture.
Yoiks are still a living tradition, although they were forbidden by the church. In southern Sámiland, closest to the power, I believe the yoiking tradition was threatened earlier, while in the north, the yoik was alive longer before the church came and said it was a sin. But there are still Sámi people who get offended if you yoik in a church, whilst others work to be able to use that cultural expression in the church.
Rumpus: It sounds like the form of this book was brought forth through the yoik.
Axelsson: I think that it’s a part of it, yes. It wasn’t that I thought of it as an idea, but I guess I just have it in my own way of thinking about poetry and working with language. So I’m sure it’s in there in the mixture of it all.
Rumpus: This is a story about the pain and trauma of settler colonialism that was placed on the Sámi. When readers in Sweden and Norway, throughout northern Europe, have read ÆDNAN, how have they reacted?
Axelsson: Amongst other things, I experienced something of an eye-opening moment from a lot of Swedish readers. I guess in the Swedish self-image, it’s quite new to think of yourself as a colonial state, a politic that is taken for granted. It’s kind of an unquestioned political viewpoint, just very passive, especially when it comes to Sámi rights.
Rumpus: Your writing about politics really showcases the issues the Sámi people faced and are facing. It seems that ÆDNAN revolves around two separate court cases: the Alta Controversy, which was brought by Sámi to the damage brought about by damming a river, and the Girjas Trial. Am I correct?
Axelsson: I don’t remember writing about the Alta, perhaps I did.
Rumpus: You talked a lot about a dam.
Axelsson: Yes. The dam, but it wasn’t about the Alta Controversy. The section of the book that is the largest is about a dam set on the Lule River in Sweden. The nearby village is like the small community I grew up in. There were the Sámi and the Swedish people working at the dam, so it’s obvious that these are two parallel societies, two cultures. The dam is a very big part of our political struggles, how this river is being regulated.
Rumpus: Does the river represent the Sámi people?
Axelsson: I guess it can be read like that. But I didn’t think to use it as a parallel, I’m not clever like that. ButI love using simple images that are given from nature itself. Sometimes people talk about the sea, that it’s a worn-out image. But I think it’s not an image at all, it’s just kind of a truth, that life came from the sea, or the imagery of darkness and light. It’s also kind of factual, it’s not a metaphor for me. It’s just the earth and how it’s constructed. So I’m not shying away from those kinds of images, I love their simplicity. I guess the river is a voice that was flowing and changing, and in the spring, it’s flooded, and in the winter, it’s frozen. But when it’s regulated, it just stands still and it’s silent, and I think that it compares to the struggles of Sámi people.
But the Girjas Trial was something happening around me, and at the time I embraced the opportunity to put events in my work that were happening around me. Girjas is a Sámi village, a collective group of reindeer herders that sued the state over hunting rights. The collective wanted to be able to distribute hunting rights rather than the state. When the state distributed hunting rights, they didn’t take the reindeer herders’ needs into consideration. Eventually the Sámi village won this right, which has not been uncontroversial.
Rumpus: ÆDNAN is an examination of tension between generations: a generation of Sámi being forced to forget their culture, and a younger generation seeking to remember their culture. In what ways have you reconnected with your culture?
Axelsson: After having children, it became more important to me to make the culture grow, in a way, to live, in our life here. Because they aren’t growing up in Sápmi—lands inhabited by the Sámi, in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia—like I did. So that is something I am still figuring out. Learning more about Sámi history has been important in different periods, especially learning about parts of Sápmi that I know little or nothing about. And learning the language, since I am not fluent in northern Sámi. It’s pure, an errand of the heart to learn it. I wish for the culture to be something living and developing and not something that belongs to the past that we have to preserve.
Rumpus: What made you write ÆDNAN?
Axelsson: I don’t really know. Just that these people wouldn’t go away from my head. Someone said that stories that volunteer themselves won’t work. They’re too obvious, and they tend to burn away. It’s the tricky ones that you don’t really know how to figure out, those are the ones you should force yourself into writing. I guess that’s what happened with this one, for sure.
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Author photograph by Daniel Pedersen
