Stolen

BY ANN-HELÉN LAESTADIUS

A traditional culture deals with threats from inside and outside its tight-knit community.

Kick-started by the disturbing poaching and slaughter of a reindeer that was part of a Sámi family’s herd in remote northern Sweden, Laestadius’ saga details the inequities faced by the contemporary Indigenous Sámi population. Elsa, a 9-year-old to whom the murdered reindeer had been entrusted, is threatened by the hunter and scared into not revealing his identity to her family or authorities. Previous reindeer slaughters had gone unpursued by local police since this sort of crime against the Sámi (and their way of life) was considered mere theft. Frustrated by the seeming passivity with which the group accepts the situation, Elsa sets upon her own path as she grows into adulthood: She questions traditional gender roles as well as the failure of local police to apprehend the hunter who is torturing and killing her community’s reindeer.

The legacies of long-held social prejudices against the Indigenous group—racism, economic insecurity, and the traumas borne by the community’s elders who had been removed from the group in childhood and sent to “nomad schools”—continue to haunt Sámi life with devastating effects. Elsa must reconcile her own quest for justice with the need for some in the group to just survive. Looming over the tale, which unfolds over the course of more than a decade, is the specter of climate change and its impacts on the traditional Sámi herding methods. Laestadius, who is Sámi and of Tornedalian descent, indicates in her acknowledgements that the novel is based upon actual occurrences in Sápmi territory. Willson-Broyles’ translation from Swedish is matter-of-fact and incorporates many phrases and words from the Sámi language.