Writing the Tale of Her People
Two days after Christmas, Ann-Helén Laestadius drove to a corral where her cousin keeps his herd of reindeer. She was there for a photo shoot, but first, she had to help feed the animals. As the reindeer jostled her impatiently, and even after a close brush with the pointy end of an antler, she looked on them indulgently.
“For the Sámi,” Ms. Laestadius said, referring to the Indigenous group of which she is a member, “reindeer are not just animals. They are life.”
That lesson is at the heart of her novel “Stolen.” It explains why the book’s Sámi characters perceive the killing of their reindeer as a crime not against their property, but against their people as a whole. And thanks to the book’s success, it is also a lesson that Sweden, whose colonization of the Sámi has been long and oppressive, may slowly be learning.
The Sámi, who number around 80,000, inhabit a vast territory across the Arctic areas of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia’s Kola Peninsula. For centuries, their language and culture have been forcibly suppressed by national governments that also stripped their land rights and developed industries that threatened the habitats on which their livelihoods and culture depend.
To this day, the Sámi are engaged in legal and political struggles to protect their lands from mineral and timber extraction, and their herding routes from energy projects. Many Sámi say they remain targets of discrimination, racism and violence in the form of reindeer killings.
“They kill our reindeer,” Ms. Laestadius said, “because they can’t kill us.”
Born to a Sámi mother and a father who is Tornedalian, another of Sweden’s ethnic minorities, Ms. Laestadius, 51, grew up near Kiruna, a mining city 200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. Early in life, she began internalizing shame about her identity, she said. Her mother spoke Sámi with her parents and neighbors, but switched to Swedish when she went into the city.
“It made me automatically start to think something is wrong,” Ms. Laestadius said. “We are something wrong.”
That sense grew stronger once she faced bullying in school, she said. “I started to realize that I should be quiet about who I am.”
Ms. Laestadius’s first book, published in 2007, was about a 13-year-old girl secretly studying the Sámi language.
“Stolen,” her first adult novel, also begins with a young Sámi girl. Elsa is 9 when she witnesses the malicious killing of her reindeer calf. As she grows up, the trauma of that moment, coupled with other brutalities — ostracizing at school, a friend’s suicide, the police unable or unwilling to investigate ongoing reindeer killings — transmutes into rage.
Ms. Laestadius had the idea for a novel for seven years, but kept herself from writing it out of concern that she did not have the right to tell reindeer herders’ stories since she was not from a herding family. But after two of her young cousins — brothers — killed themselves, she could no longer avoid writing about the impact of imposed inferiority, she said.
When a young herder gave her copies of a hundred reports of reindeer killings that had
“For the Sámi, reindeer are not just animals,” said Ann-Helén Laestadius, an Indigenous author. “They are life.”
been filed with the police without any arrests being made,
Ms. Laestadius’s urgency grew: “I wrote this book with a lot of anger.”
“Stolen” also illuminates a culture that many in Sweden have long ignored or reviled. Sámi words dot the text, an intentional strategy for overcoming the shame that prevented her own mother from teaching her the language.
Some Sámi have found “Stolen” a welcome depiction of their reality — including the reindeer killings that many Sámi groups are trying to have classified as hate crimes. The novel won Sweden’s reader-voted Book of the Year Prize in 2021, and is being adapted into a film for Netflix.
In a review of “Stolen” for the Swedish newspaper Expressen, Gunilla Brodrej, an editor, expressed shame for once dismissing as unrealistic
A fictional look at the real struggles of the Arctic Sámi.
a television series depicting the racism the Sámi face.
“In school, I, and even my children, learn that we Swedes have arranged everything in a very good way for the Sámi,” she said in an interview. “But when you read a book like this you realize that it’s a much darker story than we ever learned.”
Ms. Laestadius has seen some positive changes. Local newspapers are covering the reindeer killings more frequently, and authorities may be paying more attention.
“Usually they never come,” she said of the police, with a wry grin. “But last summer when a reindeer was killed in a little village, they sent a helicopter.”