---
title: "The Land Is Different"
sousTitre: "Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, Sámi poet and joiker, does not say the land holds memory—he says it changes in nature, depending on whether it has been lived in."
description: "The land is different: Nils-Aslak Valkeapää’s poem where the land of Sápmi is no longer the same once you have walked it, sweated on it, frozen on it—*The Sun, my Father*, trans. Gaski/Nordström/Salisbury."
date: 2026-07-10
lang: en
tradition: sami
auteurs: ["Nils-Aslak Valkeapää"]
---
# The Land Is Different

Nils-Aslak Valkeapää signed his work Áillohaš, his name in his own language, Northern Sámi. Poet and joiker—one who joiks does not sing *about* a reindeer or a wind, but sings that reindeer, that wind, as if the song belonged to it—he became the first Sámi author to receive the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 1991. Three of his poems, drawn from *Trekways of the Wind* (1994) and *The Sun, my Father* (1997), now circulate in English in the Norwegian journal *Nordlit*. The wind, the snow, a herd, a turning season—then, in the last of the three, a line repeated twice, unlike any other declaration of attachment to a place.

  
    the land
    is different
    when you have lived there
    wandered
    sweated
    frozen
    seen the sun
    set rise
    disappear return
    the land is different
    when you know
    here are
    roots
    ancestors
  
  the land
  is different
  when you have lived on it
  wandered
  sweated
  frozen
  seen the sun
  set rise
  vanish return
  the land is different
  when you know
  that here lie
  roots
  ancestors

The poem does not say you know a land better for having walked it—it says the land *is* different. This is not a statement about what happens in a mind (a richer memory, a more precise knowledge), but about what the land itself becomes. The verbs that carry it do not describe a gaze: they describe a body—wandering, sweating, freezing, watching the sun set and rise, vanish and return. It takes the span of an entire season, not a visit, for this shift to occur. And the second half of the poem moves the criterion further: the land changes, too, when you *know* that roots and ancestors lie there—a knowledge not drawn from observation, but from belonging.

*[yoik]* The word *yoik* appears once, in the second of the three poems: “The yoik in wind.” Valkeapää does not define it here. The often-cited formula for what joiking is (“you do not joik *about* something, you joik it”) comes from another Sámi voice, that of singer Mari Boine—we refrain from attributing it to him.

Two other entries in this lexicon have already placed land at the center of a poem or an axiom. For Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday, the [remembered earth](https://viasophia.org/lexique/remembered-earth/) is a work of the mind: once in a lifetime, you surrender to a particular landscape, and memory thereafter holds it. For Kombumerri philosopher Mary Graham, [the land is the Law](https://viasophia.org/lexique/the-land-is-the-law/): it precedes all human society and determines its rules. Valkeapää speaks neither of memory nor of law. He speaks of the land itself, of its nature, which is not fixed: the same patch of tundra is not the same object for one who has lived it and one who views it on a map.

In Norway, the Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that two wind farms built on the Fosen peninsula violated the rights of Sámi herders to their culture. The subsequent mediation proposed, among other things, new winter grazing lands to compensate for those now covered by turbines—a deadline is set for 2026 to secure them. The offer assumes that two lands of equal surface area are equivalent. *The land is different* says otherwise: a land cannot be replaced by another land, because what makes it habitable is neither its surface nor its vegetation, but the fact of having frozen on it, sweated on it, seen the sun return—and of knowing ancestors lie there.

---

**À lire aussi**

- [La terre remémorée](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-06-10-remembered-earth/)
- [La terre est la Loi](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-07-07-la-terre-est-la-loi/)
- [Une terre paisible](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-07-09-ainu-mosir-terre-paisible/)

## Sources

- Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, *The Sun, my Father (Beaivi, áhčážan)* — DAT, Guovdageaidnu, 1997 ; repris in Three Poems, Nordlit (UiT The Arctic University of Norway), accès ouvert, trans. Harald Gaski, Lars Nordström, Ralph Salisbury (sámi → anglais) ; rendu français maison


Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/reenchanter/2026-07-10-la-terre-est-differente/