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.

English (trans. from Sámi)

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

English

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.

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 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: 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.