Mari Boine interview: “I was on my way somewhere, but now I’m really, really me”

A song transports me to a river, the Anárjohka, in the far north of Norway; distant pulsing beats, rippling guitars and the glint of the banjo-like bulbul tarang, like a salmon catching a streak of sunlight as it leaps from the water. This is where Mari Boine grew up: “We didn’t have a car, but a long slim boat. We fished for salmon. In the winter when the river was frozen, we had a horse next to this ice road, where we played,” she remembers. The song, ‘Anárjoh’gáttis (By My Beautiful River)’, reaches to Boine’s childhood, the land, the river that shaped her writing and her voice; it moves me to tears, not for the first time on her new, very personal album, Alva.

I wave a stack of her CDs in front of the camera on our video call, time-worn cases covered in my own Post-it notes, reminders of my choices for radio plays: remixes, collaborations, best ofs, last year’s duo with Bugge Wesseltoft, and of course there’s Gula Gula, released in Norway in 1989 and then a year later internationally on Real World, that thrust her and Sámi music into the limelight. “What’s changed for you since those?” I ask. “What’s changed,” she smiles, “is that I’ve finally found my home, and me and my voice we’re now together. I know people have loved my music for a long time, but I wasn’t satisfied, I was on my way somewhere, but now I’m really, really me. I feel confident in who I am now, I like who I am, I know what my music is about, and what my goals are.”

She describes growing up by the river as like a fairy tale, but of course, fairy tales have a dark side too. Her Indigenous Sámi people were forced to live in a climate of shame and oppression, their culture and music was repressed and forbidden, their drums were burned. Hearing Christian hymns and pop music, Boine developed her own songs, vehicles for her anger and trauma as she discovered more about the treatment of Sámi people. Music became her healing and she dared to begin to use the forbidden shaman drum so close to the human heartbeat.

She remained passionate about her Sámi language. We both agree on the beauty of Sámi – the whispered ‘huh’ sound that connects with the breath, and the soft birdlike ‘tch.’ She tells me that she sang in English on albums such as See the Woman “to wake up my own people because it’s not the same when you sing in English. Mother tongue is so important [but] to sing in a language you learn with intellect is different, how can it meet that deep feeling I have inside?”

Boine is a powerful ambassador for Indigenous peoples around the world: “Our language and the traditional clothes are much more visible than they were, but the challenge is now about who has the rights over the land’s resources. Still, the reindeer herding communities are under threat and we thought that was over. We know that in order for language and culture to survive, we need a connection to nature, if nature is ruined, we will lose everything.” She refers to the ancient wisdom of the Indigenous cultures who are so close to nature and their belief that the earth is our mother, a theme central to her song ‘Gula Gula’.

On Alva, this urgency and passion lives on in ‘Dánsso Fal Mu Váhkaran’. Boine wants this song to encourage people, “especially our young people, to believe in themselves, to free themselves from all that kept our ancestors down. Encourage us to be proud of our heritage.”

How does she see her place in the Sámi community now? “In Indigenous cultures you have elders, and the position of elders, particularly women, is important and I feel I can give support and advice.”

It’s as if her arrival at the place she wants to be has coincided with a rekindling (if it were needed) of her audience. Earlier this year, Norwegian television channel TV2 aired a new series of the popular show Hver Gang Vi Møtes, which brings different musicians to perform together, and Boine found herself at the heart of it with new audiences giving her the pop star treatment. She’s loving being on stage: “People say I should be retiring now, but I want to work, it’s where I relax, it’s like going into a temple.”

With her on stage are several musicians she’s worked with over decades, musicians who know her music well, including bass player Svein Schultz who also produces the album with an outstanding and instinctive feel for what each song, each phrase, needs. “I just dance on top of what they play,” laughs Boine.

Many of the songs on Alva have arrived to her over the years as fragments of words or melodies. “I love putting them together, I suppose in my unconscious there’s a plan, but I need to work with fragments and understand where they belong. I like to have the melody first and then sing it until I’m ready to look for words.”

Sometimes it’s about confronting deep feelings, crying them through, to find the right words, as in the upbeat yet emotional ‘Oidnojuvvon (Destiny)’. ‘Oainnestan (Glimpses)’ is “important, a song so full of love,” written for her son, and ‘Rohkos (A Prayer)’ is a powerful invocation: ‘O Eadni, Mother Earth / Please sustain the fruits of birth.’

Our conversation finishes with Boine taking me back to nature, to new song ‘Áhkánsuolu’ (Island of the Helpers). In the lyrics, she sings of looking at the titular island for decades, sipping coffee by the window, but only recently realised the closeness of the Sámi words for helper or goddess (áhkkáide) to mother (áhkku) and grandmother (ur-áhkku). “I found a new way of writing”, she says, and we both silently give thanks to this long line of women, our helpers, goddesses and the wisdom of our foremothers: ‘All my gratitude I give / I carry you with me everywhere I go,’ she sings on ‘Áhkánsuolu’.

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue, read the magazine online – subscribe today: magsubscriptions.com