“The big mining companies trying to take this land and push the reindeer people away” | How Solju are standing up for the Sámi culture

The voice of Hildá Länsman is soft and intimate, halfway between a breath and a whisper. The melody oscillates around just a few notes over piano chords and glistening metal percussion. The voice is like a snowflake buffeted in the wind, circling round and round before finally settling. The song is ‘Oassi Mus’ (A Part of Me) with words in the Northern Sámi language: ‘A part of me always longs for the snow-silvered expanses / Where ice gems, rime-clad mountain birches / Gentle brush, light embrace.’ Then another voice enters, louder and more confident, with a powerful rhythmic phrase. This is Länsman’s mother, Ulla Pirttijärvi, one of Finland’s most celebrated joik singers. The joik she’s singing has just syllables, no words, but is inspired by the landscape, weather and emotions they feel in the area where they are reindeer-herding.

“If you are there many hours, the landscape becomes part of you and you can no longer see the border between the snow and sky,” Pirttijärvi explains. “It’s that feeling that goes into the joik. You are part of nature, and you can be like snow that is soft and snow that is hard – it reflects your personality. It creates a landscape inside you.”

Pirttijärvi and Länsman are the vocalists in the group Solju (the word for the traditional silver brooch Sámi women wear). Most of the songs on their new album, Uvjamuohta / Powder Snow (read the review), date back to a few months the two spent together in the spring of 2020 when Länsman’s younger brother Nillá-Ánde was away on military service. “We had to take responsibility for the reindeer. With my uncle we were going every day to the hillside and herding the reindeer and feeding them,” Länsman explains. The family is based as far north as you can go in Finland, in the municipality of Utsjoki (Ohcejohka in Sámi) herding their reindeer in Gáldooaivi. How big the herd is I don’t know. It is a strictly taboo question to ask a Sámi how many reindeer they have.

Frame of reference: Solju’s Ulla Pirttijärvi and Hildá Länsman (photo: Marja Helander)

When I ask what Solju are trying to do with their music, Länsman explains they want to bring an awareness of Sámi culture and joiking to a wider audience. And while joik is integral to the music, it’s set in a more accessible context thanks to Länsman’s composing and singing skills. “Of course, Ulla is as joik as you can get, so with Ulla’s participation it’s as pure as it can be,” says Länsman. “I bring some other dynamics with those pop melodies, but I do a bit of joiking as well.” The rough leather of Pirttijärvi’s voice harks back to ancestral tradition and is a fine counterpart to the softer silver of Länsman’s voice, representing the new generation.

The band came together after the Swedish Eurovision composing duo of Ylva and Linda Persson persuaded them to compete for a spot in 2015. They didn’t make Eurovision, but Pirttijärvi and Länsman enjoyed the experience and decided to form Solju. Their excellent debut album, Ođđa Áigodat (New Times), came out in 2018 with its anthemic title-track backed by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. The disc won Canada’s Indigenous Music Awards the following year. Solju recently guested with Finnish pop musician Antti Tuisku in a stadium of 80,000 people and ‘Sáivogáldu’ (Spiritual Spring), one of the songs on their new album, is written for the terrifying new sci-fi film directed by Saara Saarela, Memory of Water, a vision of a dystopian future in which people are fighting over dwindling water resources.

Hildá Länsman (photo: Marja Helander)

Pirttijärvi has a role in the film and her joik, arranged by Norwegian musician Olav Torget, with whom she works in the group Áššu, is dedicated to water, which she describes as “our vital force on Earth.” The melody is pentatonic with light guitar touches and metallic percussion sounding like water droplets.

As a people traditionally living in nature and inhabiting an environment threatened by industrial development – mining, wind farms and timber – despoliation of the environment is a subject addressed by many of the Sámi singers I’ve seen in the last year or so: Norway’s Sara Marielle Gaup, Sweden’s Katarina Barruk, Finland’s Ánnámáret and Solju. The angriest of Solju’s songs is ‘Válddi Fámut’ (Powers of Rule), about wealth and power. It’s Pirttijärvi who growls the vocals ‘those who rule have the power / Those with money want an even bigger share.’

“We are living and growing up in this Sámi culture. It’s heartbreaking to see the big mining companies trying to take this land and push the reindeer people away,” she says. Länsman develops the point further, eyes blazing: “There’s the absurdity of pricing things that are actually invaluable, like our nature. When politics and money meet, it can get dangerous for nature. That’s how the land can be taken from the people who have been living with it for ages. They have the power to make a price for things you cannot actually measure with money.”

Music has been an important mainstay of activism in Sámi culture, ever since Norwegian Sámi Mari Boine started singing in the 1980s. Her Gula Gula album was released in 1989 and licensed to Real World in 1990. On the title-track she sings: ‘Hear the voices of the foremothers / They ask you why you let the earth become polluted / Poisoned / Exhausted / They remind you where you come from / Do you hear?’ “I am so glad that there are younger artists who continue this fight,” Mari Boine said to Songlines in 2017. “I can see they have the anger that we had in the 80s. It’s a continuous battle. With these songs we have been healing wounds from the trauma of being colonised. My people are much stronger than they were 30 years ago. We’ve never accepted that our culture and language doesn’t have value.”

Länsman admits that music has been extremely useful in raising awareness. “Most of the Sámi artists get seen as activists, even if they don’t consider themselves as such. When you have an audience and you have the space, why not use it?” Which is not to say there aren’t some lighter songs in this new collection. I thought ‘Borggaid Cada’ (Through Snow Flurries) might be about the destruction of the environment with its loud and intrusive engine noise, but Länsman says it’s “just the normal sounds of working with the reindeer. We use snowmobiles and tractors and machines for getting 1,000kg hay balls onto a sleigh.” And ‘Boastto Beal Joga’ (On the Wrong Side of the River) is a playful description of a nascent romance. Länsman sings the main guttural vocal over a heavy bassline and percussion – with wolf whistles and reindeer sounds in the background – ‘that’s when it all began / I met you in rainy weather / Damn! / I crept under your jacket.’ It feels like an intimate insight into the realities of herding life. “It is a love song,” Länsman admits, “but it is open to many interpretations. It’s also about the feeling that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, to the fact that the Sámi people are divided into four different countries and sometimes you might think you have been born on the ‘wrong’ side of the river.” That can be literally true around Utsjoki, where for 250km the Tana (or Tenojoki) river is the border between Norway and Finland.

Read the review: Uvjamuohta / Powder Snow

This article originally appeared in the December 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today