Nils-Aslak Valkeapää

Biography

In 1994 a joik was heard at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer. It was performed by Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, by then the best-known Sámi artist in the world.

He was born in Enontekiö, in Finnish Lapland, into a family of nomadic reindeer herders; the date is given differently, most often as 23 March 1943, sometimes as 24 March. His father came from the Kaaresuvanto area, and his mother was a Norwegian Sámi from the island of Uløya in Troms. His mother tongue was Northern Sámi, but at school and in the boarding school the teaching was in Finnish, and he learned to write in his own language only as an adult. He later described his school years as a time of humiliation and anguish. He studied at a Sámi folk high school in Inari, and in 1966 he graduated from the teachers’ training college in Kemijärvi, but he never worked as a teacher.

He first became known as a performer of joik, the traditional Sámi singing. His first record, “Joikuja”, came out in 1968. Before him joik had been heard in a narrow circle; he added instruments and sound effects and took it to the concert stage. With jazz musicians, above all Seppo Paakkunainen, he developed joik in the direction of jazz. One album from this circle, “Sámi eatnan duoddariid” (1978), came out as a record, and in 2022 the joik of the same name was chosen as the national joik of the Sámi people at the Sámi Conference in Gällivare. In Finland his music caused controversy: some disliked the jazz, and Laestadian Sámi (members of a strict Lutheran revival movement) often considered joik sinful. He refused to preserve culture in a fixed form: at talk of “conserving” it he saw a folklore collector cataloguing something dead.

In all, thirteen records came out in his lifetime. “The Bird Symphony” (“Goase dušše”), built from the sounds of nature, received the jury’s special prize at the Prix Italia radio competition in 1993. For the film “Ofelaš” (“Pathfinder”, 1987), which was nominated for an Oscar, he wrote the music and played a part. The British musician Mike Oldfield took a recording of his joik from that film as the basis of the piece “Prayer for the Earth”.

His first book was the pamphlet “Greetings from Lapland” (1971), written in Finnish. In it he condemned the boarding schools, where children were weaned from Sámi life, and the policy of land seizure. His first book of poems, “Giđa ijat čuovgadat”, he published himself in Oulu in 1974. From then until 2001 nine books of poetry appeared, all in Northern Sámi; only two have been translated into Finnish. The main one is “Beaivi, áhčážan” (“The Sun, My Father”, 1988), a book of poems and photographs of the Sámi from the 1860s to the 1930s, which he spent six years collecting from European museums. Sámi drawing, the patterns of shaman drums and the rock carvings of Alta gave him his material. For this book he received the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1991. He also wrote a play in the manner of Noh theatre, first performed in Japan in 1995.

He painted as well. His paintings were often built on figures from Sámi mythology, and his pencil drawings showed birds, people and reindeer. He designed the covers of his own books and records, and of books by other Sámi authors, for example Rauni Magga Lukkari and Kirsti Paltto. He gave thirty works to Kautokeino Municipality, where they are on permanent display in the local museum. A large retrospective of his work was held in Oslo at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter from October 2020 to May 2021.

From the mid-1970s he was one of the figures of the Sámi rights movement. In 1975 he attended the founding meeting of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples in Port Alberni, Canada, and from 1978 he was its cultural coordinator. In 1979 he organised Davvi Šuvva in Karesuando, the world’s first Indigenous cultural festival. He took part in founding the Sámi Writers’ Association, and in 1984 he was among the founders of the publishing house DAT, which issued most of his books and recordings and also published other Sámi authors. From 1978 to 1983 he was the official provincial artist of Lapland. The universities of Oulu and Lapland awarded him honorary doctorates, and in 1995 he received the Estonian Order of the White Star, fifth class.

From 1996, after a serious car accident, he lived permanently in Skibotn in Norway, in a log house called Lásságámmi, which he built in the traditional Sámi manner. In 2001 he became a Norwegian citizen. In November of that year he died in Espoo, on his return from a trip to Japan. He is buried in the Birtavárre cemetery in Troms. The house in Skibotn became a museum and a studio for artists, and is maintained by the Lásságámmi Foundation, established in 2004.