Depicting a Sámi Society Between Tradition and Modernization: The Strategies of Coping in Jovnna-Ánde Vest’s Trilogy <i>Árbbolaccat</i>

Lill Tove Fredriksen

doi:10.7557/13.1163

Authors

Lill Tove Fredriksen Faculty of Humanities, the University of Tromsø

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/13.1163

Keywords:

Árbbolaccat, Jovnna-Ánde Vest, Sámi literature, coping strategies, Máhtebáiki, local community, new times

Abstract

The Sámi novelist Jovnna-Ánde Vest has written the trilogy Árbbolaččat, where he writes about the lives of the people living in Máhtebáiki, a small Sámi village in Northern Finland, from the late 1950s until the early 1980s. This is a time when new great changes coming from the majority society also has impact on the living conditions in a society where agriculture and fishing are the main lines of work. The article focuses on the protagonist Heaika and how he interacts and what kind of coping strategies he chooses in his endeavor to become a writer. Heaika serves both as a witness and a mediator of how the characters in the local society meet the impacts of the new time

Author Biography

Lill Tove Fredriksen, Faculty of Humanities, the University of Tromsø

Lill Tove Fredriksen is from Porsanger in Finnmark county, Northern Norway. She is assistant professor in Sámi literature at the Faculty of Humanities, the University Tromsø, Norway. Her field of research is oral traditions with emphasis on sea-sámi song tradition. Her current research topic is about coping strategies in a small Sámi community, the way this is depicted in the novel trilogy Árbbolaccat written by the Sámi author Jovnna-Ánde Vest.