Katarina Barruk wants you to take everything you know about language, and put it aside for a moment. As an artist from the Lusspie region in northern Sweden who sings in a dialect spoken by fewer than 30 people, she’s asking listeners to feel first. Her music is written in Umé Sámi, which can currently be found on the UNESCO’s red list of critically endangered languages, and weaves a traditional vocal style called joiking (think: yoik, as it would rhyme with boyk) into the compositions. The twist? These emotional expressions can’t necessarily be translated.
Lusspie, also known as the Storuman, is a municipality roughly the size of Delaware, and all of its members carry something special. “The joik is what we call a traditional knowledge carrier—it’s one of our foundations,” she explains over a Zoom call this winter. “It’s our traditional way of making sounds, and it has also been a way of telling stories. When you joik something, you don’t joik around it, or about it. You joik it. You are on the inside looking out, not from the outside looking in on something.” It might be easier to think of joiking as a way of honoring people or landscapes through freestyle a capella, as opposed to conversing in a one-to-one conversation.
Her newest single, an acoustic version of the track “Dárbasjub Duv,” is a good way to practice falling into her sound. But her music has already been felt around the globe: on the stages of Iceland Airwaves festival, the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, the Reeperbahn Festival in Germany, and Norway’s Øyafestivalen festival, to name a few. She’s also contributed her vocals to various art projects, from the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea to fellow Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara’s exhibition “Goavve-Geabbil” at the Tate Modern.
Barruk’s music is a portal to the larger Sámi community, which spans a region known as Sápmi, including the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Some, but not all, are involved in the ancient practice of reindeer herding, guiding the animals into the mountains during the harsh winters, where the lichen they graze on hides underneath the trees, and easing them back into the valleys come warmer weather. This Indigenous community has a number of Sámi languages that stretch across borders, but Umé Sámi is one of the least spoken. “I grew up in an activist family,” she says. “My father has been at the forefront of the Umé Sámi language. He’s a teacher, and he has also done a lot of research and work to revitalize it—he wrote the Umé Sámi dictionary.” Holding this piece of printed history in 2018 is one of Barruk’s key memories. “There were so many Umé Sámis who wanted to learn it,” she says. “I loved having that book in my hand—I just cried because it was all of the familiar words in one place. I had never had anything like that, with all of them, in my whole life.”
