Transcript
[APPLAUSE]
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
MARI BOINE
As we all know, science often confirms what many Indigenous people have been saying in songs, in stories, in their worldview for thousands of years. Now, of course, it seems self-evident that rhythm is central to life. Our hearts beat, trees pulse, the tides pull, the sun rises.
But why was it that so many educated, sophisticated men, some of them scientists, sought to silence a simple rhythm instrument? This drum, a circle of wood and skin, that speaks to life, speaks of life to life. Here is my story. I hope it will inspire you.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
Hi.
[APPLAUSE]
This song is called Gula Gula in English, ‘Hear the voices of the four mothers.’ It has been with me for decades now. It has become like a dear old friend. It has, together with my other songs, accompanied me all over the world to cities, towns, festivals, small intimate stages and concert halls.
And everywhere I go, I meet people who tell me your songs bring back forgotten dreams. People in big cities ask me, how is it possible that I feel your songs talk to me, touch something deep inside me, even if I don’t understand your words? I don’t always have an answer. I have the same questions in me, and they have led me to dive deeper into my ancestral heritage.
My name is Mari Boine. My traditional name is [NON-ENGLISH] Christine Mari, which means Mari, daughter of Christine, daughter of Beate, who was the daughter of Greta. I grew up in Sápmi, where I still live. Those who colonised us gave our land other names, Northern Scandinavia, Northern Norway, Finnmark, Lapland, The Arctic.
But for us, this is [INAUDIBLE], where our ancestors have survived under harsh conditions for 10,000 years, ever since the last Ice Age. The idea for Gula Gula came to me through an old joik, our traditional song and its rhythm. The lyrics woke me up one night and, so to say, demanded to be born.
In our culture, we believe that our ancestors can bring us messages through dreams if we are open, if we are listening.
[NON-ENGLISH]
‘The Earth is our mother. If we harm her, we die with her.’ This was the main message. The ancestors sent this old wisdom common to Indigenous peoples all over the world as a warning, as a reminder. I grew up by the most beautiful river, Anarjohka, which, due to colonisation, became the border between Norway and Finland.
We harvested and gathered from nature. My father and mother fished for salmon, so did the other families around us. Grandmothers and mothers and aunts took us children on countless trips to pick berries. My uncles and brothers hunted, put up snares, and went to check the snares in the morning.
Our summers were full of all kinds of gifts from nature, and our elders taught us how to preserve them to survive the long winters. Their unspoken message was never take more than you need and what nature can tolerate. Leave a place like it was before you arrived.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
In parallel with this wonderful freedom, there was another reality, a strict religion that was introduced into intercept me by pietistic men who wanted to control all that was wild, savage, fruitful, and above all, feminine. My parents belonged to the part of my people who chose or were forced by circumstance to take seriously this doctrine.
Foreign priests and missionaries had for hundreds of years built churches in Sápmi, worked to purge it of what they called paganism, banned and burned our drums, punished our spiritual leaders, the noaidd, filled our people with self-hate and shame and convinced them their animistic outlook on life, their reverence for mother nature was devil worship.
So it was that my father, filled with this alien fear of sin and hell, gave long sermons on guilt, sin, and shame. And so it was that he tried to protect his children from our so-called demonic legacy, our godless history. I also grew up with a view of a sacred mountain, [NON-ENGLISH], with a sacred spring in the neighbourhood, [NON-ENGLISH].
But this I didn’t know then. But these were never mentioned or talked about, neither at school nor home, nor was it ever mentioned that we used to ask permission from nature before we cut down a tree or branch. What I grew up with were stories from the Bible saying that man should rule over nature, and that man should rule over woman. No stories saying that the animals and everything in nature were our relatives and should be treated with respect.
I later learned that the joik, our traditional singing, is a way of remembering. The knowledge was passed on through joik from one generation to the other. Every child was given a joik and welcomed to life and the society by a joik. We don’t sing about. We sing into being a person, landscape, animal, situation.
In the beginning there was not much joik in my music. My first years as a singer, I knew very little about my own culture. But I discovered the healing in music. I discovered that the music opened up a whole new world for me. I had grown up more with Christian hymns and pop music.
So first, there were these songs of therapy, some of them full of rage. As women, we are socialised to never express our rage and anger. But my experience is that there is a lot of healing in facing the rage inside you as long as you use it wisely. And the more I learned about my peoples’ history, the more songs of rage came out.
I used anger as a force to redirect colonial shame, to heal the trauma of dispossession and strengthen my connection to nature. And yes, I assure you, there were waves of shock in my family.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
This song was a milestone for me. It paved the way back to my ancestral heritage. By diving deep into the richness of our culture, I discovered a way of living with a beautiful philosophy, with a respect for the laws of nature, with a humbleness for the laws of nature. For instance, I learned that we always greeted and gave thanks to the land for the gifts we were given.
We gave thanks to the salmon who gives its life in order for us to have something to eat. I learned that the wolf and the bear were respected co-inhabitants, and so clever that hunters had to use metaphors to describe them when they went out for hunting in order to evade detection.
Those who did not assist in the hunt, but benefited from the food, ritually participated by striking the skinned hide. There was no denial of one’s depth to nature. After you had hunted and eaten the meat of the bear, the bones were placed back together and buried in order for the bear to be reborn. This is a powerful reminder of the cycle of life and such a beautiful ritual, isn’t it?
The song that I started with, Gula Gula, was a song that led me to discover the shamanistic beat. Gula Gula was inspired by this traditional song loyal.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
And for the first time, I dared to use a drum which opened another path to healing. The shamanistic beat is very close to our heartbeat. It is soothing. It can take us on a journey and connect us to the non-rational, nonlinear, and spiritual. This beat is one of the most beautiful gifts I have found. It has been a crucial part of my music ever since.
The more knowledge I as an adult gained about my own culture and heritage, the more this question came up. Why was it important to silence our heritage to make it disappear? The more I travelled around the world and became acquainted with other cultures, I realised that this had not only happened in Sápmi, but that this has happened all over the world.
To my great joy, I eventually discovered that we were not only a small, different group in Northern within Europe. We belong to a family of 370 million Indigenous people worldwide, people who have inherited myths, stories, songs, rituals, strategies of survival and life wisdom from those who were here before us and who lived close to their earth and land.
And almost everywhere, colonisers demonised, displaced, and erased the people and their collective knowledge and history. Why? And why does it still continue today? This question I have been asking many times since I finally, with the help of healing songs, I finally got rid of shame, confusion, and trauma.
My songs are born in the conflict between Indigenous philosophy of life and a culture of greed that has eternal growth as its mantra. In my songs, I have shared stories about what it’s like to be a human being in the middle of this conflict. In my lyrics, I continue asking why, while I observe that my people lose trial after trial because, among other reasons, it is not possible to prove that we have been here for thousands of years because our culture and dwellings left few traces.
It is an irony of fate that the fact that our culture was sustainable creates problems for my people today. Some claim that in order to succeed in the modern world, we need to leave all the old ways behind. I belong to those who think we should take with us the best from our ancestral heritage, and dare to take it with us into the new world of technology and science. Therefore, my music has always consisted of old traditional elements and modern musical expressions.
All over the world, this is our ultimate challenge, to restore the ancient wisdom and survival strategies that were sacrificed in the name of progress. Is it possible that those most responsible for colonisation damage to listen to Indigenous knowledge, to take our advice? Is it naive to think that it is possible?
My dream is a future where the best of science can meet the best of Indigenous knowledge, with curiosity and with respect, and together we could build a more sustainable world. The UN climate report that came out a few months ago states that it’s extremely urgent to change course.
Around the world, many of us have started to remember and take back the wisdom and knowledge of our ancestors. Many of us are trying to communicate this wisdom and knowledge because we see that it is now urgent to save mother earth. Every day I look for small signs of hope, and I’m so happy every time I find such because they are there.
I am one who carries the old songs, the old wisdom, and one who carries the torch given by the ancestors with a flame that should never go out.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]