It’s the 1940s, and according to the Swedish government, Rávdná and her Sámi sister and daughter have no right to build a house or receive a housing loan. Despite the recent destruction of their homes by the Company, the government insists it cannot allow them to build because their nomadic lifestyle and “racial characteristics” make them “unsuitable” for permanent residence. This is just one blow of many to come for the stubborn Rávdná, her daughter Iŋgá, and her sister Ánne in The Home of the Drowned by Elin Anna Labba, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel. Based on Labba’s own ancestral story, this poetic novel tells the heartbreaking story of the displacement and systematic erasure of the Sámi people and their culture.
The novel begins with the arrival of the family and their neighbors, who after spending the winter on the other side of the lake, have followed the reindeer herd home to their summer place—a village of goahti (an earth-covered home) that sits up against the lake. That is, it used to. In their absence, the Company has expanded the dam, raising its smooth concrete body taller, and the lake has flooded their village. Everything they left there has been lost, and this isn’t even the first time: years ago, when Iŋgá was just born, the dam was built and flooded the village where they’d lived for generations. Now Iŋgá is a young girl, facing this displacement and its grief for the first time, buried in her mourning for both their home and her late father. Ánne’s own deep-seated grief remains. But Rávdná refuses to accept the terms by which the government continues to destroy their hopes. She decides she will build her house, whether or not the government allows her to do so.
What follows is a rich and intricate story of the struggle to survive and endure. What Labba demonstrates best is that counter to the government’s seemingly malicious assumption, the Sámi people can not simply move to a new location. They do not simply live in tents, as the government implies in its letter rejecting the housing loan. They travel in tents, but their homes in the summer place were well-built, warm, and permanent; they returned to strengthen and live in them every year; now a summer that could have been full of fishing and industry is dominated by building new homes from scratch. Iŋgá and her people have little time to breathe, let alone to find good outlets for their grief.
But even without needing to build new homes, the damming has intrinsically damaged their culture and way of life. The drowned trees tangle their fishing nets and transform the water, all that plant material and then decomposing plant material changes the biology of the lake. The fish are gone, and will take years to return (if they ever truly do). The bigger lake is more ferocious in storms now, making it harder to maintain fishing boats, and the waves make the muddy slopes of peat near the lake dangerous. In the winter, the ice is less solid. The reindeer are confused by the covering of their old paths. New homes are built on hills up the slope, and the village is now spread out and separated, disrupting the easy community and neighborliness that used to prevail.
The steady growth of the dam, the condescension of the press, and the indifference of the public slowly work apart their way of life, and so what seems at first indifferent cruelty and later starkly cold bureaucracy becomes a brutal and unforgiving violence. No one even needs to visit their home to take it from them. Workers visit in the winter, while the women are gone, to take photos and make plans, or make them from helicopters high above. Contracts are written in ways that will dispossess and ultimately cost the government and Company nothing. Even if the Sámi had always lived above the floodlines, the changes to the chemistry and landscape of the lake made by the dam’s existence are devastating to the ecosystem, whose natural cycles Iŋgá and her family and their ancestors have always centered their lives around.
Labba herself is a Sámi journalist whose nonfiction on the forced displacement of her people won awards in Sweden, and her intimate knowledge of the subject, both deeply researched and personal, shows in every chapter of this story. Most of all, it reverberates in the many ways that the community deals with grief, and the ways it tries to maintain traditions and culture even as so much slips through its hands.
This is a work of historical fiction, rooted deeply in real events. What reparations can society possibly make to the Indigenous peoples whose cultures, languages, and homelands have been so brutally erased? In the 1940s, no one warns the villagers that their town will be flooded; in the 1980s, they walk them through the proposal to expand, offer them cash, present fake smiles and crocodile concern. But in neither case are the Sámi given any option. They are told that the march of progress is inevitable: they can move out of the way, or be crushed. Labba’s novel, rich and emotional, presents us with the question of whether such progress is worth its costs—and whether the destruction of such ecosystems is really progress at all.
FICTION
The Home of the Drowned
By Elin Anna Labba
Translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel
University of Minnesota Press
Published June 2, 2026
