Gula Gula

Mari Boine grew up in Gámehisnjárga, a village on the Anarjohka river in Karasjok, in a Sámi family that lived from salmon fishing and farming. In the strict Laestadian Christian world around her, joik, the traditional Sámi way of singing, was considered the devil's work, and at school all teaching was in Norwegian. By her own account, the anger at being told that something was wrong with her language and culture built up until it erupted like a volcano, in a burst of songs that simply came to her. Those songs became Gula Gula, recorded in 1989 and commissioned for the Beaivváš Sámi National Theatre. Its title means listen, listen, and the full album title asks the listener to hear the voice of the foremothers. In the title song she reminds us that the earth is our mother, and Norway's FolkMusikk organisation has noted its plain feminist message. Boine sings in an adapted joik voice, surrounded by drums and instruments from indigenous traditions around the world. Elsewhere on the album, in a song sung pointedly in Norwegian, she lays out a bitter recipe for oppressing a minority. The album won a Spellemannprisen, and when Peter Gabriel reissued it on his Real World label in 1990 it made her internationally known. Jan Garbarek opened his 1990 album I Took Up the Runes with an instrumental version of the title song. Thirty years on, Songlines wrote that if you have heard of just one Sámi musician, it is probably her.