‘When I was growing up, I couldn’t listen to any bands or artists in my language,” says Katarina Barruk. She is one of only a handful of remaining speakers – and the only one of whom is an internationally celebrated singer – of Ume Sámi, one of the nine living Sámi languages that today is on Unesco’s critically endangered list. It’s spoken by a handful of Sámi communities living across the part of Sápmi (the territory of the Sámi peoples across northern Scandinavia) that’s now in north-east Sweden. “We have been working so hard to get to the point where you can hear the language at the Royal Albert Hall,” says Barruk. “It’s amazing.”
And not only to hear the language, but experience it sung by Barruk in her own music, recomposed and remade with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. They’ll be led by the violinist and conductor Pekka Kuusisto, in a Prom that will take the audience on a journey “into my universe”, she says, “so that people can understand that this language is alive”. The Prom is a symbol of hope and defiance for Ume Sámi and its speakers, and for the Indigenous peoples of Sápmi as a whole, she tells me. “I want to give something hopeful to my own people.”
