Polyphony in Sámi Narratives

Johan Turi was the first Sámi (Lapp) to publish a book in Sámi about his own people. But he was first of all a storyteller. Turi lived in a period of intense social change, which his narrative reflects. A study of his first published book, Muitalus Sámiid birra (1910), exposes his relation and attitude as storyteller to his context. Taking as a point of departure that storytelling is a way of establishing a position toward context, I show how Turi expresses sympathy, criticism, or doubts towards the different discourses of the time. Turi is a skillful narrator, who appears both as an indigenous writer and as a social agent, expressing in a subtle manner his relation to the collective storytelling tradition and his responsibility in narration.