Sami Yoik

A yoik (luohti in North Sámi) is not a song about something but a song that is the thing. A yoik for a person, animal or landscape uses non-lexical syllables and free-rhythm melodic contours to evoke its subject rather than narrate it. Voices are unaccompanied in the older tradition; ornament is heavy and rhythm follows breath. There is no fixed beginning or end — the form is cyclical and addressed outward.

Yoik is among the oldest vocal traditions of Europe, practised by the Sámi peoples across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula. Christian missionaries from the seventeenth century onward treated yoik as pagan and worked to suppress it; the Norwegian state's twentieth-century Norwegianisation policy went further, banning yoik in some schools. The revival started in the 1970s, with Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, Mari Boine and Wimme Saari becoming international figures. Yoik now anchors Sámi cultural-political identity.

On Mari Boine's Gula Gula (1989), modern instruments back the yoik but the vocal contour remains its own — listen for how the ornament works as part of the meaning rather than decoration on top of a meaning. Wimme Saari's solo work strips it back further.

Mari Boine's Gula Gula is the most accessible album-length introduction. Wimme Saari's self-titled 1995 album goes closer to the unaccompanied tradition.

Mari Boine has become one of the public faces of indigenous-rights politics in Scandinavia. In 1994 she famously declined to perform at the Lillehammer Winter Olympics opening because of how the ceremonies framed Sámi culture.