MY DRUM TAUGHT ME TO YOIK
You are Reading..
MY DRUM TAUGHT ME TO YOIK
Photo: Fredrik Prost and I back in 2011 with the drum I built.
I did not learn to joik in my childhood and I never thought that I would be joiking ever. I have always seen myself as a singer, and I never joiked much, for different reasons. One was that I thought joiking only was for the reindeerherding Samis. Because I never heard joiking in my house or any of my family or relatives joiking. Not until I was a grown up anyway…
But before the release of my third album “Eamiritni /Rimeborn” in 2015, I started thinking more and more about what singing actually is, what is music, why do I really want to sing and so on… I got very philosophical about things and life. And I wondered about joiking as well. What is joiking anyway, and why don´t I joik even if I am Sami?
Always when I travelled abroad people where intrested in hearing about it and hearing joiks. I started thinking that “I am sami singer, so I should joik as well!”
I had made a my own drum at a workshop with Fredrik Prost at the Sami Shaman Festival Isogaisa in 2011, and I sometimes took it out and had fun with it. Ever since the first time I started drumming it, it started to “talk” to me. If you have a drum you understand what I mean with “talking” to me. I listened to the sound of the drum carefully and it felt like the drum was making the sound of the earth. It´s hard to explain, but the sound made me feel the earth more, and it connected me to it. I enjoyed drumming – just making sound and I started humming to the sound of the drum as well… I sang different songs, and just played with it.
One day when I was trying to mimic the sound that the drum made I suddenly started making sounds similar to what Native Americans would make. Humming in a way, and at this point I felt myself opening up. I felt that this sound came through me – it was not something I created, like I do when I sing, but it was something that came to me from the earth so to speak.
I was so confused by this… I though “why am I making sounds like a Native American, I am not that, I am Sami…? This doesnt make sense.”
But I continued playing with the sound, mimicing the drum, and after a while I made sounds that where similar to sami joik.
That was the moment I realised that this is why we indigenous people have so much in common. Why we are like brothers and sisters all of us. Why we always stick together and support each other. It is of this reason: We all get our inspiration, wisdom and values from the same source – the earth. Mother earth. And this is where the sounds we make come from too. Joiking is the sound of the earth.