From a detailed multi-perspectival drawing of reindeer to written accounts of belief systems and childbirth, Johan Turi’s work offers unparalleled insight into his life as a Sami person living in northern Sweden at the start of the 20th century.
In the face of racist discrimination, land disputes and the specter of encroaching industry, Turi wanted his 1910 book Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sami) to set the record straight about the lives of Europe’s only recognized Indigenous people.
Turi is widely regarded as the first Sami author to write about Sami life in his own language, but until now his pioneering works had not been on display for almost 100 years.
To mark the handover to the Swedish government this week — of a long-awaited report by the Truth Commission for the Sami People on abuses committed by the state against the Sami — his writings, drawings, paintings and Duodji (traditional Sami handicraft) now form the center of an exhibition at the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna, the area in which he used to live.
Pieski, who lives on the Finnish side of Sápmi, said that in many ways Turi’s work started the current process of truth and reconciliation by writing about life and Sami culture from his point of view.
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