Advocate of Yoik

Advocate of Yoik is a documentary film that follows the musical life of renowned Sámi jurist and yoik performer Ánde Somby. His life story leads the audience on a journey through Sápmi—the traditional and unceded lands of the Sámi in the European Arctic—and its past and present challenges.

Reflecting Sámi cosmology, Ánde describes yoik as a relational vocal practice through which humans can welcome other beings into their voices and communicate messages across distinct layers of existence. Along the same lines, the task of an advocate suggests—according to the Latin etymology of the word—the act of using one’s voice to offer aid and guidance on behalf of others.

In his dual role as jurist and yoik performer, Ánde Somby is presented as an “advocate of yoik”: on the one hand, he uses this sonic means of communication to advocate for the threatened voices of other-than-human beings; on the other, he addresses the very survival of yoik within both Sámi and settler society.

The unseen world of the ancestors reverberates loudly in the present, carrying messages and warnings about the crises of our time. Past, present and future become entangled in the performance, as a single melody and its echo condense thousands of years of deep time. Ánde yoiks with these echoes and is invited by the ancestors to hear what the wind, the river and the salmon are trying to say to an increasingly deaf society.

Through yoik, their voices are made intelligible to us humans, revealing the ecological and colonial pressures affecting both the land and Indigenous ways of life.

Yoik is a means of mediation. It is a language of care for the Earth. It is a practice of resistance in a society that often struggles to listen.

“Being human means that I am sort of bound to this corporeal form. So I joik the wind, or the salmon; and that is the closest I can get to perceive the world – or being perceived by the world – as the wind or a salmon” (Ánde Somby)