När vi var samer (When we were Sami)

Jan, Rose, Ruth and I drove to Kramfors this afternoon. First we ate a delicious meal at the HC café, then we took our places in the theatre. 
The play covered several hundred years of Sami history, based on a book by local author Mats Jonsson, who discovered as an adult that his grandfather was a Sami, and therefore he was also a Sami. It's the usual tale of what happens to indigenous people whose land is taken over by the (in this case Swedish) state and given to others.
I've borrowed a quote from this Post-Colonial blog...
           " ”When we were Sami”, provides an illustrative description of the struggle between Sami history and identity and the Swedish colonial empire. Although it includes sad elements, it is not a sad book. The quest for the author’s identity, history, becomes a quest for Swedish history, the real, the whole history, including the dark sides of Sami exclusion and cultural extinction."
As the reviewer says the story (and the play) is not always dark. It has plenty of lighter moments too, which perhaps help the audience to listen and learn. 
Above the stage you see 4 words. The top two are in the Luleå Samisk language, the bottom two are Swedish. So when the characters spoke Samisk we saw a Swedish translation up there. There was an English translation also available via a phone app!
The five actors performed many parts, always using the same set and a few props, yet somehow they did it in a way that allowed us to keep up with who they were as they moved forward through six generations of the family, hopping into the present time now and again to recount a little of how Mats J found out all this history.
If you speak Swedish and get the chance to see this, please do so!!