Trickster Blurring Expectations and Values of Sámi Community: Author Jovnna-Ánde Vest reshaping Sámi muittašangirjjálašvuohta (reminiscence literature)

The protagonist of Jovnna-Ánde Vest’s novel, ‘Pikku-Vest,’ represents a non-normative case in the small Sámi community of Roavvesavu. This chapter presents the novel as the author’s interpretation of the rupture in the Sámi society from the 1950s to the 1970s through the prism of one family. In addition, the chapter considers the demarcation between muittašangirjjálašvuohta and fictional prose: how oral storytelling turns into reminiscence literature and/or fiction. Should Vest’s book be read as a ‘true story’ or fiction? Although Vest’s novel resembles muittašangirjjalašvuohta in many ways, the narration of the book approaches fiction. The narrator frames his father’s story inside his own story, bringing in the self-reflection typical of autobiography. The father is like a born fictional character, a Trickster, who, with his seemingly random choices and actions, sets off unexpected processes which reveal subsurface structures by shedding light on the contradiction between traditional life and the new era in a small Sámi community. The frame story of the narrator, the son, reflects the change as a more general phenomenon. He represents the generation which was caught between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ Sámi lives. Vest´s novel gives a detailed, everyday scale depiction of a painful key experience for the Sámi generations during the postwar decades.