Ella Marie is leading a revolution in three-minute pop songs

Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen, the 28-year-old artist and activist, ponders this for a moment. “So that was, like, a crazy time in my life,” she adds.

Hætta Isaksen is a member of the Sámi community, the indigenous people of northern Norway and beyond. She performs her irresistible pop entirely in Northern Sámi, a language spoken by just 25,000 people, but the most common of the 11 endangered Sámi languages. The Fosen rebellion of 2023, in which she was a central figure, was the most high-profile Sámi uprising of her lifetime, but she has been fighting for those rights since she was a teenager. Music is her weapon of choice, though not her only one.

Last summer, she shared two memorable updates online. One was of her pogoing while belting out the song of the summer, the thumping dance track “Gii Gielista”, to crown an exhilarating set at Oslo’s Piknik i Parken festival replete with headbanging and high kicks. The other showed her being dragged away by police after chaining herself to the gates of a proposed mine that would desecrate a fjord on Sámi land. “Gii Gielista”, incidentally, is a diss track about the Norwegian energy minister.

Four months later, Hætta Isaksen made her debut appearance in the UK. The first thing she did upon arriving was stage a demonstration outside the London HQ of Hartree Partners, an investor in the mine. The corporation already knew her by reputation. “Security came out and asked for Ella,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me.’ ‘Yeah,’ they said, ‘you’re not allowed in this building.’”

She is telling this story sitting in the sun outside a bakery in Torshov, Oslo, her pink scarf knotted neatly against the chill breeze. Our interview is to mark her first decade in music. It’s 10 years since she won the Sámi Grand Prix, her community’s annual song contest. The prize was her own concert, but she didn’t yet have a band. So she created ISÁK, the cult electronic group whose name is still whispered with reverence by Scandi-music obsessives. After they bowed out in 2023, she turned solo, releasing her startling debut album, Varra, last Halloween.

Across that past decade, one thing has remained constant: the way she has used her art to promote the Sámi cause. “I want to show the beauty of my culture,” she says, “but at the same time demand that audiences – whilst enjoying that beauty – also take in the colonial backstory and the responsibilities that come with it. It’s a special time in the Sámi community, where our culture is having this peak in popularity worldwide, but at the same time our rights here on our own land are so threatened. I don’t want the applause if I don’t have my rights.”

This dichotomy was illustrated by her emotional performance at London’s Tate Modern in October. She was there to mark the launch of her community’s export office, NANU, but the centrepiece of her set had darker resonances. She held the room spellbound with a ‘joik’, written by Sara Marielle Gaup, about Repparfjord. That’s the fjord Hætta Isaksen was protecting when she was hauled off by police. “It’s the case I’ve been working the longest on, and was in many ways my political awakening,” she says. “I’ve demonstrated there throughout the last 12 years, and we’ve been able to stop the mining, but the threats keep coming. When you dedicate so much time to an area… it’s like that fjord has become a piece of me. So I always feel bad when I’m not by the fjord, when I’m not watching over it.” Hence the performance. “Joik can have this function where it’s a way for me to pray, and protect the fjord when I’m not there. And also, even though someone has never visited this place, I can help them mentally travel there and feel connected to it, through the melody.” She isn’t merely raising awareness, she explains, but making listeners feel an emotional bond with the land. “That is the magic, with music: you reach people in a whole different way than you would only speaking or writing or on social media. You’re able to move something within them.”

The art of joiking is central to that. It’s one of the oldest vocal traditions in Europe, a distinctive form of chanting – usually wordless, traditionally a capella – and perhaps the most arresting weapon in her arsenal. “It’s a language of its own,” she says. “To understand joik, you have to separate it from singing, because you sing about something, but you don’t joik about something, you joik something, in the same way that you paint something. The melody itself, and the tempo, and the tones – it will create this image.”

But while the joik has a deeply spiritual aspect, that isn’t the whole story. “What doesn’t come across for an international audience is how easygoing it can be. I can joik just because I see a bird and feel like joiking. Or to make fun of someone. It doesn’t have to be that deep.” Again, though, the backstory has a tragic dimension: the church and Nordic states once attempted to erase the joik, with considerable success. “The joik has been through a lot, and many families have stopped joiking, and it has been used to make fun of Sámi, so it’s a sensitive subject,” Hætta Isaksen explains. “But a lot of young Sámi people are taking back the tradition, and not only to bring it to the stage, because the stage is not really the natural habitat of the joik.”

While audiences can enjoy the joik, within her community it holds a different place. She gives an example, which has the ring of remembering. “Let’s say I was mad about something as a child, and embarrassed, and couldn’t get out of this mindset, and I’m hiding behind a corner. Then my aunt could joik me, to help me out of what I’m going through. It’s a way of saying, ‘I see you and I love you’, without putting words into it. It’s the greatest way to uplift someone. I think that’s why in the Northern Sámi language, there aren’t many adjectives: we don’t have ‘smart’ and ‘beautiful’, because we’ve had the joik.”

She has joiked her whole life, but it was the Fosen rebellion that inspired the momentous step of composing one herself. Not that she takes the credit. “We say in Sámi that all joiks already exist: the joikers just are able to bring them to our dimension, to catch them.” She wanted to thank activist Gina Gylver for her work in combating that wind farm on reindeer herders’ land. The result was “Gina”, a highlight of Varra. “I didn’t have an award to give her, but I had the joik. So I surprised her with that.” What was her reaction? “No, she cried,” laughs Hætta Isaksen. “She cried so much.”

Hætta Isaksen’s debut LP is a response to that tumultuous time. “The whole Varra album is me processing the Fosen demonstrations,” she says. Its title has a double meaning. ‘Varra’ means blood, and she wanted to “confront the people who have blood on their hands”, but also examine the internal battles of a group under pressure, critiquing those parts of her community competing over who has the most Sámi blood. “My message is to remember the enemy who got us here in the first place,” she says. In the title track, she sings, “Before you chase me over the cliff, take a look at whose blood is running and why.”

The reaction to the album from community elders has been silence. “I have to read that as a warning,” she says. “‘Be careful where you step and how you represent us.’ And I get that. We’re so few representatives of our culture, so everyone is vulnerable to being defined by one voice.”

It’s to her community that she is speaking in her favourite song on the album, the desperately moving “Mannat” (“To Leave”). “It’s maybe my favourite song I’ve ever written,” she says, before mentioning something Tamara Lindeman has also expressed: the idea of her subconsciousness putting into words something yet to enter her consciousness. “That, to me, is one of the most exhilarating moments: a way of talking to myself in the past and in the future,” Hætta Isaksen says. “It’s so meta.” “Mannat” did that for her. “I didn’t give that much thought to the lyrics, there was just an emotion that had to be captured. It’s a song where the ‘you’ character is the Sámi people, and I’m asking them, ‘Do you feel like I took a wrong turn here? Did I go too far? Does it look like I took the easy way out?’ It was written right after the Fosen demonstrations, when I was afraid I would be left behind by my own people.”

Some members of her community said the demonstrations shouldn’t have happened, or had been conducted wrong, or that she should have spoken differently. “I’m very proud talking about Fosen and everything we were able to achieve,” she says. “But it comes at a great cost. There’s so much hate online and in my life that I’ve had to deal with for many years, but it was at a high then because I was so visible.

“Over the years, I’ve created a good armour to protect myself, but I have not ever been able to build up a defence system against hate from my own people. Because they have always been at the centre of everything I do. It’s for them and for our future. And we’re a diverse people, where not everyone’s in agreement, so sometimes that critique will reach me and it will hurt me so bad.” She looks desolate. “I was so tired at that point that those things really affected me. And then the lyrics from the chorus came, that ‘I can tolerate all the hate in the world, but I cannot live with the hate that I get from you’.”

Her feelings were compounded by an earlier decision to move to Oslo. “A lot of this guilt is around me living here, far from the Sámi homelands. After the Fosen demonstrations, so many of my fellow activists went back home, and I stayed here. And it actually makes me so emotional still…” She seems close to tears. “Because that guilt was so…” She tails off. “I was like, ‘What am I doing? Why am I here? I need to go back home and protect our lands by being there. But I can’t… my career and my husband and my life is here.’ So that song has kept meaning more and more to me, because every time I sing it, I understand the new layers of the lyrics I wrote several years ago.”

She still struggles with those feelings, but the words of an earlier legend of Sámi music help. “Mari Boine, one of my mentors and good friends and my biggest navigating star, says, ‘We need you on the barricades’.” Hætta Isaksen laughs. “So I try to believe that.” That must be good to hear? “Yeah, she’s never been worried. And I have to accept that I can’t be all things. But ‘Mannat’ was really me wanting to be believed that the reason I do all the things I do is the love for the land.” It’s hard to believe anyone could doubt that sincerity.

Another Varra track, the dance anthem, “Gii Gielista” (“Who’s Lying?”), deals with Fosen directly. “It’s such a playful song, but still about a serious matter,” she says. She wrote the lyrics in court, watching the Norwegian energy minister, Terje Aasland, give evidence: “He made a fool of himself, because he couldn’t acknowledge that we had forced his hand,” she says. During a recess, she received a text from her aunt, who’d been watching the livestream. It said: “He keeps lying so much that the Devil starts dancing.” Hætta Isaksen grins. “And I was like, ‘Well, great, I have my hook.”

While the spirit of Fosen infuses the album, Varra has a wider theme of intersectional solidarity, intertwining songs about feminism, Gaza and LGBTQ+ rights. Early in her career, Hætta Isaksen was pressured to moderate her positions: “Industry people warned me that it wouldn’t look nice for a pop singer to be so outspoken. I’m really proud, looking back – because I was 18 when I started – that I was able to steer away from those people.”

Her breakthrough had come at 17, when she won the Sámi Grand Prix, “the biggest stepping-stone for Sámi artists out into the world.” She hadn’t even qualified for the final. “I was so mad,” she says. “I kept emailing them.” When a finalist was disqualified, she was first substitute. “And I won. The prize was my own concert the year after, at the Easter Festival in Guovdageaidnu. That was such a good thing, as it forced me to get going: ‘OK, I guess I have to find some music and a producer and a band’, and that’s how I made ISÁK.” And the heavens rejoiced.

After a few shows, the group began attracting attention. Then, in early 2018, they were contacted by the Spellemanprisen, Norway’s equivalent of the GRAMMYs. Mari Boine was receiving an honorary award, and the organisers wanted to stage something special: a secret ISÁK version of her song, ‘Elle’.

“I was like, ‘Yes, OK, just my biggest idol of all time, I’ve never met her, and I’m gonna surprise her with one of her songs, without checking in with her. Sure, like, that’s no problem at all!’ This was before I had turned 20. We stepped on that stage, and made this cover of ‘Elle’, and she had a lovely response, where she raised her solidarity fist in the air on live television.” The clip still sends shivers down the spine. It became a viral sensation. As Hætta Isaksen walked off stage, she got an email asking her to join Stjernekamp (Battle of the Stars), a successful TV singing show. She entered in October 2018. She won. The next year ISÁK played more than a hundred gigs.

Hætta Isaksen had a definite ambition in mind for the band. “I felt like Sámi music had never been accepted in the mainstream here. So my really specific goal was that Sámi music and joik should be listed on NRK P3, the biggest radio channel for youth. And I’m proud to look back at the choices I made, because it was expected of me to go into the world-music genre and keep exploring these sounds that Mari Boine had been really successful in, but I had to do something different, I had to add something else. I wanted Sámi children to grow up with a broader diversity of music in their own language. So, yeah: I made hyper-electronic pop music.” She certainly did. Nothing had ever sounded even remotely like ISÁK.

Incredibly, the joik “Máze” [pronounced ‘MAH-tseh’] made it onto NRK P3. “And the radio host kept going-” Hætta Isaksen adopts a nasal presenter voice, “-this is ‘Maze’, this is ‘Maze’… and now ‘Maze’ by ISÁK'. I was like, “That’s so funny, they don’t know what this story is, and they can’t even pronounce ‘Máze’,” but it was on there, and Sámi audiences who turned on the radio experienced that for the first time. We also had collaborations with DJs like Alan Walker that allowed me to introduce joik to millions of people around the world.”

Many ISÁK songs are still meaningful to her: she singles out ‘‘Mun Lean Dás” (“I Am Here”), written for her little sister, and the band’s final single, “Trespassing”. But her priorities were beginning to change, and, in 2023, ISÁK bid farewell with a show at Oslo’s Rockefeller.

There were many reasons. Partly the pandemic had stalled their momentum. “But a lot of it was just that I was supposed to make a different sound, and had new messages to convey that would make more sense under my own name.” It was sad, she says, “because I had imagined playing with those guys for the rest of my life”. Yet somehow she had stopped enjoying it, and something was telling her it was over. “If your body and soul and mind are not aligned and pushing in the same direction… it felt like that.” It was “a peaceful divorce”, though; the trio are still friends.

In ISÁK, she had sung in both Sámi and English. When she launched as a solo artist, the English was gone. “To me, singing in Sámi is so much more meaningful,” she says. “I’m better in my mother tongue and I don’t really give a shit that people don’t appreciate my lyrics.” I start laughing at the bluntness of this, and she does too. There’s more to it than that, though: for her, pop music is a vehicle to keep the Sámi language alive. “I find that so inspiring,” she says, her eyes glowing with intensity. “Every lyric I write is preserving language: every song, every word, every reference and every new metaphor I make. When I release this music, nobody can ever say that we weren’t here or that our language didn’t exist.”

Her highlight since going solo was playing Trondheim’s Nidarosdomen cathedral: performing Sámi music in a holy space that for so long had not accepted joik, while “coming that close to the lands of the Fosen Sámi and South Sami who I had fought side-by-side with in the Fosen case”.

To understand Hætta Isaksen’s special feeling for her people, it’s necessary to go back to the beginning. She grew up by the riverside in Tana, Finnmark. “I was a lot outside, salmon fishing and berry plucking,” she says. Her parents were police officers. “I find that really funny, because some of my fellow activists this summer, when we were demonstrating at Repparfjord, said, ‘You’re actually a nepo baby: you grew up in the hands of police.’” She had the rare privilege of attending Sámi kindergarten and elementary school, and describes her childhood as “a Sámi paradise”.

At 16, she was wrenched from it. “I look back on my childhood with huge melancholy but also love for that child who didn’t know about all the hate in the world. That naïveté was so beautiful: that my parents were able to create that kind of… I guess illusion, but at the same time, no, it was the truth for our local community at that time.” Aged six, she had read UNESCO’s list of threatened languages, which hinted at the plight of the Sámi, but it wasn’t until she attended school in Alta, a more Norwegianised area, that she first encountered racism. “I wanted to become an actress, and that was the only place with an acting high school.” She exhales. “That was rough, man. That was the worst time in my life. I fell into a deep depression at 16, which lasted until I moved here when I was 19. It had to do with my pride in being Sámi being attacked every day by fellow students, by teachers, by the whole society. It was so unspecific, but small things that let me know being Sámi was really negative: something that I should hide away, something that was annoying – so annoying – for people. I would be asked to step out of the room if I wanted to speak Sámi. There were so many stereotypes of, ‘Huh, are you Sami? But you speak such good Norwegian and you’re so tall and you look good’ – compliments marinated in racism. I had teachers telling me I was oversensitive, and, ‘It’s always about the Sámi’. It was so confusing for someone who had never even considered that that was something people thought about.”

Her unhappiness and uncertainty would transform into the desire to defend and promote a culture under siege. But not yet. “When you first get hit with these comments, you’re so unprepared, you’re not able to answer. A big part of my depression was me in my desperation lying awake at night, trying to come up with good things to answer with. A lot of my need to speak up today comes from that time of not being able to defend myself.” It was only in her early 20s, having started therapy, that she rebuilt the self-worth that had defined her childhood. “It was like this foundation under me had been shattered,” she says.

It was in this state that she became trapped in an abusive relationship. “It all went into this downward spiral,” she says. “There had been this shift in how the thing I was most proud of turned into this huge problem everywhere I went. If I hadn’t been so unsure in my identity, would I have stayed in that relationship for so long? Of course, I won’t blame anyone other than my abuser. But the second I started questioning this boundary that had always been so secure, then I started questioning everything else: ‘OK, maybe what my body and my feelings are telling me is just wrong...’ That was three years of my life.”

I’m so sorry, I say. “Yeah, it was… bad,” she says, then laughs. “Sorry for laughing,” she says, “but… it’s just crazy to look back. The thing I still mourn is that this 16, 17, 18, 19-year-old me really thought this was it: this was how I was gonna be feeling for the rest of my life. And it’s been, after that, such a joy realising that there’s so much more to life than to be so insecure and self-deprecating. There is life after self-hate.”

Hætta Isaksen has since found true love: she has been with her husband, Lars, for eight years; they married last May. And she has wholeheartedly embraced her indigenous identity. For young Sámi people experiencing racism today, does she think it helps to have her there in the public eye, for them to hear her music? “Ohhhh,” she says, happily. “I definitely hope so. As long as people aren’t lying… they do come up to me and say they’ve found their pride and their identity with the help of my music and the things I’ve done – which is healing for me as well.”

Whereas once her aim was to get a Sámi voice onto NRK P3, in time it has broadened. “My focus has shifted into documenting language and telling these stories.” She’s recording new music and says her latest sessions rival the Trondheim show as her best solo experience: “I’m finding new ways to the joik.”

Yet her artistic ambitions run even wider. In 2023, she starred in Let the River Flow, a film about the Alta protests of the 1970s that announced a growing militancy among the Sámi. Director Ole Giæve wrote the part after seeing her in Stjernekamp, before ever meeting her. Playing a young Sámi woman whose journey mirrors her own, she gives an astonishing performance. Would she like to act again? She grins. “To be completely honest, I do still have an actress dream inside me.”

She calls the Alta protestors “the biggest role models of my life”. Before those demonstrations, the Sámi’s image was an easier one for mainstream society to accept: of colourful clothes, beautiful sounds and reindeer. “When you regain your self-worth, you also get the strength to demand respect,” Hætta Isaksen says. “Some people say they want us to feel proud but then stop cheering when they realise what that means.” She has lost work because of her principles. “But I think I’ve gotten opportunities too: people recognise that we have the same mission, so I’ve been able to collaborate with other oppressed people and indigenous communities all over the world.”

In any case, she says, there was never really a choice: art and activism had to go hand in hand. “I don’t think I ever could have had this platform and not told the whole story. It would have felt like lying if I were to travel the world and perform my music and not be honest about what lies behind: why I often cry on stage or feel enraged, why this music is pouring out of me. My whole life has been so affected by this fear of losing my language and losing our lands, and for my children and their children not to be able to live in this culture that I love so much.”

She used to worry about the challenges of making music once she’d found romantic happiness. She doesn’t anymore. “The Sámi identity has always been my main viewpoint. More than ever, I see the value in that, and in the untold Sámi stories around me: the trauma in my family, but also the love and pride and the success. I have, like, six album concept ideas.”

She sounds confident about where she’s heading? “Yeah,” she says. “And I have never been, before. Now, marking 10 years, looking back at everything I’ve done, I’m for the first time feeling content. I was so afraid that might dim the light, dim this hunger of going forward. But now I’m just trying to see where the music takes me.”