Riddu Riđđu — the festival

Riddu Riđđu is held each July in Olmmáivággi (Manndalen) in the Kåfjord municipality of North Troms, about 150 km from Tromsø, and draws several thousand people to a small fjord village for a multi-day programme of concerts, seminars, stage art, film, workshops, a children's programme and a market. The festival was founded in the 1990s by young Coastal Sámi as an act of cultural reclamation: the Coastal Sámi of these fjords had been among the most heavily assimilated by Norwegian state policy, with the language suppressed and many families having concealed their Sámi identity for a generation or more. Riddu Riđđu set out to make that identity public and to renew it through art — and over time it widened to invite a different native people as its 'Northern People' guest each year, hosting Inuit, Sámi from across Sápmi, and people from as far as the Pacific and the Americas, so that it became a meeting place for Arctic and other native cultures and a stage for their music, politics and storytelling. It is now an established summer festival with ticketed entry and a camping field, open to all and welcoming to visitors; what it is not is a folkloric display. The serious cultural and ceremonial work — the language and the deeper community rites that happen in connection with the gathering — belongs to the Sámi, and a visitor comes to the festival's public programme rather than to anything held privately. The festival is the front door; it is not the whole house.