Freedom Park Fridays – Niillas’ Life Work

I’m not going to even ask you how your week was as I know its been rough, traumatic even. But here we are again, at its end and here again is your date with a time-machine to take you away from it all and back to Athens in September 2016 and the 34 Exercises of Freedom. Tonight, to put your woes in perspective, we celebrate Niillas Somby, a Sámi political-rights activist, journalist, video artist and photographer. Below you can learn more about him, from his own words, as well as his videos (on his YouTube account) and other articles about his work as an activist fighting for indigenous rights against the Norwegian state. You will learn how he was one of the seven hunger strikers during the so-called Alta controversy of 1982, how he lost an arm during a sabotage action, how he went on a quest to retrieve the heads of his ancestors Mons Somby and Aslak Hætta from the University of Oslo in Norway and how he has devoted his life to the ongoing fight for Sámi sovereignty. I am exhausted just listing all of his exploits and all you need to do is sit back and watch.