Advocate of Yoik

“Advocate of Yoik” is a film realized through the Diego Carpitella Award 2025. It follows the life journey of Ánde Somby—Sámi jurist and custodian of the yoik tradition. A biocultural heritage shared between the Sámi and their ancestral land, yoik represents a powerful expression of advocacy for multibeing justice. The film title refers not only to Somby’s professional background in law, but also to the Latin root “advocare”: to use one’s voice to carry aid on behalf of others. Yoik embodies this act of advocacy—a Sámi mode of voicing with and for beings whose claims, agency, and existence are unheard and increasingly threatened by settler colonial governance and extractive regimes. From this premise, the film raises a guiding question: Who will carry the voices of the Land into a court that rules them silent? At the core of the narrative are the voices of Wind and the Great River, currently disrupted on Sámi lands by grotesque forms of green colonialism. By listening to yoiks carried in their more-than-human voices and lifting them through his own, Somby enacts Sámi ancestral role of mediator across existential thresholds, carrying multibeing claims toward a society increasingly deaf to the Earth’s voices. Blending Indigenous storytelling and ecoacoustic practices, the filmmaking places environmental sounds at the center of ethnomusicological inquiry, treating them as protagonists rather than ambience or object of study. Challenging the canonical separation between natural and cultural heritage, the film engages Sámi acoustemologies where no boundary exists between the two: wind and rivers—as much as Sámi people—are performers and custodians of yoik heritage. Hence, the film fosters multibeing justice and epistemic self-determination, while portraying how settler-driven resource extraction and climate change threaten not only ecosystems and Indigenous livelihoods, but also yoik itself as a living, biocultural heritage rooted in a rapidly changing Arctic.