Analysing Remembered Pasts
It was after World War II that the ideology and practical politics towards the Sami gradually started to change, recent enough for former experiences to hold a prominent place in the Sami historical narrative—not to say Sami identity.
This becomes particularly clear when we look at how Sami representatives today present their school history. For example, as the Swedish Sami Parliament states: ‘The school history of the Sami is a story about a foreign culture occupying thoughts and social and cultural values, and governing by introducing new norms’ (SSP). In a white paper by the Norwegian Sami Parliament on education, one finds a quote with a similar sentiment taken from the first of the altogether six volumes of Sami School History (Samisk skolehistorie 1):The school history of the Sami is the history of Sami children’s encounter with a school they did not understand, of their parent’s distress over having to send their children away to an unknown environment, and of teachers who did not have a language in common with their pupils.
Already in the early 1970s, individual Finnish Sami used the term ‘colonialism’ to describe the relationship between the Sami and the state, evoking images of a victimised and vulnerable people (Nyyssonen 2013a, 101–121). Their accounts are not about meetings and exchanges but about oppression and subordination. They indicate that a foreign majority culture forced itself upon the minority. In that respect, the accounts testify to the pain that is commonly inscribed in the history of the education of Sami children (Minde 2005; Blind 2005), as it is in the school history of indigenous peoples on a global scale (Elias et al. 2012; MacDonald 2007; Marker 2015).
Even so, in the period when Sami children’s culture and language were hardly recognised, Sami culture and language remained a presence. The previous quotation continues: ‘It is also the history about the fight by Sami teachers, parents, pupils, and politicians for a school based on the children’s language and culture’ (Samisk skolehistorie 1).
After World War II, Sami culture still remained distinct despite assimilation and language loss; over the last forty to fifty years, the position of Sami culture and language in society and within the school system have been strengthened in all three countries in question. It is reasonable to view the linguistic and cultural maintenance as a testimony to the strength of the family and local culture and consequently to ask what strategies were employed to cope with oppressive environments and circumstances. Did the parents oppose elementary school, or did they try to put their own stamp on it? Did the children try to use the loopholes that existed for their language and culture? What did they bring home from school, and what changed over the twentieth century in the relationship between the children, school, and family/local community?To address these questions, I will look at the children’s position as intermediaries, partly as ‘go-betweens’ between the state and the family and partly as the ‘means’ for official minority policies. However, I also want to consider them in their own right as children and young people trying to find a viable path to the future. Thus, I will not regard the history of indigenous schooling as a history of victimisation alone. Over the last couple of decades, the one-sided victimisation perspective has been less prominent than before in Sami history (for example Hansen and Olsen 2004), as well as in international indigenous research on schooling, demonstrated, for example, by Trafzer, Keller, and Sisquoc (2006) and Marker (2009). Particularly pertinent when discussing family values and indigenous schooling, and the ways in which families and children have used the school system, is Bauer’s (2010–2011) analysis of families at the Sherman Indian Institute. I have also tried to think with the concept of ‘survivance’, a term used, for example, by the Anishinaabe writer and cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor (2008) in the reading of Native American literature.
The concept is far from precise (cf. also Lockard 2008, 209–219); nevertheless, it has urged me to look not only for oppression and indigenous resistance but also for adaptions and manifestations of Sami culture among the pupils. With a classic methodological concept, we might have talked about Sami agency (Ryymin and Nyyssonen 2013), which is highly relevant, but it does not necessarily cover the more low-key actions of children practising their Sami-ness—their presence, so to say—and I will try to add to that aspect.In answering the aforementioned questions, Norway will serve as the main example, but the chapter also addresses commonalities and differences between the Nordic countries. I have utilised existing research on education and school history in the three countries, plus political texts and Sami voices as they have appeared in a number of publications about school experiences. The majority belongs to persons who experienced school after 1945, as there are few living ‘witnesses’ before this time. We must bear in mind that most of the voices belong to adults who have thoroughly processed what they experienced and perhaps adjusted their personal histories to the dominant story about how they ‘really’ should have experienced school according to the accepted collective memory (Tosh [1984] 2010, 303–309). Nevertheless, the way of remembering is not altogether uniform, and stories about school experiences are surprisingly varied.