Coping Strategies in Post-War Societies

After World War II, schooling took up much more time than before. In Finnmark after the war, it was common to spend six weeks at school, then six weeks at home, with eighteen weeks at school in total over the year.

For example, I was not allowed to share my grandfather’s insights about important things in life. He should have taught me how to catch grouse in a snare, and which tricks to use when fishing for salmon on the Tana River. He also had vast knowledge about reindeer herding. This knowledge, so important in Sami culture, I lost.

Johs Kalvemo, a pupil at the Grensen boarding school in the 1960s, feels that the entire culture at his place of birth, Valjok, was lost to him since he spent so much time at the boarding school. In Valjok lived old people who knew about nature and how the elements interacted. They were Kalvemo’s heroes when he was a little boy, but after having become part of the boarding school culture, the heroes at home turned into ‘freaks’ who read signs to predict the weather, interpreted dreams, and were deeply rooted in Laestadianism. Such things had no place at the boarding school (Tjelle 2000, 175–176).

These stories indicate that especially children attending boarding school who spent so much time away from home experienced a profound alienation from their families and local societies in the self-same period when official Sami policies were changing towards recognition and inclusion. However, it must also be taken into account that several of the residential schools were situated in Sami areas, thus the schools were surrounded by Sami language and culture.

Children of all ethnic groups tell heart-breaking stories about life at residential school (Tjelle 2000), but it is likely that many Sami children felt the school experience to be more alien than their peers did because it was foreign in both language and culture. The situation has been depicted in very harsh words by Nils Jernsletten (1969, 82), for example, who also held that the Sami pupils did not become ‘Norwegianised’ at all, as they did not learn anything at school. The claim is certainly too simple and should be problematised, but there is no reason to doubt that for many pupils, the language barrier was very real and challenging (Hoem 1969, 105). Nevertheless, it is also indicated that residential schools served to strengthen the idea of shared Sami culture by providing a common arena for children from different places (Hoem 1969, 66). Similar stories are told about indigenous schools in the USA and Canada (Marker 2015, 495). Former pupils also remember they used their own language in their spare time; at some of the residential schools, the children brought their family and local society to the school: their own food and their traditional clothing and footwear. Thus, while learning to become Norwegian, the children were a visible and audible Sami presence.

Niemi has argued that the assimilatory effect of the residential schools was weakest in areas with a Sami and Sami-speaking majority population and strongest in the coastal areas. Nonetheless, Niemi (1999, 21) also states that in these coastal areas:

[T]he [Sami] culture was too integrated and strong (…). At home and in local society, culture and language remained, if not as strong and dominant as before and perhaps not with the same manifestations as earlier generations had known.

He thus emphasises the strong influence of family and local culture upon the children, despite the school’s language policies, and he highlights, like historians writing on Native American history, that the history of residential schools is diverse in both experiences and results (Graham 2012).

In Finland, the period after 1945 saw the most effective assimilation in schools, precisely because of the residential school system. Nyyssonen (2007, 117, 2013b) argues that Sami children met with growing pressure assimilated ‘as they entered the new school system and a modern institutionalised childhood’. All Sami children attended school, and a patriotic ethos dominated among the teachers. Sami identity received little respect, and efforts at linguistic assimilation are documented. Like Sami children in Norway, many of them started school without mastering the majority language, and Nyyssonen claims Sami children, not least Skolt Sami children, were met with much hostility:

Consequently, many felt a sense of shame about their ethnic background, resulting in alienation from Sami culture: learning or switching to the Finnish language, or even changing one’s name, was a strategy for survival in the school environment.

(2007, 117)

Parents were not part of the school system and had little influence. According to Nyyssonen (2007, 53), they did not demand teaching in Sami mainly because they were few, there were several dialects, many had a good command of Finnish, and—perhaps most importantly—they wanted to increase their children’s ability to cope in Finnish society.

The anthropologist Pertti J. Pelto (1962, 5), who lived with the Skolt Sami for fifteen months in 1958 and 1959, wrote that ‘the Skolts appear to take pride in their linguistic abilities, and many of them speak more “bookish” Finnish than do the neighbouring Finns’. He did not testify to the children turning their backs to their own culture, though. Schooling took the Skolt boys away from ‘contacts with reindeer herding for most of the herding season, interrupting the steady development of identification with the dominant male role’. Nevertheless, Pelto (1962, 16) found a very strong identification with Skolt culture, in particular among the boys: ‘The woodsman-reindeer herding role of father is exciting, as evidenced in the writings of school boys, for example, and almost all Skolt schoolboys ‘emphatically vowed that they would become reindeer men’.

They did not need the school for a future as ‘reindeer men’ and did not necessarily enjoy schooling: ‘Skolt boys (and to a lesser extent girls) seem to dislike school intensely’. As Timo Kauriloff put it when remembering his first day at school: ‘It was like herding a bunch of sheep into a pen and keeping them there facing in one direction’ (Pelto 1962, 14).3

In Norway after World War II, the authorities eventually listened to advice from Sami activists, scientists, and educationalists and launched a plan for Sami schools in Sami areas. The reindeer owners were enthusiastic, as they had been earlier, and they wanted their children to learn good reindeer herding at school to improve their lot. Elsewhere in Sami areas, Sami representatives sitting on school boards stated that they did not want Sami schools and, furthermore, the children first needed to learn Norwegian. A meeting with Sami and Norwegian representatives in Karasjok in April 1960 passed a resolution stating that ‘further introduction of the Sami language in school would be an ill-fated step backward that would force development in the wrong direction and create huge difficulties for our youth in their future lives’ (Stortingsmelding nr. 21 1962–1963).

How can we understand this reaction against a Sami school? The welfare state and ideas about modernisation through industrialisation were well established; together with decades of teaching Sami inferiority and uselessness, the idea had evolved that the road to a better life for the Sami was to assimilate into majority culture (Jernsletten 1969). The paradox, of course, is that this happened at the same time as state authorities were both willing and able to change school policies and give more space for Sami language and culture.

There were, however, more than one Sami voice; some of them spoke very clearly. One was Odd Mathis H?tta (1961), who had attended teacher-training college. He pointed to the manner in which the school still produced images of inferiority:

It is fine to learn world history and Norwegian history.

We also find examples indicating that children themselves did not use the school to assimilate but to become ‘star pupils’. Randi Nymo (2005), who attended school in a Sami area in the county of Troms, has provided evidence that one strategy of Sami children was to work hard and distinguish themselves in class to prove that the Sami were at least as good as others. ‘It has been necessary for children in this society to attain knowledge and to become clever pupils. Through good marks, the children built capital to free themselves from the myth of the “useless” Sami who lived outside society’. Very interestingly, Nymo (2005) adds that ‘the school participated in strengthening Sami cultural heritage, not least a collective view of human life’. Thus, she emphasises that there were schools and teachers who cherished Sami values by making them visible—which only underpins the fact that Sami history is a very diverse history. In this school, the idea of education as a good thing was formed by pride in Sami culture and the idea that the Sami were equal to others.