From Being a Presence to Becoming the Future of a People
What did it mean to stand between the school, an institution representing majority culture as well as official minority policies, and families and local societies representing indigenous cultures—in some cases, different livelihoods and ways of life? Until recently, the knowledge communicated from above directly via the curriculum and indirectly in structures and routines most often produced the message that Sami language and culture were inferior and of little worth; Sami knowledge was invisible.
Even so, spaces existed where Sami culture and values remained. Family and local society were the important agents, transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next through participation and experience. In addition, there were transfers between the children who met at school but came from different local societies and between border-crossing Sami. The spaces for the transfer of Sami culture were biggest in societies dominated by the Sami, as these were Sami societies, while in other societies, language and culture increasingly became a matter for the family.The Sami typically did not see formal elementary education as incompatible with maintaining Sami culture and ways of life, even if such perspectives also existed. Many a child found neither knowledge nor the keys to a better life at school. Even so, access to higher education became an important issue for Sami activists in the interwar years, and it became a major issue in the 1950s and 1960s. Education held the same promise for a better life for Sami youth as it came to hold for fishermen, smallholders, and workers in the 1950s, with the added factor for many Sami individuals that schools had to recognise their presence, value, and knowledge. For others, schooling became a way out of Sami society, a means of escaping family ties and the local community.
There was a period of time when the transfer of Sami knowledge at the generational basis was threatened, namely in the 1950s and 1960s.
Social and economic changes and the long history of discrimination created a feeling that there was no room for the Sami in modern society. This was not a shared Sami feeling, however, and it did not dominate the public discourse. After this period, one saw essentialism and attempts at segregation, but in the early years of the 2000s, as in the early years of the 1900s, one is struck by the will to create a school system that transmits specific Sami knowledge as well common knowledge seen as vital for all citizens. What is new today, in addition to school taking more time than before, is that the Sami are much more influential when it comes to defining the school and that this is combined with demands of reciprocity; the school as such must take on the responsibility of teaching all children, not only the Sami, about Sami culture and history. The influence does not necessarily come from the local society or the children’s families; the Sami parliaments largely speak on behalf of the Sami people.Notes
1. Sami censuses have not been held for a long time, and there is no precise number for how many people define themselves as Sami. In the Nordic context, the given numbers generally hover around 50–80,000. The majority of the Sami lives in Norway, followed by Sweden, Finland, and Russia.
2. Sami parliaments were established in Finland in 1973, in Norway in 1989, and in Sweden in 1993.
3. Pelto (1962, 117) made a point of Kauriloff actually being named Gauriloff, but ‘he says he likes his spelling better and further, he believes very strongly in asserting his own individuality’.
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