Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North, 1900-1940 9780228006435

Citation preview

L an guag e , C it iz e n s h ip, a nd Sámi Educati on in   t h e N o r d ic N o rth, 1900–1940

31978_Kortegangas.indd 1

2020-12-11 10:23:27

McGill-Queen’s Indigenous and Northern Studies (In memory of Bruce G. Trigger) John Borrows, Sarah Carter, and Arthur J. Ray, Editors The McGill-Queen’s Indigenous and Northern Studies series publishes books about Indigenous peoples in all parts of the northern world. It includes original scholarship on their histories, archaeology, laws, cultures, governance, and traditions. Works in the series also explore the history and geography of the North, where travel, the natural environment, and the relationship to land continue to shape life in particular and important ways. Its mandate is to advance understanding of the political, legal, and social relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, of the contemporary issues that Indigenous peoples face as a result of environmental and economic change, and of social justice, including the work of reconciliation in Canada. To provide a global perspective, the series welcomes books on regions and communities from across the Arctic and Subarctic circumpolar zones.   1 When the Whalers Were Up North Inuit Memories from the Eastern Arctic Dorothy Harley Eber   2 The Challenge of Arctic Shipping Science, Environmental Assessment, and Human Values Edited by David L. VanderZwaag and Cynthia Lamson   3 Lost Harvests Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy Sarah Carter   4 Native Liberty, Crown Sovereignty The Existing Aboriginal Right of SelfGovernment in Canada Bruce Clark   5 Unravelling the Franklin Mystery Inuit Testimony David C. Woodman   6 Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785–1841 James R. Gibson   7 From Wooden Ploughs to Welfare The Story of the Western Reserves Helen Buckley   8 In Business for Ourselves Northern Entrepreneurs Wanda A. Wuttunee

31978_Kortegangas.indd 2

  9 For an Amerindian Autohistory An Essay on the Foundations of a Social Ethic Georges E. Sioui 10 Strangers Among Us David Woodman 11 When the North Was Red Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia Dennis A. Bartels and Alice L. Bartels 12 From Talking Chiefs to a Native Corporate Elite The Birth of Class and Nationalism among Canadian Inuit Marybelle Mitchell 13 Cold Comfort My Love Affair with the Arctic Graham W. Rowley 14 The True Spirit and Original Intent of Treaty 7 Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council with Walter Hildebrandt, Dorothy First Rider, and Sarah Carter 15 This Distant and Unsurveyed Country A Woman’s Winter at Baffin Island, 1857–1858 W. Gillies Ross 16 Images of Justice Dorothy Harley Eber

2020-12-11 10:23:27

17 Capturing Women The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West Sarah Carter 18 Social and Environmental Impacts of the James Bay Hydroelectric Project Edited by James F. Hornig 19 Saqiyuq Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women Nancy Wachowich in collaboration with Apphia Agalakti Awa, Rhoda Kaukjak Katsak, and Sandra Pikujak Katsak 20 Justice in Paradise Bruce Clark 21 Aboriginal Rights and Self-Government The Canadian and Mexican Experience in North American Perspective Edited by Curtis Cook and Juan D. Lindau 22 Harvest of Souls The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632–1650 Carole Blackburn 23 Bounty and Benevolence A History of Saskatchewan Treaties Arthur J. Ray, Jim Miller, and Frank Tough 24 The People of Denendeh Ethnohistory of the Indians of Canada’s Northwest Territories June Helm 25 The Marshall Decision and Native Rights Ken Coates 26 The Flying Tiger Women Shamans and Storytellers of the Amur Kira Van Deusen 27 Alone in Silence European Women in the Canadian North before 1940 Barbara E. Kelcey 28 The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher An Elizabethan Adventure Robert McGhee

31978_Kortegangas.indd 3

29 Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture Renée Hulan 30 The White Man’s Gonna Getcha The Colonial Challenge to the Crees in Quebec Toby Morantz 31 The Heavens Are Changing Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity Susan Neylan 32 Arctic Migrants/Arctic Villagers The Transformation of Inuit Settlement in the Central Arctic David Damas 33 Arctic Justice On Trial for Murder – Pond Inlet, 1923 Shelagh D. Grant 34 The American Empire and the Fourth World Anthony J. Hall 35 Eighteenth-Century Naturalists of Hudson Bay Stuart Houston, Tim Ball, and Mary Houston 36 Uqalurait An Oral History of Nunavut Compiled and edited by John Bennett and Susan Rowley 37 Living Rhythms Lessons in Aboriginal Economic Resilience and Vision Wanda Wuttunee 38 The Making of an Explorer George Hubert Wilkins and the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913– 1916 Stuart E. Jenness 39 Chee Chee A Study of Aboriginal Suicide Alvin Evans 40 Strange Things Done Murder in Yukon History Ken S. Coates and William R. Morrison

2020-12-11 10:23:27

41 Healing through Art Ritualized Space and Cree Identity Nadia Ferrara 42 Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing Coming Home to the Village Peter Cole 43 Something New in the Air The Story of First Peoples Television Broadcasting in Canada Lorna Roth 44 Listening to Old Woman Speak Natives and Alternatives in Canadian Literature Laura Smyth Groening 45 Robert and Francis Flaherty A Documentary Life, 1883–1922 Robert J. Christopher 46 Talking in Context Language and Identity in Kwakwaka’wakw Society Anne Marie Goodfellow 47 Tecumseh’s Bones Guy St-Denis

54 Kiviuq An Inuit Hero and His Siberian Cousins Kira Van Deusen 55 Native Peoples and Water Rights Irrigation, Dams, and the Law in Western Canada Kenichi Matsui 56 The Rediscovered Self Indigenous Identity and Cultural Justice Ronald Niezen 57 As affecting the fate of my absent ­husband Selected Letters of Lady Franklin Concerning the Search for the Lost Franklin Expedition, 1848–1860 Edited by Erika Behrisch Elce 58 The Language of the Inuit Syntax, Semantics, and Society in the Arctic Louis-Jacques Dorais

48 Constructing Colonial Discourse Captain Cook at Nootka Sound Noel Elizabeth Currie

59 Inuit Shamanism and Christianity Transitions and Transformations in the Twentieth Century Frédéric B. Laugrand and Jarich G. Oosten

49 The Hollow Tree Fighting Addiction with Traditional Healing Herb Nabigon

60 No Place for Fairness Indigenous Land Rights and Policy in the Bear Island Case and Beyond David T. McNab

50 The Return of Caribou to Ungava A.T. Bergerud, Stuart Luttich, and Lodewijk Camps

61 Aleut Identities Tradition and Modernity in an Indigenous Fishery Katherine L. Reedy-Maschner

51 Firekeepers of the Twenty-First Century First Nations Women Chiefs Cora J. Voyageur 52 Isuma Inuit Video Art Michael Robert Evans 53 Outside Looking In Viewing First Nations Peoples in Canadian Dramatic Television Series Mary Jane Miller

31978_Kortegangas.indd 4

62 Earth into Property Aboriginal History and the Making of Global Capitalism Anthony J. Hall 63 Collections and Objections Aboriginal Material Culture in Southern Ontario, 1791–1914 Michelle A. Hamilton 64 These Mysterious People Shaping History and Archaeology in a Northwest Coast Community, Second Edition Susan Roy

2020-12-11 10:23:27

65 Telling It to the Judge Taking Native History to Court Arthur J. Ray 66 Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada Echoes and Exchanges Edited by Anna Hoefnagels and Beverley Diamond 67 In Twilight and in Dawn A Biography of Diamond Jenness Barnett Richling 68 Women’s Work, Women’s Art Nineteenth-Century Northern Athapaskan Clothing Judy Thompson 69 Warriors of the Plains The Arts of Plains Indian Warfare Max Carocci 70 Reclaiming Indigenous Planning Edited by Ryan Walker, Ted Jojola, and David Natcher 71 Setting All the Captives Free Capture, Adjustment, and Recollection in Allegheny Country Ian K. Steele 72 Before Ontario The Archaeology of a Province Edited by Marit K. Munson and Susan M. Jamieson 73 Becoming Inummarik Men’s Lives in an Inuit Community Peter Collings 74 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America Nancy J. Turner 75 Our Ice Is Vanishing/Sikuvut Nunguliqtuq A History of Inuit, Newcomers, and Climate Change Shelley Wright 76 Maps and Memes Redrawing Culture, Place, and Identity in Indigenous Communities Gwilym Lucas Eades

31978_Kortegangas.indd 5

77 Encounters An Anthropological History of Southeastern Labrador John C. Kennedy 78 Keeping Promises The Royal Proclamation of 1763, Aboriginal Rights, and Treaties in Canada Edited by Terry Fenge and Jim Aldridge 79 Together We Survive Ethnographic Intuitions, Friendships, and Conversations Edited by John S. Long and Jennifer S.H. Brown 80 Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1, Origins to 1939 The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 1 81 Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 2, 1939 to 2000 The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 1 82 Canada’s Residential Schools: The Inuit and Northern Experience The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 2 83 Canada’s Residential Schools: The Métis Experience The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 3 84 Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 4 85 Canada’s Residential Schools: The Legacy The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 5

2020-12-11 10:23:27

86 Canada’s Residential Schools: Reconciliation The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 6 87 Aboriginal Rights Claims and the Making and Remaking of History Arthur J. Ray 88 Abenaki Daring The Life and Writings of Noel Annance, 1792–1869 Jean Barman 89 Trickster Chases the Tale of Education Sylvia Moore 90 Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws Yerí7 re Stsq’ey’s-kucw Marianne Ignace and Ronald E. Ignace 91 Travellers through Empire Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada Cecilia Morgan 92 Studying Arctic Fields Cultures, Practices, and Environmental Sciences Richard C. Powell 93 Iroquois in the West Jean Barman

95 Against the Current and Into the Light Performing History and Land in Coast Salish Territories and Vancouver’s Stanley Park Selena Couture 96 Plants, People, and Places The Roles of Ethnobotany and Ethnoecology in Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rights in Canada and Beyond Edited by Nancy J. Turner 97 Fighting for a Hand to Hold Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada Samir Shaheen-Hussain 98 Forty Narratives in the Wyandot Language John L. Steckley 99 Uumajursiutik unaatuinnamut/ Hunter with Harpoon/ Chasseur au harpon Markoosie Patsauq Edited and translated by Valerie Henitiuk and Marc-Antoine Mahieu 100 Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North, 1900–1940 Otso Kortekangas

94 Leading from Between Indigenous Participation and Leadership in the Public Service Catherine Althaus and Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh

31978_Kortegangas.indd 6

2020-12-11 10:23:28

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North, 1900–1940

O t s o K o rt e k a n g as

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

31978_Kortegangas.indd 7

2020-12-11 10:23:28

©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 isb n isb n isb n isb n

978-0-2280-0568-1 (cloth) 978-0-2280-0569-8 (paper) 978-0-2280-0643-5 (eP DF ) 978-0-2280-0644-2 (eP UB)

Legal deposit first quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Language, citizenship, and Sámi education in the Nordic North, 1900–1940 / Otso Kortekangas. Names: Kortekangas, Otso, 1987– author. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s Indigenous and northern studies; 100 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200351664 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200351710 | IS BN 9780228005681 (hardcover) | I SB N  9780228005698 (softcover) | IS BN 9780228006435 (P DF ) | ISB N  9780228006442 (eP U B ) Subjects: L CS H: Sami (European people)—Education—Scandinavia— History—20th century. | L CS H: Sami (European people)—Education— Government policy—Scandinavia—History—20th century. | L C SH : Sami language—Study and teaching—Scandinavia—History—20th century. | LC SH: Education and state—Scandinavia—History—20th century. | LC SH: Language and education—Scandinavia—History—20th century. | LC SH: Language and culture—Scandinavia—History—20th century. Classification: L CC L C3536.S 34 K67 2021 | D D C 371.829/9457048—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 8

2020-12-11 10:23:28

Contents

Table and Figures  xi Foreword by Marianne Stenbaek  xiii Acknowledgments xix Introduction: Sámi Language in Sámi Lands?  3 1  The Sámi: Historical Background  6 2 Sweden  20 3 Finland  49 4 Norway  79 5  Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North, 1900–1940  109 Notes 117 Bibliography 131 Index 143

31978_Kortegangas.indd 9

2020-12-11 10:23:28

31978_Kortegangas.indd 10

2020-12-11 10:23:28

Table and Figures

Table 2.1 Nomad school teachers and languages spoken, 1938–39  40

F ig u r es 0 .1 Map of Northern Scandinavia and Finland. Source: Panu Savolainen. xxi 2.1 Sámi theologian and activist Gustav Park. Copyright CC BY. Source: Stockholm City Archives S E / S S A/0820 Carl Lindhagen’s collection B6 volume 7, https://stockholmskallan. stockholm.se/post/32603. 33 2.2 Teacher Karin Stenberg with Carl Lindhagen, Swedish politician interested in Sámi issues, ca. 1919. Public domain. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karin_ Stenberg_och_Carl_Lindhagen.jpg. 34 3.1 Teacher Josef Guttorm. Credit: Väinö Auer, ca. 1918. Copyright: C C B Y 4.0. Source: Museovirasto Musketti, Suomalais-ugrilainen kuvakokoelma, S U K436:54, https:// finna.fi/Record/musketti.M012:SUK436:54?lng=en-gb. 55 3.2 Sámi poet and teacher Pedar Jalvi in 1905. Credit: Armas Launis. Copyright: C C B Y SA 4.0. Source: https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pedar_Jalvi_(1888-1916).jpg. 67 4.1 Isak Saba (first from the left), teacher and first Sámi member of Parliament, with his colleagues from the Norwegian Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet [A P ]), 1906. Copyright CC BY 3.0. Source: Norwegian Labour Movement Archives and Library

31978_Kortegangas.indd 11

2020-12-11 10:23:28

xii

Table and Figures

(Arbark), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Labour_ parliamentary_group_1906.jpg. 87 4.2 Jens Otterbech, Norwegian clergyman and proponent of Sámi rights, with family in Kistrand, ca. 1900. Public domain. Source: Norsk Folkemuseum, https://digitaltmuseum.org/ 011013426736/sogneprest-jens-otterbech-1868-1921-hannamarie-otterbech-helt-til-hoyre. 88

31978_Kortegangas.indd 12

2020-12-11 10:23:28

Foreword

This is the era of the Arctic. The Arctic and its peoples have increased extraordinarily in importance in the last forty years. There are many reasons for this. Climate change has made the Arctic much more accessible but also much more vulnerable; increased resource development, self-government movements among Arctic peoples, and their participation in many international fora such as the United Nations have brought global attention to these regions; and there are new movements in many places to pay attention to minorities and to safeguard their cultures and languages. The list could be much longer, for Arctic peoples have also gained important rights through legal avenues and governmental land-claim decisions. Some Arctic peoples, like the Greenlanders, the Inuit in Canada, and the Inuit in Alaska, are well known in the English-speaking world and have established themselves on the global stage. However, there is one group of Arctic peoples that have not been well known in North America but are now becoming more apparent: that is the Sámi, previously known as Lapps or Laplanders. Their homeland is known as Sápmi and consists mainly of the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and far northwestern Russia. Most still live in their ancestral lands, but many also reside in urban areas. The Sámi are an Arctic Indigenous people. They have steadily assumed greater political and cultural power in their home nation states of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. In those three countries, they number around 100,000. There are also a few thousand Sámi in Russia. Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North, 1900–1940 provides a very thorough and detailed introduction to the Sámi by examining the system of education and the use and

31978_Kortegangas.indd 13

2020-12-11 10:23:28

xiv Foreword

safeguarding of the Sámi language. Both the educational system and the language have contributed to an awakening nationalism and a movement for Sámi Indigenous rights that pose a strong rebuttal to the assimilation, which was attempted at various times. It is striking to see in this book how the experiences of the Sámi have been very similar in many regards to the experiences of Greenlanders and North American Inuit, about whom much has already been written. The book is a welcome addition; it not only offers insights into education and culture but also provides a foundation for understanding the contemporary Sámi. Many attempts were made to assimilate the Sámi, partly by trying to integrate them in southern-style schools that did not honour their language and culture. There were also many attempts to eliminate the Sámi language by insisting that in order to succeed in a modern world, the Sámi needed to be able to communicate in the dominant languages of the nation states and to be educated in the same way as other Swedes, Norwegians, or Finns – though sometimes with a lower standard. In the Nordic countries, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onward, a growing intellectual and religious awareness emphasized Nordic cultural values and mythologies, and this benefited the Sámi by protecting their language and culture. This book discusses some of the most influential teachers and pastors. The Lutheran Church had a tradition of training Indigenous catechists: local people who received some elementary education from ministers and who became teachers themselves. A very influential voice at this time was that of N.S.F. Grundtvig (1783–1872), a radical Lutheran bishop, writer, and activist in Denmark. He preached and wrote extensively about the heritage and importance of Nordic culture, the importance of education for everyone – not just the elites – and the correlation between language and national identity. Grundtvig was hugely influential in Norway and Sweden, and Finland was also influenced. Otso Kortekangas credits Grundtvig’s ideas with helping to save the culture and language of many Nordic peoples. Grundtvig’s work, as well as that of local educators and ministers, sustained the growing nationalism among the Sámi in all three countries. Though the Sámi had little official interaction with other Indigenous groups at that time, very similar movements developed in other countries aiming for the retention and expansion of Indigenous identity. In

31978_Kortegangas.indd 14

2020-12-11 10:23:28

Foreword xv

Alaska, for example, many Arctic peoples such as the Inupiaq and the Yup’ik, were taken from their homes and sent to schools run by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Here they were separated from their families and thus from their cultures and languages. Today in Alaska, language proficiency varies a great deal from village to village, though massive efforts are underway to reclaim the ancestral languages. Furthermore, a strong Indigenous identity has been maintained. In fact, it was the Alaskan Inupiaq who, with the inspiration of Mayor Eben Nanauq Hopson, invited Inuit from across the Arctic to come together in 1977 to the town then known as Barrow (now Utqiagvik), the most northernly town in the United States. Hopson was moved by the incursion of the oil companies as well as state and federal governments to unite the Inuit in order to present a united front against these outside and destructive forces. A few Sámi observers attended. This meeting turned out to be the beginning of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (now Council), or ICC, which since its official foundation in 1980 has become a prominent voice for Inuit and for all Arctic Indigenous peoples, including the Sámi. The Sámi have never formally joined the I C C , but they have attended most of its general assemblies and work closely with the organization. Though this book deals with the Sámi between 1900 and 1940, the advances they have made since then are relevant because those years laid the groundwork for later developments. Movements similar to the IC C , though on a smaller scale, took place in the Sámi areas, resulting in the increase of local authority and the eventual formation of Sámi parliaments in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. The Sámi’s exposure to the ICC also gave them a taste for international Indigenous co-operation. They have been very engaged in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues since its founding in 2000. They now play a significant role in this body and are members of the Arctic regional group at the UN. The Arctic peoples in Canada and Greenland, like those in Alaska, share similar stories with the Sámi. In Canada, the residential school system, which operated from the nineteenth century to as late as 1996, is a heinous element of the nation’s history. The schools were administered by the federal government in conjunction with religious groups, mainly Anglican, Methodist, and Roman Catholic. They impacted about 150,000 Indigenous children and left a legacy of sexual, psychological, and physical mistreatment, which resulted in many deaths and broken lives. Eventually, the Canadian government

31978_Kortegangas.indd 15

2020-12-11 10:23:28

xvi Foreword

established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or T R C , (2008– 15), which heard testimony from Indigenous peoples across the country. In June 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered an official apology in the Canadian parliament for the nation’s maltreatment of Indigenous peoples. The work of the TRC and its 94 Calls to Action have touched many Canadians and have led to some improvements in the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada. At the same time, there has been a resurgence among Inuit in wanting to learn and maintain their language and culture. The Inuit have achieved some form of self-government across the Canadian Arctic – in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the western Arctic, the new autonomous territory of Nunavut, the region of Nunavik in northern Quebec, and a measure of self-government in Labrador, known as Nunatsiavut. As an aside, the story of the Inuit in Nunatsiavut very closely parallels the story of some Sámi regions. Beginning in the 1750s, Moravian missionaries arrived there from Greenland and Germany. They established schools for the Inuit and, like some of the Lutheran ministers in the Sámi regions, they used the local language in instruction, thus helping to preserve the language. However, when Labrador became part of Canada in 1949 the Inuit were forced into English-speaking schools. Many lost their language as a result. Greenland saw many of the same movements, although they started earlier than in Alaska and most of the Canadian Arctic. The establishment of Atuagagdliutit in 1861 as a national newspaper in Kalaallisut, the Greenlandic Inuit language, sparked an interest in language and culture and gave rise to political debates about the future, just as some early Sámi newspapers did. Greenlanders have been adept at using the media with their state-owned radio and television, the Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation, newspapers, and books (again very much like the Sámi) and have been politically active. In 2008, they voted for self-government from Denmark. The Sámi and Greenlanders now co-operate on broadcasting and other media. Greenlanders have also played a significant role in international bodies such as the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the Arctic Council, where they work closely with the Sámi. Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North, 1900–1940 tells an exciting story of national, cultural, and linguistic awakening. The book focuses on culture and language, and only tangentially on the political developments that accompanied this

31978_Kortegangas.indd 16

2020-12-11 10:23:28

Foreword xvii

revival and made it possible. Though there are slight variations in the time frames, with some groups achieving autonomy earlier than others, the movements across Indigenous areas in the Arctic are remarkably similar. This book is a much-needed exploration of the background to the blooming of Sámi identity and the role the Sámi now occupy on national and international stages. Marianne Stenbaek McGill University July 2020

31978_Kortegangas.indd 17

2020-12-11 10:23:28

31978_Kortegangas.indd 18

2020-12-11 10:23:28

Acknowledgments

I finished this book while changing jobs from the Department of History at Stockholm University to the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at K T H Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. This transition offers me the opportunity to thank both of these places for the intellectual, social, and institutional support without which this work would not have been possible. I had the enormous privilege to study and complete my PhD dissertation at Stockholm University with a group of supervisors, colleagues, and friends with an exceptional level of wit, kindness, ambition, and international perspective. I am very grateful to all of you; this book would not exist without the culture of courage we created together. At the time of these acknowledgments, I have been working as a postdoctoral scholar at K T H for eight months. I already feel very much a part of the group, thanks to the positive and welcoming yet intellectually ambitious atmosphere at my new post. I want to thank the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien), the Royal Patriotic Society (Kungl. Patriotiska Sällskapet), and Gunvor och Josef Anérs stiftelse for their generous funding at different stages of producing this book. Mark Abley from McGill-Queen’s University Press has been an encouraging and professional support throughout the project. Apart from Mark, I also thank the two anonymous readers, appointed by the press, who provided valuable feedback and suggestions. I am grateful for the excellent copy-editing by Paula Sarson. Thank you, assistant professor and cousin Panu Savolainen, for the map. To Hanna, Liisa, and Maija, thanks for your patience with my irregular working hours. And most importantly, thanks for existing.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 19

2020-12-11 10:23:28

31978_Kortegangas.indd 20

2020-12-11 10:23:28

Map 1. Map of Northern Scandinavia and Finland (pre-Second World War borders)

Kistrand Kvalsund (Hammerfest) Talvik

Places mentioned in the book are marked on the map.

Finnmark county

Tromsø Lyngen

Lapp villages (lappbyar, since 1971 samebyar): originally geographical areas and organizations based on families, modified to correspond to the Swedish government’s definition of efficient reindeer herding in the late nineteenth century.

Troms county

Kautokeino

Riutula Paatsjoki Angeli Inari

Könkämä

Laimoluokta Kiruna

Sirkas (Sirges)

Suonikylä

Sompio

Jukkasjärvi

Sörkaitum (Unna Tjerusj)

SOVIET UNION

Vittangi Pajala

Gällivare

Tuorpon

FINLAND

Jokkmokk

Luokta-Mávas

Umby (Ubmeje tjeälddie)

Utsjoki Outakoski

Saarivuoma Karesuando

NORWAY

Gran Ran

Karasjok

Ledesby

SWEDEN

Arjeplog Sorsele

Arvidsjaur

Stensele

Luleå

Oulu

Östersund Mittådalen

Kuopio

Härnösand

Episcopal sees Parishes and population centres Oslo (Christiania)

Lapp villages (Sámi villages) (Sweden) Other villages/places

Helsinki

200 km Stockholm

0.1  Map of Northern Scandinavia and Finland

31978_Kortegangas.indd 21

2020-12-11 10:23:31

31978_Kortegangas.indd 22

2020-12-11 10:23:31

L an guag e , C it iz e n s h ip, a nd Sámi Educati on in   t h e N o r d ic N o rth, 1900–1940

31978_Kortegangas.indd 1

2020-12-11 10:23:31

31978_Kortegangas.indd 2

2020-12-11 10:23:31

In t ro du cti on

Sámi Language in Sámi Lands?

Josef Guttorm, a Sámi-speaking teacher working at the Outakoski elementary school in Utsjoki,1 northern Finland, commented in 1908 on an ongoing discussion about whether Sámi should be used as a language of instruction in elementary schools with Sámi pupils. Guttorm wondered why this question was “a topic of disagreement or a stumbling-block in Lapland.” To him, such a debate was saddening. According to Guttorm, “the Sámi people” were “nothing else than Lapps” as long as the status of Sámi language was questioned and debated. In this juxtaposition, Guttorm contrasted the autonym Sámi with the nowadays pejorative exonym Lapp to demonstrate a clash in perspectives. In Guttorm’s view, Sámi language had an important function as a conveyor of Sámi culture. For this reason, it needed to be used as a language of instruction in elementary schools. Without their own language, the Sámi were not a “real” people but were confined to being a population that outsiders viewed as “nothing else than Lapps.”2 Gustav Park, a student of theology with a Sámi background, held a speech at the first countrywide meeting of the Swedish Sámi in Östersund in central Sweden in 1918. Park criticized Sámi schooling from several angles. He regarded the educational authorities as incapable of viewing the situation of the Sámi from the inside. In contrast to Guttorm in Finland, Park considered it a healthy development that the majority language of the country, Swedish, was the language of instruction in elementary schools with Sámi pupils. The children already knew Sámi, announced Park in the meeting. They needed to learn Swedish in order to become full-scale citizens in the Swedish state. For Park, the function of Swedish as the language of instruction

31978_Kortegangas.indd 3

2020-12-11 10:23:31

4

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

was clear: paired with good-quality education, it was the way to equal citizenship with other Swedes.3 In northern Norway, Sámi teacher Anders Larsen criticized the rigid language assimilation taking place among many Sámi children in the schools of Finnmark County in northernmost Norway. In a book published in 1917 that criticized the language assimilation, Larsen wrote that the Sámi children both wanted to and needed to learn Norwegian. However, he continued, they should not gain this knowledge at the cost of the Sámi language. Norwegian was beneficial in many ways, as it enabled access to the economic and civic life of Norway. Sámi, on the other hand, was good for the inner development of the children. Like Park in Sweden, Larsen viewed the majority language of the country as the means to an equal standing with other inhabitants of the country. And just as Guttorm in Finland posited, he thought that only Sámi language could preserve and develop Sámi culture.4 Taken together, Guttorm’s, Park’s, and Larsen’s articulations indicate that the language of instruction in schools with Sámi pupils was a contested issue in the early twentieth-century Nordic countries in general, and also within the Sámi communities in each country. The action and reaction of Sámi teachers came in different forms, as this book lays bare. What mattered for these teachers was the function of the language of instruction rather than the language as such. Function, in this book, refers to the role and purpose that each language was to have in the context of education (e.g., as the most efficient and intelligible conveyor of teaching) but also in a wider societal context (e.g., as the language the pupils needed to learn to be able to participate in the activities of the majority societies in each country). Two groups are the focus of this book’s analysis. The first group includes the regional educational authorities that supervised and implemented as well as participated in the planning of educational reforms. The second group is Sámi teachers. The book focuses particularly on the ways these teachers acted against the backdrop of governmental educational policies. All of these actors – regional school inspectors (Finland), nomad school inspectors (Sweden), regional directors of schools (Norway), as well as teachers, bishops, and local clergymen who in different ways were connected to educational policies – worked for the governments of Norway, Finland, and Sweden. The focus of the analysis lands, then, on governmental officials on different levels.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 4

2020-12-11 10:23:31

Introduction 5

This book discusses Sámi history as an integrated part of the early twentieth-century context of elementary education in northern Europe. The activity of Sámi teachers is not treated as a “mere reaction” to governmental policies. Neither is it discussed as a process detached from the context of governmental elementary education policies. In many ways, the Sámi teachers in Norway, Finland, and Sweden found themselves positioned between the local Sámi communities and the governments that had educated them to become teachers. This position behoved them to formulate criticism and to suggest solutions to alter the elementary education policies experienced as discriminatory. As Torjer A. Olsen points out in his article on Indigenous research ethics, researchers should not treat individual voices as representative of a certain group. In other words, the Sámi individuals’ voices in this book should not be interpreted as the Sámi voice. I have done my utmost to respect the complexity of individuals, aiming not to allocate any a priori positions to them, while obviously keeping in mind their Sámi background.5 Sámi history is often written and narrated as minority history within Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia, narrowing down the Sámi context into nation-state-sized chunks. This book addresses the problem of methodological nationalism in framing Sámi education in a comparative and international setting. In studying processes of civic, social, and economic inclusions and exclusions, it serves as a relevant general example of educational history in a minority context. The topic is of great relevance for the increasingly multicultural societies of twenty-first-century Europe and North America.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 5

2020-12-11 10:23:31

1 The Sámi: Historical Background

Sámi, Sámi language, and Sámi people are umbrella terms for a number of populations with their own specific cultures, history, and language varieties pertaining to the Fenno-Ugric group of languages. In total, seven different Sámi language varieties exist within the borders of modern-day Norway, Finland, and Sweden.1 In Russia, which is not covered in this book, another two varieties exist. The largest Sámi language variety, North Sámi, is spoken today by around 20,000 individuals in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The old, nowadays pejorative term for the Sámi in Sweden and Finland, and sometimes even in Norway, was Lapp. Lapp language was the common term for the Sámi language varieties. Somewhat confusingly, the older Norwegian word for the Sámi was finner, whereas the Finnish speakers of Norway were and still are called Kvens (kvener). Historically, the Sámi led a life rather distinct from other Nordic populations. Both Lapp and Finne can linguistically be traced to this distinction: Lapp means someone who lives off the wilderness (hunting, fishing, etc.) rather than from agriculture; and Finne is thought to be derived from the Norse verb finnr, to find, forage. While small-scale agriculture was already a part of the livelihoods of many Sámi early on, the nomadic lifestyle in general, and reindeer herding in particular, have set them apart. Stereotypes relating to this difference in lifestyle still abound, even if only a minority of the Sámi own reindeer, while the majority typically work nine-to-five jobs. The largest Nordic Sámi settlements of today are Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki.2 The source material used for this book distinguishes in some instances the specific Sámi group or variety that is referred to in the source. In general, however, the majority of the sources simply refer

31978_Kortegangas.indd 6

2020-12-11 10:23:31



The Sámi: Historical Background 7

to Sámi or Lapps when talking about one or several of the Sámi groups, regardless of the cultural background of the source authors. In this regard, this book follows the logic of the sources. Where pertinent, the Sámi group or variety referred to in a source is explicated. In general, the term Sámi is used for the people and the language varieties alike. Apart from the Sámi, Finnish-speaking minorities also call the northern parts of Norway and Sweden home, and have done so for centuries. The historical and contemporary terms Kven/ Kven language are used for the Finnish speakers of northern Norway. The Finnish speakers in northern Sweden are simply referred to as Finnish speakers. Historically the Sámi, currently inhabiting mostly the northernmost parts of Scandinavia, Finland, and northwestern Russia, lived across large areas in the Nordic countries and Russia. Today they number around 100,000 individuals.3 The majority of Sámi live in Norway, with smaller populations in Sweden, Finland, and Russia. In the 1940s, the Swedish ethnographer Ernst Manker estimated the total number of Sámi to be around 32,600 individuals, with 20,000 Sámi in Norway, 8,500 in Sweden, 2,300 in Finland, and 1,800 in Russia. The population has always had frequent connections with other Nordic populations but were pushed northwards due to intensified state policies, mainly agricultural colonization, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Today, the group is labelled as Indigenous by the legislations of all countries where the Sámi live (Norway, Sweden, Russia, and Finland). This UN-backed label grants the minority certain rights. However, questions such as land use and cultural rights continue to be highly debated and politicized in the Nordic countries, and the numerically small population regularly attracts media coverage on a national level.4 Since the implementation of intensified taxation, mission, and ­education in the seventeenth century in both Sweden (including ­modern-day Finland) and Norway (a part of Denmark at the time), the governmental policies targeting the Sámi reached their peak in the early twentieth century, the period treated in this book. This period witnessed a strong thrust toward modernity, with the rather undeveloped Nordic countries leaping to industrialization and modernization of all regions, including, with certain delay, the northern areas inhabited by a majority of the Sámi. This leap toward modernity included elementary education as a crucial component. The period was marked not only by increased governmental pressure on the Sámi population,

31978_Kortegangas.indd 7

2020-12-11 10:23:31

8

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

but also the early twentieth century saw the rise of Sámi resistance and activism, in many cases motivated by the aspiring nationalism of the Nordic countries and by an experienced kinship with other minority groups. In the majority of cases, the most vocal Sámi activists were teachers, such as Isak Saba, the Sámi teacher from Finnmark in Norway, who authored the Sámi national anthem that is still sung and cited today. The teachers’ education provided them with the language and power to write and distribute the message of a Sámi cultural struggle. As teachers and former pupils, they were well acquainted with the school policies they regarded as discriminatory.

E xc l u s io n s a n d I nclusi ons in E l e m e n ta ry Educati on The early twentieth century witnessed the establishment of the ideological and societal structures of the Nordic welfare states. Systems of elementary education were an important component of this process of state building. The planners of Sámi education in early twentiethcentury Norway, Sweden, and Finland sought to integrate the children of the Indigenous Sámi into the economy and citizenship of the modern Nordic nation states. This inclusion came at a cost for many Sámi: it entailed an exclusion of a number of cultural attributes and most importantly, the Sámi language. In Sweden, Finland, and Norway, the elementary education of the Sámi was part of a general governmental investment in education systems, but it was also a case apart. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, governments in Europe, influenced by new pedagogical ideas developed to address societal challenges such as industrialization, urbanization, and proletarization, considered elementary education a tool by which to solve several types of social problems, including poverty. The education of the Sámi cannot be separated from this general pattern. Rather, this process needs to be studied as a part of the intensified focus and belief in education as a formative and controlling mechanism around the turn of the twentieth century.5 The Sámi origins of the pupils affected educational policies in the three countries in different ways. Norway had a specific assimilation policy targeting the Sámi, especially in the northernmost parts of the country. In Sweden, from 1913 onward, the specific Sámi educational policies took the form of segregation: the children of the nomadic reindeer-herding Sámi of the Swedish mountain regions attended

31978_Kortegangas.indd 8

2020-12-11 10:23:31



The Sámi: Historical Background 9

nomad schools (nomadskola), where the goal of education was an economically efficient livelihood of reindeer herding. In Finland, in the case of the standard governmental elementary school system, no special policy with regard to the Sámi existed, but de facto assimilation took place in many cases as Finnish language and culture dominated within the elementary school system, expanding to the Sámi areas. However, a significant part of northern Finland was outside of this elementary school system during the first half of the twentieth century. Itinerant catechist schools administered by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland had the responsibility for elementary education in the areas without governmental elementary schools. The administration and teachers (called catechists) of this parallel school system were much more positive toward the use of Sámi, and many catechists either learned one or several of the Sámi language varieties spoken in Finland, or were Sámi themselves.6 With regard to Norway, this book examines mainly Finnmark County, where a majority of the Sámi in Norway lived and where the educational policies targeting the Sámi were strongest and most clearly defined. The neighbouring county of Troms will be discussed to a lesser degree, whereas the areas south of Finnmark and Troms, which had considerably smaller Sámi populations and more laissez-faire language policies, are excluded from this study.7 As for Finland, the book covers both the standard elementary schools and the ecclesial itinerant catechist schools in Lapland, an area that in the early twentieth century corresponded to the northern part of the Province of Oulu.8 Lapland was the home region for almost all Sámi in early twentieth-century Finland. For the period 1920–40, the study also includes the Petsamo area that pertained to Finland between 1920 and 1947. For Sweden, the focus of the study in this book lands on the nomad schools. The nomad schools are an interesting case for a Nordic comparison due to their ideology of segregation rather than assimilation. For the general context of Sámi education in Sweden, it is paramount to remember that the children of the more or less sedentary Sámi attended standard elementary schools where de facto language assimilation was a common outcome of education. The Russian/Soviet elementary education of the Sámi is not treated in this book. The main argument for this exclusion is that the early twentieth-century political and geographical contexts of Russia were rather different from the Nordic countries. After the 1917 Russian

31978_Kortegangas.indd 9

2020-12-11 10:23:31

10

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

Revolution, the Soviet state implemented school policies that were positive toward the Sámi, including the publishing of teaching material in Sámi languages. In the 1930s, Stalinist terror radically replaced earlier policies with methods of “mass murder, deportations and removal to the reservation,” as Andrej Kotljarchuk has shown. While highly relevant and intriguing, the Russian part of Sámi educational history requires a contextualization and historical background that is outside the scope of the current study: in Russia and the Soviet Union, the Sámi were a small population among a myriad of minority peoples living in the vast country.9 Ultimately, the exclusions through inclusions in Sámi education were a part of the general educational initiatives aiming at civic and economic inclusion. At the same time, Sámi education included elements of special targeted education and certain kinds of exclusive forces. The planned and realized goals of education are, unquestionably, always both inclusive and exclusive. Nevertheless, the methodical character of some of the assimilative and segregating measures sets the Sámi case apart from the general educational initiatives in the early twentieth-century Nordic countries. The education of the Sámi was general and specific, excluding and including, at the same time.

O u t l in e o f t he Book The following pages introduce the general context of early twentiethcentury Sámi education, also serving as a short overview of earlier research for those interested in additional reading on Sámi history. The book then examines the early twentieth-century elementary education of the Sámi in (1) Sweden, (2) Finland, and (3) Norway. More important than treating the different countries, the chapters reflect different cases of educational policies. Chapter 2 presents the Swedish nomad school system: a modernist experiment of segregation based on national economic and culturally hierarchical ideas of reindeer herding as the true and productive Sámi way of life. Chapter 3 is a narrative of laissez-faire language policies in the elementary schools with Sámi pupils in Finland. Left alone, the governmental standard elementary school system disseminated Finnish language and cultural norms to the Sámi areas, with a number of Sámi teachers as notable exceptions to this rule. The church-run schools had an altogether different policy, and Sámi language was a natural part of these schools until the mid-twentieth century. Chapter 4 depicts both the systematically and

31978_Kortegangas.indd 10

2020-12-11 10:23:31



The Sámi: Historical Background 11

strictly regulated language assimilation of Sámi pupils in Norwegian elementary schools and also the clearly formulated Sámi opposition with nationalist undertones. Within all three chapters, the governmental (including ecclesiastical) policies serve as a backdrop for the agency and writings of Sámi teachers. The three chapters are followed by a general conclusion that frames the three cases in a wider international context of Indigenous and minority education in the early twentieth century.

K e y wo r d s o f S á m i Educati on in t h e E a r ly T w e nti eth Century The general context and historical background of the book are here presented in ten keywords:10 nationalism, economy, citizenship, border, livelihood, culture, race, religion, colonialism, and pedagogy. These terms all relate to the general theme of this book: elementary education. Nationalism As most frequently applied in the context of Sámi educational history, nationalism was the ideology behind the building of modern nation states. Defined in this sense, nationalism was a thrust toward modernity, an ideology seeking to transform the large and mainly agrarian Nordic countries into modern nation states with strong national economies, including industry and intensified agriculture. The nationalisms of Norway, Finland, and Sweden differed from each other in many ways. In the case of educational policies, all three countries were substantially influenced by both the ethnic and romanticist nationalism of German-speaking Europe and the civic society nationalism conventionally associated with the tradition of the French Revolution. This twofold nationalist influence implied that notions of nation and national languages were important in Nordic elementary education. At the same time, the education projects of the Nordic states aimed for a socio-economic and civic uplifting of the masses, even if more classicist approaches promoting advanced education only for the elites were also strong in all countries.11 Norway and Finland experienced a strong nationalist awakening in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they strived toward independence and aimed to develop a national culture in their new national languages, Finnish and New Norwegian (landsmål/nynorsk).

31978_Kortegangas.indd 11

2020-12-11 10:23:31

12

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

Finland, earlier a part of Sweden, was an autonomous grand duchy within the Russian Empire between 1809 and 1917. Norway, ceded by Denmark in 1814, was in a personal union with the Swedish crown until it gained full independence in 1905. Up until the nineteenth century, the language of culture and higher society in Norway had been Danish, and in Finland, Swedish. The liberal Norwegian intelligentsia started developing a new Norwegian language, the landsmål. Landsmål steered clear of the existing written language of Norway (riksmål), which was close to Danish. In Finland, Finnish was elevated to a national language, whereas Swedish maintained its strong position and was codified into a parallel national language together with Finnish. In both Norway and Finland, debates arose as to which languages should play a greater role in nation building. In this context, the numerically small Sámi population, inhabiting areas geographically distant from the capitals, had a difficult time advocating for their rights and role as a legitimate language community within the countries.12 Sweden was a country unified and independent centuries earlier than Norway and Finland, and the nation-building process never gained the same intensity around the turn of the twentieth century that it did in the two other countries. However, after the loss of Finland in 1809 and the loss of Norway in 1905, the Swedish intelligentsia had to relate to the new reality of the country in a smaller geographical form. A cultural standardization and homogenization followed. The northern areas gained more attention than before and entered the sphere of governmental educational policies.13 An important consideration for this book is the nationalist movement among a number of Sámi teachers in the early twentieth century. Nationalism, as an ideology, influenced not only the majority societies, but also the minority Sámi in the Nordic countries. The early twentieth century witnessed a certain national awakening among the Sámi in all three countries studied in this book. These movements, especially the one in Norway, succeeded in creating a Sámi public sphere in the early years of the twentieth century, with the publication of such periodicals as Sagai Muittalægje (the News Reporter) in Norway, and Lapparnes egen tidning/Samefolkets egen tidning (the Newspaper of the Sámi, the publication language was Swedish) in Sweden. In Finland, such a public sphere had to wait until the 1930s and the journal Sabmelaš (the Sámi), published by Lapin Sivistysseura (the Society for the Culture of the Lapps), a society established in 1932 by a number of Finnish intellectuals interested in Sámi culture. The early twentieth-century

31978_Kortegangas.indd 12

2020-12-11 10:23:31



The Sámi: Historical Background 13

Sámi public sphere and national movement was active only for a few years at a time and struggled to maintain consistency and continuity during the first half of the twentieth century.14 The national awakening among the Sámi had a strong connection to governmental education policies. Ideas of Sámi nationality flourished among teachers and their training courses. The curricula of the teachers’ training courses disseminated Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish nationalism. At the same time, these courses offered an opportunity for ambitious Sámi youngsters to come together to be inspired by the ideas of such Nordic nation-builders as N.F.S. Grundtvig15 about the intrinsic value in each nationality and its ­language. Many teachers, inspired by Nordic majority nationalisms, applied the same ideas in a Sámi context.16 Economy and Citizenship All three countries were still, in the early twentieth century, largely rural societies. In Finland, Sweden, and Norway, the general national economic ideal was farming, and the ideal citizen to be educated in elementary schools was the Finnish- or Norwegian-speaking peasant, respectively. In Sweden, however, the nomadic reindeer herders constituted an exception to this rule. The ideal citizen to graduate from the nomad school was the nomadic reindeer herder. In both cases, one of the goals of elementary education was to modernize and strengthen the livelihoods, whether in agriculture or reindeer herding.17 The educational authorities often viewed education from an instrumental governmental perspective, considering it a way of reaching economic goals. However, from the outset of the twentieth century, Norwegian educational authorities also aspired to educate Sámi pupils into an equal citizenship with the other inhabitants of Norway. According to the educational authorities, this project could only be carried out in Norwegian language. In Sweden, it was the Finnish speakers and the sedentary Sámi who were to be educated into becoming equals, whereas the nomadic Sámi were offered a different kind of citizenship through the nomad schools. This citizenship was based primarily on the livelihood of reindeer herding.18 In all three countries, the Sámi contested the kind of citizenship that educational authorities had designed for them. In Sweden, leading Sámi personalities, such as Gustav Park, criticized the strict connection between reindeer herding and elementary education as it led to

31978_Kortegangas.indd 13

2020-12-11 10:23:32

14

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

a kind of second-class citizenship. In Finland and Norway, the fact that the Finnish and Norwegian notions of citizenship tended to exclude Sámi language was the focus of Sámi criticism.19 Borders and Livelihoods The intensifying governmental control over territory led to increased attention toward the borders of the states. Especially in Norway, but also to a certain degree in Sweden and Finland, the governments regarded the language minorities living close to the border areas, such as the Sámi and the Finnish speakers in northern Norway and Sweden, as threats to national security. Control of the border between Norway and Finland was strengthened in 1852, and action at the border between Sweden and Finland followed suit in 1889. Movement of reindeer herds across the border between Sweden and Norway was regulated, although never prohibited, in 1883. These border regulations had important consequences for the livelihood of reindeer herding in the border areas. Prior to the regulations, reindeer herds had crossed national borders as the winter and summer grazing lands of the reindeer were in many cases situated in different countries. After the border regulations between Finland and its Scandinavian neighbours, the boundaries of the grazing lands had to respect the national borders. This led to increased pressure and overproduction of reindeer within the reindeer herding areas in Finland and Sweden.20 In Sweden, the government had initially sought to protect reindeer herding from the expanding small-scale agriculture. A boundary was drawn within Sweden, beyond which farmers were not allowed to acquire any farmland. The reindeer herding laws passed in 1886 and 1898 reserved that livelihood exclusively for the Sámi. These laws also established a regional authority (called Lappväsendet) to control and regulate reindeer herding and to mediate between farmers and reindeer herders, often to the advantage of the former group. At the same time, the Sámi who also had livelihoods other than large-scale reindeer herding were now de jure defined outside of Sáminess. In Sweden, Sámi came to be almost synonymous with reindeer herder. When the problems caused by the border closures and expanding agriculture continued, the Swedish government passed a law in 1925 that allowed authorities to command slaughtering of reindeer and relocation of a number of Sámi from the northern areas bordering Finland and Norway to more southern Sámi areas. The relocations

31978_Kortegangas.indd 14

2020-12-11 10:23:32



The Sámi: Historical Background 15

caused problems for reindeer herding and created skirmishes between the different Sámi groups.21 In Finland, following the problems that border regulations had created, the government implemented a new structure for reindeer herding based on the paliskunta system (a paliskunta is a co-operative of the reindeer herders in a certain area). One of the most important tasks of each paliskunta was to organize the payment of compensation to farmers for the damage done to agricultural land by reindeer herds. The government discussed whether a border should be set for agriculture, as had been done in Sweden, but the discussions had no practical consequences. The legislation on reindeer herding in Finland had set agriculture as the norm, whereas reindeer herding was considered a secondary livelihood. Reindeer herding was never exclusively reserved for the Sámi in Finland.22 In Norway, rather than protecting Sámi livelihoods, the government instead sought to expand agriculture even to the northernmost Sámi areas. In this regard, Norway and Finland were similar, whereas Sweden stood out with its protective politics on reindeer herding. However, also in Sweden the great number of Sámi that did not have reindeer herding as their main livelihood were engaged in or adapted to agriculture. In many cases, these individuals assimilated quickly to the surrounding Swedish society.23 Culture and Race The notion of different races emerged and coexisted with an earlier hierarchy based on cultural and religious differences between the Swedes and the Sámi around the turn of the twentieth century. The difference that set the Sámi apart from the Swedes was no longer only the condition of being regarded as an “inferior” culture or being pagan or recent converts to Christianity. Rather, it was something essentially biological, or racial, that made the Sámi suitable targets for different institutional projects of the Nordic governments rather than protagonists of their own fate. The fact that the Sámi groups living in Sweden were one of the groups studied by the State Institute for Racial Biology (Statens institut för rasbiologi) in early twentieth-century Sweden has translated into a substantial level of scholarly and media awareness around racial biology as the explanation for contemporaneous Swedish policies toward the Sámi.24 It is highly probable that race biology influenced the educational authorities and informed the policies.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 15

2020-12-11 10:23:32

16

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

However, direct links to such ideas are scarce in the reports of the educational authorities studied in this book.25 The turn-of-the-twentieth-century shift from a religiously or culturally legitimated hierarchy to a racially legitimated hierarchy in Sweden also applies to Norway and Finland. However, the strength, intensity, and timing of such a shift can be called into question in all countries. Racial arguments for the production of difference between population groups were often mixed with other, mainly social and cultural, arguments in the first half of the twentieth century. Regardless of what vocabulary was used, essentialization and categorization were key mechanisms in the production of difference in the early twentieth century, as they continue to be today.26 Religion Sámi schooling emerged essentially as a by-product of Lutheran mission. One of Martin Luther’s reformation principles specified that since the Bible alone formed the basis of the doctrine of all Christians (sola scriptura), all Christians should also be able to understand at least parts of the Bible themselves. To meet this goal, evangelization and preaching needed to be conducted in the mother tongue of each people. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, missionary initiatives in Sámi took place in the northern parts of the Nordic countries.27 The Lutheran missionaries’ attitude varied toward Sámi language, but the use of Sámi was often encouraged within the mission. In Sweden, a school for Sámi youngsters opened in Piteå in 1617. After its closure, a new school was opened in 1632 in the town of Lycksele (Skytteanska skolan)28 in today’s Västerbotten County. The school’s aim was to educate Sámi missionaries who could infuse Lutheran faith deeper into the Sámi culture. Besides the founding of the Skytteanska skolan, the Church of Sweden established new churches around the northern regions of Sweden. Lapp schools (Lappskolor) were built in connection with six of these churches in the eighteenth century. The aim of these schools was to educate Christian Sámi to disseminate the faith. Local clergymen educated the most talented Sámi pupils to become catechists. A number of Sámi pupils continued their studies to become clergymen, and religious literature was translated into Sámi in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.29 In the Norwegian Lutheran educational tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the minority languages Sámi and Kven were

31978_Kortegangas.indd 16

2020-12-11 10:23:32



The Sámi: Historical Background 17

often tolerated and their use was encouraged at times. In 1714, when Norway was still in union with Denmark, the state established two schools, the Seminarium Scolasticum for missionaries, and Seminarium Domesticum to educate Sámi teachers in Trondheim. These institutions closed in the late 1720s. Later, Seminarium Lapponicum (“The Lapp Seminar”) opened in Trondheim in 1752 to offer education in Sámi language. The leader of the Seminarium Lapponicum, Knud Leem, translated and published an alphabet book as well as Luther’s Small Catechism in North Sámi.30 In the establishment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century elementary school systems, the Lutheran churches in each of the three countries under discussion in this book ceded a certain degree of control over education to the governments. Nevertheless, the church continued to play a considerable role in the formation of educational policies. The standard elementary school systems implied a certain secularization of the educational systems, but Christianity continued to be one of the main subjects in elementary schools.31 Lutheranism played a substantial role in the arguments for a softer language assimilation and more use of Sámi in instruction among the leading church authorities of the northernmost Nordic region. Historian Lars Elenius has concluded that during the early twentieth century, two perspectives coexisted and competed in the articulations of the bishops of northernmost Sweden: an ecclesial discourse that was positive toward the use of Sámi and a monocultural school discourse that viewed the use of Sámi in a more negative light. In Finland, Lutheran principles contributed to the fact that Sámi was used as a language of instruction in many of the catechist schools in early twentieth-century northern Finland. The church and the school were also closely connected in Norway. Ecclesial and educational policies were administered under the same state department, and Bishop Eivind Berggrav, for instance, was deeply engaged in the discussions involving school policies among the Sámi in northern Norway.32 Colonialism The question of whether the history of Sámi schools is a part of Nordic colonial or imperialist history has been examined in previous research on Sámi education. Scholars of Sámi history generally share a definition of colonialism as a hierarchical and unbalanced power relation where the Nordic states, in expanding to the Sámi regions, set up a

31978_Kortegangas.indd 17

2020-12-11 10:23:32

18

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

system of non-reciprocal power relations that benefit the states but not the Sámi inhabitants. Whether or not the education of Sámi children in the past is called colonial, there were a number of structural and ideological similarities between the expansion of the school systems to the Sámi areas and the implementation of educational systems in Europe’s overseas colonies.33 Pedagogy In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Nordic national elementary school systems were influenced in their early phase by Herbartian ideas (named after the German philosopher Johann F. Herbart) of the encyclopedic school, with a broad and universal knowledge base that the teacher was to convey to the children. Critique toward this pedagogy came under many names during the early twentieth century. In recent pedagogical research, the concepts reform pedagogy and progressive education are used rather interchangeably as umbrella terms for the new pedagogical ideas. The pedagogy situates the child, instead of the teacher, in the centre. According to this tradition, children are like small explorers, and the task of the teacher is to help them discover and learn. Different traditions (classicist, liberal, reformist) persisted side by side in the Nordic debates on education during the twentieth century.34 Reform pedagogy had a direct bearing on language of instruction and Sámi pupils. The need to use Sámi in the Tromsø teachers’ training course vanished with the advent of the new pedagogical tools of reform pedagogy emphasizing experiential learning. As the immediate environment could be shown to the children through excursions and different kinds of visual aids, even a Norwegian-speaking teacher was suitable for teaching Sámi-speaking pupils. What needed to be explained in Sámi before, could now been shown to the pupils with progressive teaching materials.35 The creation of the nomad school system, while a special case, was also a part of general pedagogical ambitions from the Swedish government. Reform pedagogical ideas, adapting education to the culture and natural surroundings of the children, were present in the articulations of leading school authorities. The reindeer-herding Sámi became subject to a differentiating pedagogy aimed at preserving their culture and livelihood, although not necessarily their language. The aim of Sámi education was to teach the Sámi to know their surroundings.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 18

2020-12-11 10:23:32



The Sámi: Historical Background 19

However, the pupils were not to learn to view their surroundings from the outside: according to the educational authorities, the children ran the risk of being tempted to abandon traditional Sámi livelihoods when finishing school.36 The training for the teachers at the schools Sámi children attended differed partly from the general line of teacher education in all three countries. In Finland, the fact that a great number of Sámi children attended the itinerant church schools meant that the quality and quantity of education their teachers had profited from was low compared to the elementary school teachers’ training courses. In some cases, the catechists had undergone a one-year training course. In other cases, they had some degree of unofficial education from the local parish authorities, or no teacher education at all. The teachers in the standard elementary school in Finnish Lapland had undergone the standard elementary school teachers’ training course.37 In Sweden, the requirements for teaching in the nomad schools were lower than the requirements for teachers in “regular” elementary schools. The lower elementary school teachers’ competence (and at times even a lesser competence) was considered sufficient for the nomad school teachers. The contents of and time spent at the nomad teachers’ training course were adjusted over time not only according to the changes in regulations regarding the nomad school but also partly based on critique presented by Sámi individuals, and in Sámi meetings organized in 1918 and 1937 respectively.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 19

2020-12-11 10:23:32

2 Sweden

Sámi schoolteacher Sara Nutti from northernmost Sweden described her workplace, the nomad school, in a November 1935 newspaper article. Published in the Swedish Liberal daily Stockholms-Tidningen, the article was titled “The Sámi Are Happy with the Nomad Schools” (“Lapparna glada åt nomadskolan”). Contrary to many of her colleagues in the more southern Sámi areas in Sweden, Nutti painted a generally positive image of the nomad school. She was particularly content with the parts of the curriculum that reflected the Sámi culture and livelihoods. However, one major piece was missing, according to Nutti, namely Sámi language as a language of instruction. The question of whether and to what extent Sámi was to be used in the nomad schools was discussed regularly from the establishment of the system in 1913 until the beginning of its gradual dismantling in the early 1940s. It is this period, and the debates on the use of Sámi language in schools, that this chapter discusses in detail.1 Up to the turn of the twentieth century, the Church of Sweden, Sweden’s Lutheran state church, was responsible for the elementary education of the Sámi. The church administered this responsibility through a number of different school forms: (1) standard Swedish elementary schools, (2) Lapp elementary schools (lappfolkskolor) that evolved from earlier mission schools, (3) itinerant catechist schools, and finally (4) mission schools. The latter was mostly run by Svenska missionssällskapet (Swedish mission society), a missionary society affiliated with the Church of Sweden. To simplify, the church administered its educational responsibility through two channels: stationary schools that gathered Sámi children from a certain area, and itinerant schools with teachers called catechists

31978_Kortegangas.indd 20

2020-12-11 10:23:32

Sweden 21

that followed the Sámi families who, in turn, followed their half-­ domesticated reindeer herds to the pastures.2 Since regulations in 1877 and 1896, the main language of tuition in all schools was Swedish. These regulations left certain leeway for Sámi as a language of instruction: the formulation of 1896 stated that Swedish was the language of tuition “whenever possible,” that is, whenever the Sámi pupils understood that language.3 In 1904, Olof Bergqvist (in office 1904–37) succeeded Lars Landgren as the bishop of northernmost Sweden. Bishop Bergqvist, with a long tenure as the head of the Diocese of Luleå, attained a strong influence within the policies on Sámi elementary education. His ideals regarding the elementary education of the Sámi had far-reaching consequences. Bishop Landgren had promoted a full assimilation of the Sámi and a transformation of the ecclesial schools with Sámi pupils into standard elementary schools with a Swedish curriculum. Olof Bergqvist held a different opinion, and he became the main architect of the nomad school system.4 In 1909, Bergqvist wrote a proposition that eventually led to the establishment in 1913 of the school system targeting the children of the nomadic reindeer-herding Sámi of Sweden’s mountain areas. Elementary school inspector Karl Lorenz Österberg, and the future first nomad school inspector, Vicar Vitalis Karnell, assisted Bishop Bergqvist in writing the document. Laws regulating reindeer herding in Sweden had, since the late nineteenth century, excluded from legal status as Sámi those Sámi with mixed livelihoods, such as agriculture, hunting, and small-scale reindeer herding, as opposed to solely largescale reindeer herding. The 1909 proposition followed this legal categorization of Sámi as synonymous with nomadic reindeer herder. Only the children of the nomadic large-scale reindeer herders were to attend the nomad schools, whereas the proposition aimed to send the children of other Sámi to standard Swedish elementary schools. The nomad school was divided into two phases. The non-stationary lower nomad schools (grades 1–3) followed the Sámi to the grazing lands of the reindeer. The stationary upper nomad schools (grades 4–6) were active in central villages. During their yearly cycle of following reindeer herds from open mountain areas in the summer to forest lands in the winter, the Sámi traditionally gathered in villages to spend the winter. This dual system reflected earlier educational policies: the winter villages where the upper nomad schools were placed were also the sites of the first Lutheran missionaries’ camps to Christianize the

31978_Kortegangas.indd 21

2020-12-11 10:23:32

22

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

Sámi in the seventeenth century. The lower nomad schools were called kateketskolor (catechist schools) in the early years of the nomad school system, as the itinerant schools administered by the Church of Sweden had been called since the eighteenth century.5 The 1909 proposition suggested that Sámi could continue to be used in the regions where it was already used as a language of instruction. The proposition left it up to the chapters of the Dioceses of Luleå and Härnösand together with local Sámi parents and the local boards of the nomad schools to make decisions about the use of Sámi as a language of instruction. The proposition of 1909 had a twofold perspective on the use of minority languages in the north of Sweden. It expressed positive views about the use of Sámi in the nomad schools while it held a negative view on the use of Finnish in the same schools. For a long time, Finnish was used in the Church of Sweden to convey the Gospel in the Finnishspeaking parts of Sweden, before a major part of the Finnish-speaking regions were ceded to Russia in 1809. The Sámi inhabiting the northernmost, traditionally Finnish-speaking regions of early twentiethcentury Sweden were more used to hearing and using Finnish than Swedish. In addition, for the majority of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Sámi language used by church authorities was based on the southern Sámi varieties. This written Sámi was not easily intelligible for the Sámi in the north. Using Finnish was a pragmatic solution for both the church and the Sámi.6 In addition, the Laestadian movement, a lay (but intra-church) religious revival movement that attained influence in northern Fennoscandia in the nineteenth century, spread its mission in Finnish. The Laestadian revival gained a strong position in many Sámi communities and fortified the position of Finnish as the religious language in northern Sweden. Hence, in the northern parts of post-1809 Sweden, the Sámi populations spoke North Sámi as their first language, and ­Finnish, rather than Swedish, as their second language. North ­Sámi-Finnish-Swedish trilingualism was also common in the northern areas, as the later nomad school inspector Axel Calleberg noted.7 Many of the leaders of the Church of Sweden frowned upon the lay Laestadian religious revival. Bishop Olof Bergqvist expressed in his memoirs considerable suspicion toward Laestadianism, calling its religious rhetoric something only suitable for a “people of nature” such as the Sámi. Leading church authorities had two reasons to harbour skepticism of the Finnish language: it was a national security

31978_Kortegangas.indd 22

2020-12-11 10:23:32

Sweden 23

threat for the proximity of the border with Finland, and it posed a challenge to the ecclesial order (the lay Laestadian movement undermined the traditional authority of the church).8 The 1909 proposition regarded tuition in Sámi as “one of the most effective ways to preserve the Lapp tribe from being absorbed by other population elements.” The proposition’s authors believed it was therefore unwise to discontinue instruction in Sámi in the regions where parents wished that such instruction would be provided. However, in the regions where Swedish was already the sole language of tuition, Sámi could be left out of the instruction.9 The authors of the 1909 proposition thought that the Sámi were at risk of being “absorbed” by the surrounding population. This aligned with the principal view of the educational authorities on the purpose of the nomad school system: to educate a nomadic Sámi population that was able to resist assimilation.10 The early preparation for and actual legislation of the nomad school was neutral or even cautiously positive toward the use of Sámi in instruction. In the most important document regarding the establishment of the nomad school system – the 1909 proposition – Sámi language was portrayed as a tool for preventing the Sámi population from dying out. This view would change with the first inspector of the nomad schools, Vitalis Karnell, who was a zealous propagator of the nomad school system and, as such, the object of criticism from Sámi individuals.

S á m i T e ac h e rs O p p o s e Vi tali s Karnell Although the 1909 proposition did not consult local Sámi on questions related to education, the Sámi were not passive bystanders toward the reforms. Already in 1905, almost a decade before the establishment of the nomad schools, a Sámi organization had been founded in Sweden. One of the powerhouses of the early Sámi movement was Elsa Laula, a Sámi midwife. Among her points of critique, Laula castigated Sweden for not providing the Sámi with elementary education that was as qualitative as the standard elementary education provided in Swedish elementary schools. This critique was replicated and reinforced by two Sámi teachers, Karin Stenberg and Gustav Park, also a theologian. Some information about the first nomad school inspector, Vitalis Karnell, will help contextualize the critique of these Sámi teachers.11

31978_Kortegangas.indd 23

2020-12-11 10:23:32

24

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

The establishment of the nomad school inspector’s position marked a forceful centralization of authority, and an even clearer segregation between the standard elementary schools for sedentary Sámi children and the nomad schools for nomadic Sámi children. A research committee appointed in 1915, consisting of Bishop Bergqvist, among others, criticized the school boards (skolråd) for being inconsequential and inefficient in dividing and categorizing Sámi children as nomadic or sedentary. The school boards held divided opinions about the need of a school reform, which delayed the implementation of the nomad school system. To advance the reform and to achieve a more systematic segregation between the nomadic and the sedentary Sámi, the report suggested the establishment of a special inspector post. The nomad school inspector took over the authority of the school boards that had been chaired by the local clergymen in 1916. Vitalis Karnell was well acquainted with the conditions of northern Sweden and the life of the Sámi. After growing up on the island of Öland in southeastern Sweden, Karnell moved to the ­university town of Uppsala, where he studied theology at Uppsala University. Apart from studies leading to an exam in theology, he also studied FennoUgric languages with K.B. Wiklund, the future author of the textbook for the nomad schools (Nomadskolans läsebok). After Karnell’s studies, he moved to Norrbotten in northern Sweden to work as a clergyman and elementary school teacher. From the early twentieth century onward, he worked as the elementary school inspector of the Eastern Norrbotten district in the northernmost Swedish areas. In that role, he was in contact with both the Finnish-speaking and the Sámi cultures of northern Sweden. Karnell was a member of an expert committee on reindeer herding appointed in 1904, and of the 1909 committee on Sámi education headed by Bishop Bergqvist, which led to the 1909 proposition and ultimately the implementation of the nomad school system in 1913. In 1917, Karnell was appointed as the first nomad school inspector. In 1919, when his tenure as nomad school inspector had ended, Karnell returned to his previous role as the inspector of the elementary schools of the Eastern Norrbotten district.12 In Vitalis Karnell’s documents regarding the nomad schools, the inspector commented sparingly on the issue of language of instruction. An exception is his annual inspection report (Inspektörsberättelse) for 1918, in which he singled out the municipalities of Gällivare, Arjeplog, and Jokkmokk, where the tuition had been carried out with

31978_Kortegangas.indd 24

2020-12-11 10:23:32

Sweden 25

inadequate school books and in Sámi. This, wrote Karnell, implied that the pupils were “to no avail to themselves nor to others” and they were not making any progress in terms of education. Karnell reported that in these three municipalities the Sámi had decided in 1918 to switch to tuition in Swedish.13 Karnell portrayed Swedish language combined with better school books as progress, as the path to a better future for the schools and the pupils. This argument underscores the importance of quality in the tuition provided in the nomad schools. For Karnell, adequate school books constituted a crucial step toward high-quality teaching moulding skilful reindeer herders. It is clear that Karnell believed Swedish was a suitable language for tuition in the nomad schools. However, it is unclear if he considered Sámi an unsuitable language of instruction or rather if he considered the introduction of Swedish teaching material and Swedish as the sole language of tuition as the easiest ways to improve the quality and precision of education. For Karnell, quality of education was synonymous with executing efficiently the function of the schools: to educate qualified reindeer herders. Whether or not Sámi was used in the schools was a question of secondary importance. Inspired by a Sámi meeting in Trondheim, Norway, in 1917, a number of Swedish Sámi gathered for a nationwide meeting the following year in Östersund in the southern Sámi regions of Sweden. During the 1918 meeting, two Sámi figures stepped up as leaders: teacher Torkel Tomasson and teacher, theology student, and clergymanto-be Gustav Park. One of the main points of the meeting was the critique of Swedish governmental policies that stipulated only nomadic reindeer-herding Sámi were de jure counted as Sámi. Tomasson and Laula had already pointed out, at the very beginning of the twentieth century, that this segregation within the Sámi community was very detrimental to the survival of the traditionally sedentary (but still, in many cases, reindeer-owning) Sámi and the Sámi population in general. Laula and Tomasson promoted the option to combine livelihoods (reindeer herding, hunting, fishing, and agriculture), like many Sámi had done traditionally. The governmental politics, however, created an artificial division into nomadic and sedentary Sámi, the former being regarded as “true” Sámi and the latter as an already partly assimilated population that had to be fully assimilated.14 Gustav Park was one of the most important critics of the division of the Sámi in nomadic and sedentary groups. He also condemned

31978_Kortegangas.indd 25

2020-12-11 10:23:32

26

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

the nomad schools for failing to provide the same quality of instruction as other Swedish elementary schools. With regard to language of instruction, Park considered it wise to dedicate the school years to learning Swedish rather than having Sámi as part of the curriculum. Considering that the Sámi were Swedish citizens and lived their lives mainly among other Swedes, Park welcomed the fact that the newly updated instructions for the nomad schools (1916) stated instruction should be given in Swedish. Park believed that Sámi language would survive in any case since the children would use Sámi at home and, for example, in the context of reindeer herding.15 Park’s main criticisms were that the duration and quality of teaching in the nomad schools were inferior to standard elementary education and that these teachers had a shorter education than standard elementary school teachers. Park pointed out that teaching Swedish to Sámi children was a difficult task, and the duration of both the students’ terms of the nomad schools and the teachers’ training course should be extended.16 During his speech at the 1918 meeting, Park also discussed the concept of citizenship. While demanding a decent quality education for Sámi – a right they had as Swedish citizens – he also criticized the Sámi for not living up to their civic duties. Just as the state had duties toward its citizens, a “good citizen” also had certain duties toward the state. Park condemned Sámi parents, as some had been reluctant to send their children to the schools.17 Park showed considerable diplomatic skill in demonstrating that the Sámi could improve upon being good citizens, whereas the Swedish government had to scrutinize its duties to the citizens: providing an elementary education equal in quality to that provided for the rest of Sweden’s population. Park viewed Swedish as the language of instruction as a guarantee of high-quality education and equal citizenship. It is important to remember for further discussion and comparison with Finland and Norway that Park’s fundamental assumption was that Sámi language would survive in any case, since it was used in homes and in settings of reindeer husbandry. For Park, mastering Swedish was an added bonus rather than a dichotomous alternative to the survival of Sámi language and culture. Park’s support of Swedish as the language of instruction was based on the assumption that the nomad schools coexisted with a solid Sámi culture that could transmit the Sámi language to the children outside of school hours. The school was a different sphere, providing know-how common for all Swedish

31978_Kortegangas.indd 26

2020-12-11 10:23:32

Sweden 27

citizens. This kind of domestic/educational duality was in fact a builtin feature in the nomad school system. For most of the 1920s, all hostesses of the boarding facilities of the nomad schools, except for one, were of Sámi origin. After a school day in Swedish, the children spent the evening at boarding facilities that were, at least in principle, Sámi-speaking environments.18 However, the fact that a considerable number of the Sámi in Sweden wished that the schools would reflect a Sámi environment is clearly stated in the meeting’s final resolution on school issues. Many of the participants yearned for the mission schools which had been mostly discontinued after the nomad school reform. The mission schools were adapted to the lifestyle and needs of the Sámi, while providing instruction permeated by Christian values. The mission schools also provided instruction in Sámi, at least in the schools of the southern Sámi areas. It is apparent that in contrast to the nomad schools, which were unpopular among the participants of the meeting, the mission schools had reflected a Sámi way of life that resonated among the Sámi population.19 Karnell, also among the participants of the Sámi meeting, expressed doubts in his yearly report of 1918 as to whether the Sámis’, and specifically Park’s, criticisms of the nomad schools were justified. Karnell pointed out in his report that the nomad school system had been in place for such a short time that it was difficult to draw any conclusions on the quality of tuition. It was, for this reason, also difficult to determine whether the schools actually provided the children with tools and competence that would hold in comparison with other Swedish citizens. Using an explicit racial categorization that is otherwise rare in his reports, Karnell remarked that even if the Sámi were to decide over their own school system, they would soon discover it was impossible to implement. The Sámi “out in the mountains” would have conflicting views on the issue, as they tended to be stubborn and reluctant to compromise. Karnell declared he knew this from twenty years’ experience of the “race character of the Sámi people.” This instance again lays bare Karnell’s condescending attitude toward the Sámi, who he thought to be incapable of deciding over their future. For this reason, he believed the nomad school was needed to modernize the Sámi way of life. And it was imperative the school was obligatory, so that Sámi parents would not keep their children out of school.20 Park specifically criticized the two points Karnell deemed paramount within the nomad school system: segregation and obligation. To Park,

31978_Kortegangas.indd 27

2020-12-11 10:23:32

28

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

segregation implied lower-quality education in the nomad schools when compared to standard Swedish elementary schools. In his view, education that held the same quality as other elementary schools in the country was a higher priority than instruction in Sámi. Park disagreed with Karnell about the curriculum and structure of the nomad schools; however, with regard to the function of Swedish as the language of high-quality instruction, he agreed with the nomad school inspector. Park believed that knowing Swedish served as an added resource for Sámi children, whether in terms of equal citizenship or material well-being. Park and Karnell disagreed on the notion of the ideal Sámi citizen. During the 1918 Sámi meeting, Karnell declared he had high hopes for Sámi culture that exceeded those for the culture of settler farmers, who in his view risked outcompeting the reindeer herders in the mountain regions. At the same time, Karnell was refuting Park’s criticism of the poor quality of tuition in the nomad schools. According to Park, the northernmost Sámi areas in Sweden had the most ignorant pupils: these pupils had received less education than those in the areas south of Norrbotten. Karnell was of a completely different opinion and emphasized that there was “a difference between culture and culture.” The ideal representation of Sámi culture for Karnell was the less educated reindeer herders of Norrbotten. For Park, the ideal Sámi was an educated, informed, and enlightened person with civic rights and duties equal with other Swedes. In Park’s reasoning, the function of Swedish language in schools would be to make accessible all domains of the civic and economic life in Sweden to Sámi children. While Karnell highlighted the Sámi specifically, Park underscored the purpose of education as an equalizer in terms of rights, skills, and competencies.21 In a 1917 interview in the major Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, Karnell elaborated on his views on the Sámi culture. The nomad school inspector again revealed that he did not consider the Sámi or their language to be capable of instilling and developing the right kind of Sámi culture in elementary education. In a somewhat contradictory manner, however, Karnell emphasized the importance of hiring Sámi teachers for the nomad schools. These teachers needed to be carriers of a “true and sacred ‘Lapp spirit,’” although this Lapp spirit was something the Sámi teachers would have to learn during their teachers’ education. Karnell suggested that the future teachers needed to understand the calling they were to pursue was “true and wonderful

31978_Kortegangas.indd 28

2020-12-11 10:23:32

Sweden 29

and great,” and that the nomad life was the “only right kind of life for them and their people.” Karnell also emphasized the importance of producing suitable teaching material for conveying the right kind of Sámi culture. The “Lapp spirit” was truly Sámi, but it had to be introduced from the outside, by Swedish teachers’ education.22 In his first yearly report as nomad school inspector, Karnell included an introduction in which he commented on some of the basic ideas behind the nomad school. Karnell wrote about the incompatibility of the standard Swedish elementary schools and the “way of life, disposition and character” of the Sámi. The school schedule and terms of the nomad schools accommodated the needs of the reindeer-herding Sámi. If the term began in September, as in the standard elementary schools, many Sámi would still be out in the mountains on the summer grazing lands. The nomad school, adapted to the Sámi way of life, ensured that the law stipulating all children had to attend an elementary school would also apply to all Sámi children in Sweden.23 In the 1917 report, Karnell referred to an ongoing debate in the Swedish parliament about the livelihoods of the Sámi, whether they should be able to be both reindeer herders and farmers. There were two general views on this question in the parliament: one promoted the idea that the Sámi should be able to choose a combination of reindeer herding and agriculture (as many Sámi had done for centuries); the other defended the segregationist idea that only the nomadic reindeer-herding lifestyle was worth preserving, and to achieve this, the nomadic Sámi should be segregated. The outcome was, as we have seen, a division of the Sámi population in Sweden into two groups: a sedentary group and a nomadic reindeer-herding group. It was especially in the county of Västerbotten that the question of combined livelihoods was topical. Further north, in the Norrbotten County, the situation was “healthier,” according to Karnell, since the Sámi were involved to a greater degree in nomadic reindeer herding in these areas. It is also no coincidence that the first proposition of 1909 by Bergqvist, Karnell, and Österberg was more positive toward the use of Sámi as a language of instruction in the northern areas, where the language would convey a “healthy” Sámi culture, as opposed to the mixed livelihoods of the Sámi in the more southern regions.24 Karnell, as a staunch segregationist, was very much against the combination of agriculture and reindeer herding. And since, in his view, the Sámi needed help from the Swedes to survive as a pure reindeer-herding population, the language of instruction question

31978_Kortegangas.indd 29

2020-12-11 10:23:32

30

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

became irrelevant for him. After all, if the Sámi were left to decide for themselves, “they would like to live completely free, unbound by any laws or decrees, even if they hereby would go towards their own destruction,” according to Karnell in his 1917 report. Why allow a language in schools that the Sámi could use to convey a culture that was alienating them from the “true Lapp spirit”? This spirit was, for Karnell, the true yet reformed Sámi culture that the Swedish state was to bring about among the Sámi through the nomad school system. “True” Sámi culture was to be reconstituted, but since it needed to be done in a manner controlled by the Swedish state, it was to be reconstituted in Swedish. At the same time, the whole idea of the lower, itinerant nomad school was to follow the Sámi to the summer lands and thus keep the children close to their parents. In this structure, Sámi language would continue to play a role as the home language of the children.25 Another Sámi teacher who opposed Karnell’s paternalistic treatment of Sámi education was Karin Stenberg, an early twentieth-century advocate of the political and cultural rights of the Sámi. Besides her long career in teaching, she participated in the founding of the national Sámi organization Same Ätnam (1945) and the Sámi folk high school of Sweden (1942). The folk school had, among other subjects, instruction in Sámi language and history, and it welcomed students from the whole Nordic Sámi area. Stenberg was of forest Sámi origin,26 and she was active in preserving forest Sámi history and culture. She also advocated for the rights and culture of the forest Sámi in the Swedish Sámi political sphere mainly concerned with the large-scale reindeer herders of the mountain regions.27 In 1920, Stenberg published the book Dat läh mijen situd: det är vår vilja, En vädjan till den svenska nationen från samefolket (This Is Our Will: A Plea to the Swedish Nation from the Sámi People) with Swedish writer Valdemar Lindholm. The book’s purpose was to influence the work of a governmental committee mapping out the rights of the Sámi and conditions for reindeer herding in Sweden. According to Dat läh mijen situd, the committee had a one-sided perspective, and hence a Sámi perspective was needed. The content of the book closely resembles the main critique presented in the first national meeting of the Swedish Sámi in Östersund two years earlier, in 1918.28 Valdemar Lindholm, the co-author of the book, held strong opinions about the relationship between the Swedish state and the Sámi people. Indeed, many Sámi within the Swedish Sámi movement

31978_Kortegangas.indd 30

2020-12-11 10:23:32

Sweden 31

considered Lindholm’s opinions too radical. This was also the case with Torkel Tomasson, one of the leading figures of the movement. In the preface to Dat läh mijen situd, Stenberg takes full responsibility for the opinions and points of view in the book. Stenberg was regularly in contact with the Swedish politician and mayor of Stockholm Carl Lindhagen, and she visited him in Stockholm in 1919. In a letter to Lindhagen from 1922, Stenberg referred to the Sámi community that had assisted her financially in getting the book published. It is, however, clear that Lindholm’s role was substantial, and the book should be considered a joint publication by a Sámi teacher and a politically active Swedish writer.29 To provide context for its political claims, the book includes a thorough analysis of the history of the relationship between the Swedish state and the Sámi. The core message is concentrated in the two first lines of the book’s conclusion: “We want to live in our fathers’ land as Sámi, but not as a people without enlightenment and prospects of development. We believe in the future of our people and in its development into a nation as cultivated as any.”30 Despite the almost separatist tone in the excerpt, it is clear that Lindholm and Stenberg situated the struggle of the Sámi mainly in a Swedish context. To support the arguments concerning self-determination and rights for the Sámi, the book makes important international comparisons. In the first chapter of the book, for instance, the authors state that the Sámi have the “will to live.” And this will to live, “in the time of the League of Nations with all the talk about the rights of the small nations,” should in itself be an argument for greater right to selfdetermination. The book refers to the question of the Åland Islands, a group of islands located between Sweden and Finland. Around 1920, Sweden was trying to persuade Finland to arrange a referendum on Åland as to whether the Swedish-speaking region should be a part of Sweden or Finland (as it was, and would remain, following a decision by the League of Nations in 1921). In light of this example, in which the Swedes were so interested in supporting the linguistic rights and self-determination on Åland, why should they think otherwise in the case of the Sámi in Sweden, the authors of the book inquire.31 Apart from this reference to the League of Nations, the body of international affairs par excellence, the book poses another far-­ reaching framing of the Sámi people’s rights. In a chapter discussing enlightenment and school policies, the authors reaffirm the critique of the 1918 national meeting of the Swedish Sámi, stating that the

31978_Kortegangas.indd 31

2020-12-11 10:23:32

32

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

Sámi should have the right to choose between the nomad schools and regular elementary schools. Stenberg and Lindholm oppose the obligation to send the children to the nomad schools, and state that the quality of education in those schools was unsatisfactory. In opposing the patronizing Swedish state, wanting to decide what was good for the Sámi, they refer to a colonial framework. According to Stenberg and Lindholm, Sweden had criticized England for “subjugating other peoples,” and condemned the colonial politics of England in India and Ireland. Yet no Swede had criticized the Swedish “colonial politics” in the Sámi areas.32 The context of Stenberg’s and Lindholm’s book is unmistakeably Swedish, since it was intended to influence the work of the Swedish governmental committee investigating the situation of the Sámi. At the same time, it is clear that Lindholm and Stenberg viewed the plight of the Sámi in a much larger context than that of Sweden, Sápmi, or even northern Europe. Situating the struggle of the Sámi in a context of European colonialism was much ahead of its time, resembling the rhetoric of the 1960s–70s decolonization era. What Dat läh mijen situd shows is that among the Sámi, or at least among the educated Sámi elite, there existed an awareness of a common struggle with other minority peoples in the world in the earliest decades of the twentieth century.

T h e N o m a d S c h ool Boards : A Vo ic e f o r t h e S á m i o r a Rubber S tamp? The preceding paragraphs have discussed educational authorities, including Sámi teachers, who formed the educated tier of the Sámi population. In Sweden, there is also the opportunity for studying what broader echelons of the Sámi people made of the education of their children. The formidable source material that allows this kind of study consists of the minutes of the nomad school boards (nomadskolfullmäktige), established in 1925. The Swedish government issued a new decree on nomad schools in 1925. An important consequence of this decree was the establishment of an institutionalized forum for the voice of Sámi parents of pupils through the nomad school boards that consisted of the local teacher and representatives for parents. The decree created a channel for the voice of the Sámi. In that regard, it reacted to some of the criticisms of the Sámi as presented, for example, at the 1918 meeting

31978_Kortegangas.indd 32

2020-12-11 10:23:32

Sweden 33

2.1  Sámi theologian and activist Gustav Park

and in Stenberg’s and Lindholm’s book. Ultimately, however, the nomad school boards played merely a consultative role. They met with the nomad school inspector regularly, but their wishes and comments fell mainly on deaf ears.33 In the minutes of a number of meetings during the 1920s and 1930s between the nomad school inspector and the local nomad school

31978_Kortegangas.indd 33

2020-12-11 10:23:39

2.2  Teacher Karin Stenberg with Carl Lindhagen, Swedish politician interested in Sámi issues, ca. 1919

31978_Kortegangas.indd 34

2020-12-11 10:23:41

Sweden 35

boards, the lack of Sámi language and culture in the nomad schools was presented as a problem. Especially in the southern Sámi regions, the local Sámi varieties were quickly losing ground to Swedish among the children.34 In 1927, the successor of Vitalis Karnell as nomad school inspector, Erik Bergström (in office 1920–33) answered the critique on the lack of Sámi language in schools presented by Tuorpon’s nomad school board in Jokkmokk. Bergström sought to introduce tuition in Sámi so that the children would be able to read in their mother tongue. The inspector was very clear about the fact that Swedish “as the state language of the country” would continue to be the principal language of the nomad schools.35 In the minutes, Bergström noted that the Tuorpon Sámi parents were happy with the planned amount of Sámi language tuition in the overall frame in which Swedish continued to be the principal language of instruction. During another board meeting, just a few days earlier in Luokta-Mávas in Arjeplog, the Sámi board member Anders Larsson Bär forewarned that the schools should avoid spending too much time teaching Sámi because it reduced the time spent teaching Swedish, the “state language,” and one that the children needed to learn to understand perfectly. According to Bär, the children, coming from Sámi-speaking homes, already understood Sámi. Bär’s reasoning on the different languages of education resembled Park’s ideas put forward at the 1918 meeting: Swedish was the language of education, and Sámi the language of domestic life.36 Not all nomad school board members viewed favourably this principle of “Swedish in schools, Sámi at home.” In 1932, Israel Andreas Jonsson in Gran and Ran in Sorsele criticized the lack of Sámi in the nomad school. The schools aimed at providing an environment as true to the Sámi culture as possible, but carried out instruction in Swedish. Jonsson referred to nomad school inspector Bergström, who preferred that the pupils wore traditional Sámi clothes rather than industrially produced clothes from southern Sweden, in order not to stray from their way of life. Jonsson designated traditional clothing at school as pointless. In Jonsson’s view, much more concerning was the fact that the schools did not provide tuition in Sámi. This, concluded Jonsson, led to a situation where the children learned to think that Sámi was inferior to Swedish. Further north, at the school board meeting in Luokta-Mávas in Arjeplog, Per Nilsson Ruong affirmed that instruction exclusively in Swedish rendered the children arrogant,

31978_Kortegangas.indd 35

2020-12-11 10:23:41

36

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

and led them away from the Sámi way of life. Jonsson and Ruong highlighted the point that instruction solely in Swedish made the Sámi children foreigners and condescending toward their own culture.37 In the northernmost areas of Sweden, Sámi members of the nomad school boards called for education in Finnish. This reflects an older tradition of educational policies targeting the Sámi, emanating from the mission era. As mentioned earlier, since the seventeenth century, the Church of Sweden had used Finnish in its sermons and other church activities in the northernmost areas of modern-day Sweden. Sámi members of a nomad school board meeting in Saarivuoma in 1929, expressed the wish that the teacher in the lower classes would know Sámi or Finnish. The board wanted tuition in either Sámi or Finnish since the children understood these languages. As the minutes testify, the board members wished to adapt the language of instruction to a language the pupils knew and understood or that was of use to them in their daily lives.38 The minutes from a 1928 nomad school board appointment in Könkämä, close to the Finnish border, explicitly stated the importance of the use of Finnish language in religious contexts. According to the minutes, the members of the nomad school board wanted Finnish to be used in the local nomad school, since the Christian proclamation among the local Sámi always took place in Finnish. The members of the board added another reason for learning Finnish: trade. The minutes show that for the local Sámi in Könkämä, the nomad school was at least in part an extension of religious and church activities. Finnish as a language of instruction was to have the function of intelligibility, that is, of conveying tuition in a language the pupils knew and associated with church and church activities. At the same time, the reference to trade reveals that the Sámi viewed the majority language of the country as a necessity in economic terms. In the case of Könkämä, however, the language to be learned was the majority language of the neighbouring country. For the local Sámi, knowing Finnish made economic sense as it benefited trade across the SwedishFinnish border. This is one of many examples that shows the Sámi were very much aware of the different functions of the languages in the northern Nordic area.39 The annual reports of inspector Bergström show that, from 1925 onward, the nomad school inspector provided Finnish books to the northernmost nomad schools, in addition to the ones in Sámi that he provided to most other nomad schools in the country. According to

31978_Kortegangas.indd 36

2020-12-11 10:23:41

Sweden 37

Bergström, the aim of distributing Sámi and Finnish books to these schools was to provide the pupils with the opportunity to study both languages in the nomad schools, and to acquaint the children with the literature available in their mother tongue and their religious language, respectively.40 The degree to which Sámi was in use in religious instruction was a recurring theme at the nomad school board meetings. In Stensele and Lycksele, local Sámi emphasized that only the local Sámi variety, Ume Sámi, should be considered as a language of instruction. In the same paragraph of the minutes, they also asked for sermons in Sámi in the area. Since the nearby congregation of Stensele had a Sámispeaking vicar, the board noted that this should not be a problem. This Sámi-speaking vicar was Gustav Park, who in the decade following the 1918 meeting had advanced from a student of theology to vicar of Stensele. The Ume Sámi variety, in this case, was portrayed as the language of religion and religious instruction, just as Finnish was in northern Swedish Sámi areas.41 Among Sámi speakers, similar arguments were in use for Finnish as for Sámi, even if the former was not the mother tongue of the people asking for religious instruction in this language. The main concern was that the congregation understood the language of the clergymen, and the pupils understood the language of the teachers. Both Sámi and Finnish were tools for rendering the Christian proclamation as accessible as possible for the congregation in church and for the pupils in schools. There was a regional difference in the preferred use of languages. In the southern and central Sámi areas, Sámi was both the mother tongue and the preferred church language of the Sámi. In the northernmost areas, Sámi was the mother tongue, and Finnish was the preferred church language, as well as a resource in cross-border trade with Finland. Nomad school inspector Bergström noted the regional differences in the use of Sámi in his annual report of 1929–30. He drew his own conclusions about this fact; they were not favourable for the use of Sámi in the nomad schools. Bergström discussed the Swedish skills of the pupils in both the northern and the central parts of the Swedish Sámi area. He noted that in the north, “all normally gifted children” learned to speak and understand Swedish in a passable manner. In the areas around Jokkmokk and Arjeplog, Bergström described the Swedish skills among the pupils as robust. He acknowledged that knowing some Sámi was an advantage for teachers delivering

31978_Kortegangas.indd 37

2020-12-11 10:23:41

38

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

instruction in Swedish, for example in explaining difficult words and expressions. However, he downplayed the role of Sámi as an auxiliary language of instruction and stated that pedagogically skilled Swedish teachers without any knowledge of Sámi were able to convey the teaching as successfully as Sámi-speaking teachers, especially in the lower grades. According to Bergström, the teachers’ impeccable knowledge of Swedish was paramount; knowing Sámi was secondary to knowing Swedish and could never compensate for any faults in the Swedish skills of the teachers. Some Sámi skills were beneficial, according to Bergström, especially in teaching the subject of Christianity; however, the primary function of Sámi was to help the children learn to read and recite the Bible in Swedish. Especially where able teachers were around, from fourth grade onward, teaching Christianity could be provided in Swedish, even if the ability of the pupils in the upper nomad schools (grades 4 to 6) to recite a Bible text in Swedish was, according to Bergström, substantially weaker than that of solely Swedish-speaking children. Bergström viewed the use of Sámi language as a pedagogical tool, comparable to other pedagogical methods. Once other pedagogical tools developed, or the pupils learned enough Swedish, the need for Sámi in schools disappeared. Bergström noted that in the case of Christianity, where the status of Sámi was traditionally at its strongest, teachers with pertinent skills could teach in Swedish rather than in Sámi.42 Bergström reported in 1930 that the nomad school teachers who spoke only Swedish had learned some Sámi so they could convey the most basic Christian instruction in Sámi. It is unclear whether this applied to all nomad schools or only to the schools in the Norrbotten area in northernmost Sweden. He also reported that the language barrier was a problem only in Norrbotten, where the Sámi children were monolingual Sámi speakers when they started the nomad school. The goal was, as always, to gradually reduce the quantity of Sámi language instruction so that in the upper nomad school (grades 4 to 6), the tuition could be carried out in Swedish. In Bergström’s arguments, it was the dissemination of instruction in Christianity that held intrinsic value, not Sámi or Finnish as languages of instruction.43

U nf u l f il l e d P ro m is e s of Extended Use of Sámi Following Erik Bergström, a nomad school inspector with a science background, the office returned to a theologian in 1933 with the

31978_Kortegangas.indd 38

2020-12-11 10:23:42

Sweden 39

earlier vicar of Sorsele (in Västerbotten County) Carl Axel Calleberg (Axel Calleberg). Calleberg (in office 1933–45), a native of Dalecarlia in central Sweden, had actively participated in the debates on Sámi education. The co-operation between Calleberg and the Sámi was mainly smooth, and he took a clear stance for improving the quality of the nomad schools both in terms of curriculum and the actual school buildings. Calleberg took an interest in Sámi language varieties and Sámi culture. He also established a collection of Sámi artifacts showcased at the open-air museum in Härnösand.44 In his first yearly report of the nomad schools (1933–34), Calleberg expressed his concerns about the risk of extinction of Sámi language in the southern Sámi areas. To prevent this from happening, Calleberg suggested an increase in the use of Sámi in the nomad schools, “even if only a little.” Calleberg gave no further reasons for why instruction in Sámi should have been part of the tuition provided in the nomad schools. It is apparent that he considered the disappearance of Sámi language as a negative development. When writing that Sámi language should have more space in the curriculum, Calleberg even used the word subject (ämne). In other words, he considered that Sámi language varieties should have their own slot in the weekly timetable as the mother tongue of the schoolchildren. Inspector Bergström’s earlier stance on Sámi language had only been about whether parts of the instruction in other subjects could be conveyed in Sámi. Sámi as a school subject was introduced in Sweden in 1957. Calleberg was quite ahead of his time with the suggestion of Sámi as a school subject.45 Calleberg was positive toward the use of Sámi, but it is important to note that he wished its use to increase “only a little”: the space for Sámi in schools was to be minimal. In his report for the years 1936– 1937, Calleberg replicated, consciously or not, Bergström’s earlier reasoning that neither Sámi language nor Sámi-speaking teachers were a necessity for nomad schools. In a conclusion of a list of nomad school teachers, inspector Calleberg commented on the origin of the teachers (see table 2.1). Of a total of twenty-five teachers, wrote the inspector, fourteen were of “pure” Sámi origin, four of Swedish-Finnish origin, and seven of Swedish origin. Calleberg was content with the teachers, calling them an “excellent group.” What is striking is that while fourteen teachers were of “pure” Sámi origin, all the Finnishspeaking teachers were labelled as “Swedish-Finnish.” Educational authorities in the north of Sweden viewed the Sámi as a population different and separate from the Swedes, and the Finnish speakers as a part of the general Swedish population. The

31978_Kortegangas.indd 39

2020-12-11 10:23:42

40

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

Table 2.1 Nomad school teachers and languages spoken, 1938–39*

Nomad school district

Sámi1

Karesuando Vittangi Jukkasjärvi Gällivare Jokkmokk Arjeplog Västerbotten Jämtland Total

 1  1  2  3  1  2  4 14

Sámi and Finnish 1 1 3 1

6

Finnish

No note on language skills

Total number of teachers2

1 2

2 2

3

1 1 1 7

30

Source: Calleberg, Inspection report (Inspektörsberättelse) 1938–39 (Axel Calleberg) D IV:1, (RNS), (R S A H ). * Skills in Swedish are not listed in the source material, as it was assumed that all teachers master Swedish. The “no note on language skills” category implies that the teacher knew only Swedish or that the note in the yearly report is incomplete. 1 Including two teachers with “some skills” in Sámi (“något kunnig”) instead of the standard formulation Lappish-speaking (“Lapsktalande”). 2 The table includes 30 teachers in total, the 25 “ordinary” (teachers with a permanent employment) and “extra ordinary” nomad school teachers (that is, teachers with a fixed-term employment) as well as five substitute teachers, and excludes the especially hired handicraft teachers (their language skills are not listed).

Finnbygdsutredningen, a governmental survey into the elementary school system in the Finnish-speaking areas of Norrbotten, stated that most Finnish speakers in northern Sweden were biological Swedes who had adopted the majority language of the region, that is, Finnish. The survey authors reasoned that these people were actually Swedes and thus had no right to a different mother tongue from the majority language of the country. The task of the nomad school system was to preserve a “pure Sámi” population, whereas the task of the elementary schools in the Finnish-speaking regions of Sweden was to assimilate the Finnish speakers. This difference of purpose explains the terms in Calleberg’s reasoning, where a pure Finnish origin did not exist, since the Finns were also Swedish. The Sámi teachers of the nomad schools, however, were designated as part of a pure Sámi population, since this pureness of the nomadic Sámi population was one of the ideals of the nomad schools.46 In spite of Calleberg’s positive attitude toward the “pure Sámi” teachers in the nomad schools, the importance of both pedagogy and

31978_Kortegangas.indd 40

2020-12-11 10:23:42

Sweden 41

Swedish language increased in the nomad schools. In 1929, twenty of the twenty-eight teachers were of Sámi origin, whereas in 1940, the ratio was fourteen Sámi teachers to eleven of other origins (namely, Swedish- or Finnish-speaking Swedes). Both Bergström and his successor Calleberg stated in similar terms that the teachers needed to master Swedish and knowing Sámi was a complementary resource that could never compensate for an imperfect acquisition of Swedish. Whereas the first nomad school inspector, Vitalis Karnell, had supported the idea of hiring local Sámi teachers to teach Sámi children, both Bergström and Calleberg preferred Swedish teachers for the pedagogical skills they had gained at their training courses. An earlier idea of hiring Sámi teachers to teach Sámi children was slowly supplanted by a professionalized notion of teaching. This latter notion regarded teacher training and pedagogy, rather than knowledge of the local conditions and Sámi language, as the tools that created the best results in schools. The nomad school inspectors in step with this view preferred formally competent Swedish-speaking teachers to Sámi speakers with lower formal competence.47 The national meeting of the Swedish Sámi in 1937, this time in Arvidsjaur, again pointed out the need to modernize the nomad schools. In the same year, Calleberg produced a thorough report on the nomad schools. This time the leaders of the Sámi meeting and the leader of the nomad school system held an almost uniform view about the need to modernize the nomad schools. The 1938 decree on the nomad schools brought the nomad school system closer to the learning standards and schooling hours of the standard Swedish elementary schools. While the nomad school still had a restricted schedule and curriculum, the idea that it should be as thorough and have the same quality of teaching and curriculum as other Swedish elementary schools had now gained traction. Gradually, the nomad school aligned itself with the general Swedish elementary school system.48 The fact that Sámi was not used to the extent that would have pleased all the locals is reflected in the documents from the meetings between the nomad school inspector and the nomad school boards. Swedish Sámi from the whole Sámi region – from Jämtland in the south to the central Swedish Sámi areas of Västerbotten and further north to Norrbotten – complained to the nomad school inspectors in the late 1920s and 1930s that the nomad school system was alienating the schoolchildren from Sámi language and rendering them “Swedified.” They wished that some Sámi would be included in the

31978_Kortegangas.indd 41

2020-12-11 10:23:42

42

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

teaching at the nomad schools, since it would be “a shame” if the children were to forget their mother tongue. The plea for the preservation of Sámi language and culture is paramount in these articulations. The use of Sámi was a recurring theme in the protocols of the meetings, and both Bergström and Calleberg promised to ameliorate the status of Sámi in the nomad schools. However, this positive attitude never translated into any concentrated effort to extend the use of Sámi. On the contrary, as the pedagogical skills and formal training of the teachers became a higher priority, the need to use Sámi, which the inspectors considered a pedagogical auxiliary, gradually disappeared. It is worth noting that not only the inspectors but also many Sámi, including the Sámi clergyman and teacher Gustav Park, viewed the quality of education as more important than the use of Sámi in the schools. The strong focus on the quality of education and the professionalization of teaching impeded, or at least softened, claims for wider use of Sámi in education.49

Vary in g L a n g uag e P r ac ti ces among Nomad S c h o o l T e achers The official policies steered away from hiring Sámi teachers and did not particularly encourage the use of Sámi as a language of instruction, either. Nevertheless, local practices concerning the use of Sámi in schools varied. Nomad school teacher Sigrid Rutfjäll of South Sámi origin cited several examples of using Sámi when teaching the nomad school pupils. Rutfjäll recounted her time as a practising teacher among the Sámi population of Sörkaitum in Gällivare in the late 1910s. She wrote that the most important item in the schedule was instruction in the Swedish language. However, the children were almost exclusively Sámi-speaking, and Rutfjäll used Sámi as an auxiliary language when teaching Swedish. She explained that whenever her southern Sámi variety diverged from the pupils’ more northern variety to the point that the two language varieties were mutually unintelligible, a local teenage girl, Risten Kitok, helped the teacher translate the most difficult words. Later, when working close to her home area in Härjedalen, Rutfjäll also used Sámi in tuition. Rutfjäll portrayed the use of Sámi as unproblematic, and cited no instances of any reprimands from the nomad school inspector.50

31978_Kortegangas.indd 42

2020-12-11 10:23:42

Sweden 43

The case of the Swedish (non-Sámi) nomad school teacher Terese Torgrim points toward the fact that at least some Swedish-speaking teachers used Sámi language in tuition. Torgrim, the daughter of the vicar of Pajala on the Swedish-Finnish border, learned Sámi in the early years of her long career as nomad school teacher in the northernmost Swedish Sámi areas. In her memoirs from her teaching years, she depicted learning Sámi as self-evident, the Sámi language was something she “of course” had to learn and improve. Torgrim’s Sámi skills indeed improved to the point that she served as interpreter for the Swedish race biology professor Herman Lundborg, when he carried out his research in Laimoluokta on Lake Torneträsk.51 There are also opposite accounts of the use of languages in instruction. Kally Holmström was a Swedish teacher who, after a period of unemployment, accepted the offer to teach within the nomad school system – to the astonishment of her friends and former colleagues. In 1938, Holmström published an account of her time as a nomad school teacher. She did not use Sámi in tuition. Rather, she expected the children to learn Swedish as quickly as possible. To speed up this process, she used sign language and teaching through demonstration.52 Sámi nomad school teacher Sara Nutti, from Kiruna in the northernmost Swedish Sámi regions, travelled to Stockholm in 1935 to study the elementary schools of the capital. She grew up in in a reindeer-herding Sámi family living in the northernmost parts of Sweden. Nutti was in contact with Ernst Manker, ethnographer and, since 1939, leader of the Sámi department of the Nordic Museum in Stockholm. Manker’s archives at the Nordic Museum Archive house a text that Nutti wrote during or around the time of her visit to Stockholm in 1935, in which she described the life of the Sámi in the north. Someone, probably Manker, corrected the language and a part of the text is copied with a typewriter, as it became the manuscript for the article on Sara Nutti published in the daily StockholmsTidningen, cited at the beginning of this chapter. In the original text, Nutti discussed education, especially her own field of work, the nomad school. In general, Nutti was content with the fact that the schools conveyed know-how relating to the traditional Sámi way of life, notably through the school subject “nomad knowledge” (nomadkunskap). The main fault she reported was the lack of instruction in Sámi language. Nutti was worried that the Sámi language was at risk of disappearing or turning into a mixed language.53

31978_Kortegangas.indd 43

2020-12-11 10:23:42

44

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

In the printed and corrected version of the same text, as well as in the newspaper article, the lack of Sámi in schools was portrayed as a defect from a different angle. In this text, the lack was criticized for the reason that Swedish had no accurate expressions for a number of objects and phenomena relating to nomadic reindeer herding; therefore, instruction in Swedish could not efficiently convey the skills related to this livelihood. Here, Sámi language was clearly portrayed as the conveyor of the livelihood of reindeer herding.54 In her original text, Sara Nutti commented on the patronizing attitudes of the Swedes that impeded the Sámi from deciding over their own fate. Whether or not Nutti was aware of it, this patronizing discourse also included her host, Ernst Manker. In a letter to the editor of Stockholms-Tidningen, Sven Haglund, written two days after the publication of Nutti’s article, Manker wrote that he had noted among the interests of “little intelligent miss Nutti” the use of Sámi as a language of instruction. Manker himself supported the use of Sámi in schools, and in Nutti he saw a chance to distribute his message. He wrote to Haglund: “I hope that I put the words into her mouth with so much substance and modesty that it has some effect without her being uncomfortable with it.” Manker took full credit for Nutti’s views, even if he wrote that Nutti herself thought Sámi should get more use in the schools.55 It is probable that the two different versions of Nutti’s text indicate Manker’s involvement in writing the final version. Emphasizing that tuition in Sámi would be beneficial for conveying the livelihood of reindeer herding was an argument that Manker knew would hit home among the leading school authorities who were very interested in the national economic function of the nomad school system. Manker himself noted, in a letter to the Finnish geodesist and researcher Karl Nickul, that paramount among the motives for preserving Sámi culture were economic considerations. It is thus plausible to conclude that while Nutti herself, in the original unprinted and uncorrected version, underscored the culture-bearing function of Sámi, Manker altered the argumentation in the printed version to correspond with a national economic function: the language as the conveyor of the livelihood of reindeer herding.56 Ernst Manker was in contact not only with Sara Nutti, but also with nomad school teacher Laila Jääskeläinen from the Dåraudden nomad school in Ammarnäs, Sorsele. In a letter to Jääskeläinen, Manker referred to Nutti’s article in Stockholms-Tidningen. Jääskeläinen’s

31978_Kortegangas.indd 44

2020-12-11 10:23:42

Sweden 45

reply reveals she was not convinced of the need to provide tuition in Sámi. Quite the contrary, she attacked Nutti’s text for romanticizing the situation among the Sámi. According to Jääskeläinen, life in northernmost Sweden was challenging, and there was no space for romantic language policies. Jääskeläinen, who identified herself as Swedish and had a Finnish name, closed her letter by saying that the Finnish speakers of northernmost Sweden did not want to learn Finnish, and neither should the Sámi dream romanticized dreams of learning Sámi. For Jääskeläinen, Swedish was the main language of the country, and the only viable language of tuition. Swedish language was the only victorious way out of the “struggle” of the arduous life up north. Jääskeläinen considered Swedish to have a progressive function as a language of instruction. She pointed out that there were several different Sámi varieties, and it would have been “baroque” to either force the South Sámi speakers to learn North Sámi or to have several different languages in the different nomad school districts. This claim stands in rather strong contrast to teacher Rutfjäll’s method of adapting to the local varieties, at times with the help of an interpreter. Jääskeläinen also questioned whether nomadic Sámi made good nomad school teachers. In biologically hierarchical terms, she stated that the “nomads” were not developed enough to be teachers. Employing nomadic Sámi as teachers would only build “a wall around Lapland” and isolate the Sámi from “a highly civilized life.” Jääskeläinen concluded that the nomadic Sámi had not reached a point where they would be capable of generating a group of teachers for their own needs.57 These instances of the nomad school teachers’ varying practices and views regarding the use of Sámi complement the earlier analysis on the educational authorities and the Sámi parents in the nomad school boards. In all three groups, opinions varied about the principle and practice of using Sámi in tuition.

C o n c l u si ons In the Swedish Sámi areas, the exclusion in education was mainly of the Sámi language varieties on one hand and a production of an idealized, exclusive Sámi way of life on the other. Swedish educational authorities constructed this idealized Sámi way of life that they defined, defended, and cherished for their own principally economic reasons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This idealized

31978_Kortegangas.indd 45

2020-12-11 10:23:42

46

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

definition was implemented and codified in a number of laws on the livelihood of reindeer herding in the late nineteenth century. The laws defined reindeer herding as an ethnic livelihood, only available for Sámi individuals. At the same time, they constructed a de jure Sámi group that was to be the subject of the new laws: the reindeer-herding nomadic Sámi of the mountain regions. What was excluded from the legislation was the more or less sedentary Sámi. The laws defined the former group as living in the desirable “original” and “real” Sámi way, and the latter, sedentary group as a degenerated and partly assimilated group that had adapted to the Swedish farmers’ way of life. The nomadic group was judged worthy of preservation through a specific and targeted system of elementary education, whereas the children of the sedentary Sámi were sent to standard Swedish elementary schools to be fully assimilated. It is the targeted school form, the nomad school, which has been in the focus of this chapter. The nomad school system was established in 1913, a decade or so after the reindeer herding laws divided the Sámi population in two legal categories. The roots of the regard for the reindeer-herding nomadic mountain Sámi as the desirable Sámi group go back farther in time, however. In the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the Church of Sweden, backed by the royal administration, had launched a series of missions in the Sámi areas, with the double aim of preserving reindeer herding and Christianizing the Sámi population that in many instances was leading a life the church had judged as pagan. For the governmental educational authorities, the main function of Sámi language in the nomad schools was its intelligibility. For pragmatic reasons, the authorities tolerated the use of Sámi in the schools since many of the Sámi children in the lower grades, coming from Sámi-speaking homes and regions, knew little or no Swedish. Swedish was always the primary language according to the authorities, as it was the language of progress and equal citizenship that the elementary education was planned to implement throughout the country. The documents initiating the nomad school system portrayed a rather positive image of Sámi language as the preserver of both Sámi culture and livelihood. In the coming years, the leaders of the nomad school system, the nomad school inspectors – Vitalis Karnell (1917–19), Erik Bergström (1920–33), and Axel Calleberg (1933–45) – downplayed this culture-bearing function of Sámi language and instead underscored the progressive function of Swedish language.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 46

2020-12-11 10:23:42

Sweden 47

Karnell was clear about the need of Swedish, and Swedish only, as the language of instruction. His successors had mixed feelings about whether any Sámi language was to be tolerated in the nomad schools. In practice, however, the nomad school inspectors downplayed Sámi language as a language of instruction, since that language was part of the old Sámi way of life that the nomad schools, with their progressive goals, wanted to leave behind. Leading educational authorities considered Sámi language to be lacking the quality of education and progressive functions that were prioritized in the nomad schools. Karnell, Bergström, and Calleberg all concluded that in the long run, only Swedish as a language of instruction could uplift and modernize the livelihoods and way of life of the nomadic reindeer-herding Sámi. What was paramount for these men was that the curriculum and education of the nomad schools was executed as efficiently as possible. The question of the use of Sámi in instruction was always of secondary importance. This explains why there was a certain consistency in the arguments on the functions of language of instruction throughout the period 1900 to 1940. Karnell was against the use of Sámi in principle. Bergström and Calleberg argued in favour of Sámi as a language of instruction beside Swedish, the main language. This question was, however, never a high priority for any of them. Among Sámi teachers and political leaders such Gustav Park, the function of Swedish as the language of equal citizenship gained ground in the 1910s. In the city of Östersund, at the first countrywide meeting of the Swedish Sámi in 1918, Park put forth that the Sámi had the same civic rights and responsibilities as other Swedes. That Swedish was a language of instruction in schools with Sámi pupils was a guarantee of these equal rights and responsibilities. Park was clear on the qualification that this priority of Swedish language applied only in a context where Sámi language thrived in a domestic setting. As exemplified in the complaints of many Sámi parents of pupils during the whole period from the creation of the nomad schools until the system’s gradual dismantling, whenever the survival of Sámi language and culture were threatened, Sámi individuals rose to defend their right to exist alongside Swedish. Where the legislation and the nomad school inspectors considered Sámi a mere auxiliary of instruction, the local practice in tuition varied. Nomad school teachers like Sigrid Rutfjäll and Terese Torgrim reported using Sámi in teaching, whereas other teachers used only

31978_Kortegangas.indd 47

2020-12-11 10:23:42

48

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

Swedish, sometimes supported by sign language or other visual tools. The rather strictly formulated exclusion of Sámi language in the legislative documents did not reflect the reality in all schools. The nomad school inspectors did, however, prioritize Swedish-speaking teachers and the number of solely Swedish-speaking teachers increased from the 1910s to the 1940s, accelerating the language assimilation in schools.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 48

2020-12-11 10:23:42

3 Finland

During the first half of the twentieth century, two parallel school systems administered education for the Finnish Sámi area. The itinerant ecclesial catechist school system run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland had the main responsibility for education until the 1920s. The stationary standard elementary school system run by the Finnish National Board of Schools (F N B S ) expanded to the Sámi areas at quite a moderate pace from the turn of the twentieth century onward. These two systems had very different views on Sámi as a language of instruction. The negative attitude of the standard elementary schools is often ascribed to nationalism and certain ignorance and insensitivity to minority languages. The positive attitude of the ecclesial catechist schools, on the other hand, can be attributed to the Lutheran tradition of using people’s mother tongue in religious instruction. Additionally, there was certain political empathy for the Sámi language rights stemming from the fact that Finnish was, prior to Finland’s independence in 1917, itself a minority language within the Russian Empire.1 Within both systems, considerable leeway existed for Sámi teachers to use Sámi language in the schools. Josef Guttorm and Hans Aslak Guttorm, father and son, are prime examples from the governmental schools. Both proud promotors of Sámi culture, they framed Sámi language as the way to higher “enlightenment” and culture among the Sámi. Finland was the last of the Nordic countries to ratify a law on compulsory education in 1921. A decree from 1871 stated that the language of instruction of the elementary school was to be adapted to the mother tongue of the population being educated. Another decree in 1898 and the law of 1921 both retained this formulation,

31978_Kortegangas.indd 49

2020-12-11 10:23:42

50

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

stating that if a school district had over twenty pupils whose mother tongue was other than Finnish or Swedish, the municipality was obliged to provide education for the pupils in their mother tongue. This paragraph of the law was subordinate to the paragraph stating that if there were less than twenty pupils in a school district, the municipality was not obliged to establish a school in this district, and to the paragraph stating that children living more than five kilometres from the closest school were exempt from mandatory education. A substantial number of Sámi children living in sparsely populated northern Finland were exempt from compulsory education, and a number of ecclesial catechist schools continued to function to educate pupils who were outside of the standard elementary school system. In many cases, the catechist schools provided tuition in Sámi, and they played a considerable role in the elementary education of Sámi children until the mid-twentieth century. When the network of standard elementary schools gradually expanded to Lapland, Finnish came to be the language of instruction in most cases because of educational authorities’ lack of interest in organizing tuition in Sámi and because of the small number of Sámi-speaking teachers available. The number of pupils in standard elementary schools surpassed the number of pupils in the catechist schools in 1927.2 The only standard elementary schools providing tuition in Sámi during the first four decades of the twentieth century were the Utsjoki church village and the Outakoski schools, both located in the municipality of Utsjoki. Apart from these two Utsjoki schools, Sámi was not used as a language of instruction within the standard elementary school system in Finland.3 The standard elementary schools were administered by the F N BS on the national level, the inspector of the elementary schools on the regional level, and the school boards on the local level. The lowest level of administration of the catechist schools were the catechists, who were accountable to the local clergymen. The bishop of the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu was the head of the clergymen. Bishop Juho Rudolf Koskimies held this office from 1900 until 1936, almost the full period treated in this book.

T h e “ A s s im il at iv e S tate I deology” a n d   S á m i P ro tes ts During the period 1900–20, a majority of the pupils in northernmost Finland attended the itinerant ecclesial catechist schools for their

31978_Kortegangas.indd 50

2020-12-11 10:23:42

Finland 51

elementary education. Gradually, the standard elementary schools expanded even to the most sparsely populated northern areas. The office of the inspector of the elementary schools of the district of Lapland, which covered most of the Sámi population area in Finland, was established in 1906, together with twenty-six other district elementary school inspector offices around Finland.4 The first inspector of the elementary schools of the district of Lapland was Kaarlo Kerkkonen (in office 1906–12). Kerkkonen was born, raised, and educated in southern Finland, far removed from the realities of the lives of the Sámi. He was well acquainted with educational issues and policies. A clergyman, Kerkkonen had been the principal of two different folk high schools before accepting employment as the elementary school inspector of the district of Lapland. After his time in Lapland, he worked as the inspector of the school district of Lohja, northwest of Helsinki, from 1912 to 1917. He served simultaneously as an auxiliary member and, since 1917, a full member of the FNBS, the government agency responsible for the development and oversight of education and schools.5 In a 1914 book, Kerkkonen published a summarizing report of his years as elementary school inspector in Lapland. Kerkkonen’s view on the question of language of instruction is clear: according to the inspector, the Sámi themselves understood that “already the material subsistence required that the children learn Finnish.” Claiming to represent a common view among Sámi, Kerkkonen poses the following rhetorical question about using Finnish, rather than Sámi, as a language of instruction: “why deny the children of the poor Lapps the good that is offered to the other children in Finland through elementary schools.” Kerkkonen relates Finnish language to a progression that would bring the blessings of modernization even to northernmost Lapland.6 In his book, Kerkkonen presents himself as positive toward the Sámi language as such. He notes, inaccurately, that Finnish law, unlike the Norwegian one, guaranteed every population the right to receive elementary education in their mother tongue.7 While noting this legal base for education in Sámi, he considers it irrelevant as a language of instruction. To bolster his argument, Kerkkonen refers to the opinion of the Sámi (in the text presented by an “old man” from Utsjoki), who saw no point in providing instruction in Sámi.8 Kerkkonen reasoned that the different Sámi varieties in Finland were so distant from each other that producing teaching material in all varieties was an impossible task. In addition, the Sámi were so few that there was no future for a common Sámi nationality in Finland.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 51

2020-12-11 10:23:42

52

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

Kerkkonen compared the situation with that in Norway, where the number of Sámi was greater and the “national ideology” of the Sámi stronger. However, even in Norway with some “national [Sámi] revival, a couple of small newspapers and some young enthusiastic leaders,” both the elementary school and church policies were inevitably spreading the Norwegian culture and eradicating the Sámi language and culture. Kerkkonen concluded that if this was happening to the larger population of Norwegian Sámi, it was highly improbable that the smaller Sámi population in Finland would survive.9 Kerkkonen paralleled the situation in Norway with that in Finland: he portrayed the assimilation of the Sámi as an inevitable force that would wipe out Sámi language in Finland, as it was doing in Norway, where the Sámi culture was stronger. Kerkkonen stated that the reason assimilation was taking place in Finland and Norway was that the “state ideology” of Norway and Finland prevailed over the “national ideology” of the Sámi. He portrayed this state ideology as an actor in itself with its own purposes, strong and impossible to resist. He also granted the Sámi their own nationality and national ideology. For Kerkkonen, the language of the Sámi nation indeed functioned as a culture-bearing language. The Sámi nationality and culture were, however, perceived to be weaker than the state ideologies of Norway and Finland, which were languages of monolingual10 administration and executed their purposes through church and elementary schools. According to Kerkkonen, these “stronger” ideologies announced the “end [of the Sámi] as a nationality.” Kerkkonen’s quote highlighting the power of the state ideology and the majority languages did not necessarily mean denying the value of Sámi language. Rather, the power of the majority languages rendered Sámi as a language of instruction redundant, with the innate assumption that minority languages without their own states, and consequently without “state languages,” were bound to become extinct.11 Contrary to Kerkkonen’s depiction, language assimilation in Norway and Finland was no natural force. In the case of Norway, it was a highly conscious policy from the state and regional administration. In the case of Finland, it was the result of ignorance and passivity from the authorities regarding the position of Sámi in education. In this particular case, ascribing the responsibility of assimilation to the unstoppable state ideology, Kerkkonen could present himself as neutral and even elegiac about the disappearance of Sámi language and nationality. Indeed, Kerkkonen wrote that the Sámi nationality would

31978_Kortegangas.indd 52

2020-12-11 10:23:42

Finland 53

inevitably die out, even if he himself considered this extinction a lamentable development. Nothing was to be done, such was the power of the state language and state ideology, according to the inspector.12 In the inspector’s overall annual reports that Kerkkonen sent to the FN B S between 1907 and 1912, he included a table on the language of instruction in the elementary schools of Lapland. The language categories were Finnish and Swedish with all pupils in the Finnish column, to little surprise considering that the number of Swedish speakers in Finnish Lapland was minimal. Sámi language was not even given a possibility to exist in Kerkkonen’s handwritten tables. This omission is peculiar, considering that Sámi teacher Josef Guttorm had provided tuition in Sámi in the Outakoski school, in Utsjoki, since 1903.13 Josef Guttorm was one of the most important figures among the few Sámi actors in the sphere of education in the early twentieth century. Guttorm had been hand-picked to become a teacher in Outakoski by Gustaf Johansson, bishop in the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu between 1884 and 1897, who also organized the funding for Guttorm’s studies. Guttorm’s letters to Johansson’s successor, Bishop J.R. Koskimies, reveal that the former was very conscious of the attitude of Kerkkonen and the Finnish educational authorities in general. In 1908, the municipal council of Utsjoki had discussed the founding of a new elementary school in the Utsjoki church village. One of the questions that stirred the most debate was whether this school should have Sámi as a language of tuition. In January 1908, Josef Guttorm expressed in a letter his frustration to Bishop Koskimies that such a point should even be debated. That Sámi language was a topic of disagreement or a stumbling block in Lapland was saddening, according to Guttorm. For him, the insensitive language policies were testament to the wider pattern that, in Finland, the Sámi were currently treated as “nothing else than Lapps, regardless of what we ourselves think.” It is clear how Guttorm used these two terms, Sámi and Lapp, to emphasize the tensions between the Sámi and the Finnish political authorities. At the same time, the debate Guttorm referred to about the language of the Utsjoki church village school cross-cut the Sámi-speaking population of Utsjoki. With the nominations Lapp and Sámi, Guttorm remarked that a number of the Utsjoki Sámi ­supported the use of Finnish rather than Sámi as the language of instruction. This “party” Guttorm called “Lapp-Finns.” According to Guttorm, then, it was partly the pressure from the outside, and partly

31978_Kortegangas.indd 53

2020-12-11 10:23:42

54

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

the conflicting views within the Utsjoki Sámi community that reduced the Sámi to “nothing else than Lapps,” a population that needed not be consulted when decisions were taken over their heads. In this articulation, a certain resemblance can be discerned to teacher Per Fokstad’s writings in Norway. Guttorm, like Fokstad, thought it was the respect and cherishing of the Sámi culture from within the Sámi community that could uplift the “Lapps” into a Sámi people or a Sámi nation (the Finnish word kansa used by Guttorm can mean both people and nation). This uplifting needed to engage the Sámi language as one of its principal tools. Guttorm clearly considered Sámi to have both a culture-bearing and a progressive function; Fokstad shared this view (see chapter 4).14 Guttorm’s letters to Bishop Koskimies together with Kerkkonen’s 1914 book show that various opinions existed among the Sámi about the language of instruction in the schools. Outakoski in Utsjoki was a largely Sámi-speaking environment, where Sámi language and culture were hardly threatened. The whole municipality of Utsjoki had a Sámi-speaking majority population. Also most of the municipal officials, apart from those in the leading posts, were Sámi. In this atmosphere, learning Finnish was regarded as a useful resource, since the children learned Sámi language and ways in any case in the strong Sámi milieu of Outakoski. This attitude is easily comparable to that in Sweden, where Sámi opposition to school policies accepted education in Swedish, if Sámi lived on as a language of everyday life. Both are instances of the added resource function: the Sámi accepted and, in some cases, preferred the majority language as the language of instruction, as long as Sámi language and culture lived on in the Sámi domestic and cultural settings.15 Another reason for the popularity of Finnish among the Sámi of Utsjoki was the fact that Finnish had been the church language of the Sámi in the northernmost regions of Sweden and Finland since the eighteenth century, as discussed in chapter 2. This line of interpretation is supported by the inspection report of the Chapter of the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu for the period 1929–31. A section on Utsjoki in the report and the instruction material there stated that while the instruction was mainly provided in Sámi, the children could choose whether they wanted their catechisms and Bible history books in Finnish or in Sámi; a majority of the pupils chose Finnish books. For the Utsjoki Sámi, Finnish was not only the majority language of the nation state, the borders of which they had rather recently ended up living within. Finnish had had an intelligibility function as the religious language

31978_Kortegangas.indd 54

2020-12-11 10:23:42

Finland 55

3.1  Teacher Josef Guttorm

since most of the Sámi-language religious literature was printed in South Sámi, a language many North Sámi speakers in Utsjoki understood much less readily than Finnish. Due to a long mission tradition in Finnish, it was also the language that conveyed religious contents to the Utsjoki Sámi in the most intelligible manner.16

S á m i, t h e “ S is t e r Language” o f F in ni sh Despite Kaarlo Kerkkonen’s aloof attitude toward Sámi, he wished to allocate a certain space for that language in the standard elementary schools. He noted that the system in the Outakoski elementary school

31978_Kortegangas.indd 55

2020-12-11 10:23:43

56

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

in Utsjoki worked reasonably well, revealing a cautiously positive take on teacher Josef Guttorm’s Sámi-language tuition. In Outakoski, the teaching material was in Finnish, whereas the tuition was carried out in Sámi. Kerkkonen concluded that this kind of functional bilingualism worked for now, but that in a generation or two Finnish language in its “superiority” would suffocate its “sister language.” Kerkkonen concluded, “As sorrowful as it is, there is nothing we can do about it.” With these elegiac and deterministic lines, Kerkkonen closed the discussion on Sámi as a language of instruction. The elegy in Kerkkonen’s statement possibly reveals a strategy for refuting competing arguments on language of instruction. In giving Sámi language a certain space in Outakoski, Kerkkonen was able to present himself on the side of the Sámi, giving tuition in that language a certain degree of legitimacy. In the following lines, however, he stripped the notion of tuition in that very same language of any de facto benefit or function. Since he was positive that the Sámi language (in this case, North Sámi) would disappear soon enough, he could condone tuition in that language as long as it went on, even if it had no importance whatsoever for the pupils in the future.17 Kerkkonen’s use of the expression “sister language” calls for elaboration. Finnish nationalism had a strong political and cultural strand called the Fennoman movement. Supporting the Fennoman movement implied supporting Finnish rather than Swedish as the primary, although not necessarily the exclusive, language of the national elite. The Fennoman movement was born against the backdrop of Russian control over Finland. It gained strength during the latter part of the nineteenth century parallel with intensified centralization measures of the government in Saint Petersburg, called Russification policies by the Fennomans. These policies restricted the Finnish autonomy granted in 1809, when Sweden ceded Finland to Russia. The Fennoman movement included an expansive nationalistic element that maintained the closest Fenno-Ugric peoples to Finland should be brought under Finnish protection or control. The FennoUgric Sámi languages were hence considered domestic in both a cultural sense and a political sense, even if many supporters of Fennoman ideas viewed the Sámi as a population clearly inferior to the Finns. In either case, the “sisterhood” between Finnish and Sámi implied that the school authorities in Finland labelled the Sámi varieties much less clearly as foreign languages than their Swedish and especially Norwegian equivalents did. Kerkkonen’s use of the term

31978_Kortegangas.indd 56

2020-12-11 10:23:43

Finland 57

“sister language” shows that he, in line with Fennoman ideology, acknowledged not only the relationship between Sámi and Finnish but also a clear hierarchy between the two languages, in which Finnish was the language of the future and Sámi a language of the past. Kerkkonen could tolerate Sámi as a language of instruction. Finnish, as the language of state administration in Lapland would in either case gradually take over, even in the schools with Sámi pupils.18 The discussion above shows the ways in which Kerkkonen mixed Fennoman and culturally hierarchizing arguments to circumvent the problem that the “disappearing” Sámi people was related, and thus, according to Fennoman ideology, needed the protection of Finland. Sámi was to be protected in principle, but it was a language without any future function in practice.

S á m i L a n g uag e in t he Borderland Elementary school inspector Kerkkonen was succeeded by Vihtori Lähde (in office 1912–22). Prior to his career as an inspector, Lähde had worked as a teacher in a number of schools in southern and central Finland. He was educated at a teachers’ training course and later at the University of Helsinki.19 Different from Kerkkonen, Lähde mentioned in his reports that Sámi-language tuition was provided in Outakoski and included “Finnish-Lappish” as a category in his tables over pupils attending the elementary schools of Lapland in 1914. The categories in Lähde’s reports were “Finnish, Swedish, Finnish-Swedish and FinnishLappish.” Still, no exclusively Lappish category existed. Apparently, it was possible to have both Finnish and Swedish pupils in the elementary schools in Finland, but not exclusively Lappish pupils. Finnish-Lappish might have indicated some kind of a scale of mixing the languages. Another interpretation is that it was important to mark in Outakoski, right on the Norwegian border, that all of the Lappish pupils in the elementary school were also, and actually foremost, Finnish. In the 1921 report, Lähde described his inspection district, the district of Lapland, which almost entirely bordered Sweden, Norway, and Russia, as either an “especially hopeful” or an “unfathomably dangerous borderland.” Notions of national security as an underlying reason for assimilation policies were strong in Norway. Lähde’s reports suggest they played a certain role even in Finland.20

31978_Kortegangas.indd 57

2020-12-11 10:23:43

58

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

A comment on the Riutula children’s home and boarding school in Inari confirms that Lähde considered Sámi language to have a certain value as a language of instruction. The elementary school in the Riutula home for orphans and poor children was founded in 1915 by the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) of Finland. The main aim of the leaders of the children’s home and school was missionary, to educate children for “God’s kingdom.” In the Finnish Y W C A , an organization separate from but not oppositional to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, Riutula was placed under foreign mission rather than domestic mission. The dividing line between domestic and foreign mission in the YW CA’s case was that foreign mission was conducted among “pagans,” whereas domestic mission targeted lapsed Christians. Even if Riutula was placed under foreign mission and had many Sámi-speaking pupils, Finnish was the only language of instruction. The missionaries were positive toward using Sámi in Christian contexts, but this interest and positivity never translated into hiring Sámi-speaking teachers or hostesses.21 The missionaries encouraged other features of Sámi culture, such as reindeer herding, even if Sámi language was not prioritized. This paradox resembles the idea of the nomad school system in Sweden, where the leaders took good care to ensure that reindeer herding and other features of the nomadic livelihood were included in the curriculum, but the interest in advancing instruction in Sámi language was lukewarm. One of the initiators of the mission in Riutula, Ida Lilius, had followed the mission among the Sámi in Sweden before embarking on a career in Finnish Lapland.22 The teachers and other personnel in Riutula were Finnish, so the connection to Sámi culture was weak. Inspector Lähde considered this a problem and regarded teaching Sámi language and culture an important task for a school with pupils without Sámi-speaking homes to go to after school hours. Again, it is easy to draw a comparison to Sweden, where educational authorities encouraged the use of Sámi in domestic settings. When this possibility did not exist, due to the loss of parents, Lähde was prepared to assign this responsibility to the elementary school in the Riutula children’s home. Even if the leaders of the children’s home and boarding school were not overtly negative toward the use of Sámi language, tuition in Sámi was never put into practice. Rather, Riutula came to be one of the strongest symbols of assimilation of Sámi children in Finnish Lapland. Lähde,

31978_Kortegangas.indd 58

2020-12-11 10:23:43

Finland 59

however, wished for Sámi to be used as a language of instruction, as he deemed it to have a culture-bearing function.23 After ten years in office, Lähde left his post as the inspector of the elementary schools of the district of Lapland in 1922. Following Lähde, the district had three inspectors who each stayed in office for only a few years.

Q ua l it y o f E du c ati on and Sámi as a   L a n g uag e o f I nstructi on In 1930, Antti Hämäläinen was appointed the inspector of elementary schools in the district of Lapland. He stayed in Lapland for seven years thereafter, leaving behind both written and photographed material from his trips in the north. Like his predecessor Kaarlo Kerkkonen in the earliest years of the century, Hämäläinen saw himself fit to represent the Sámi or, more accurately, the Sámi who were in favour of learning Finnish. In his travel memoirs from his years in Lapland, Hämäläinen claimed the majority of the Sámi held the opinion that if their children would not learn the main language of the country, they would “inevitably be left behind.” As with Kerkkonen’s reasoning, Hämäläinen portrayed the majority language and elementary education as the heralding twosome of civilization, even if Hämäläinen himself was undecided on whether or not to preserve Sámi language and culture. Hämäläinen, similarly to Kerkkonen, believed that Sámi language and culture would inevitably disappear and give way to Finnish culture. In this context, special measures to ensure Sámi tuition would have been in vain.24 Hämäläinen was born in Ingria in the Russian Empire, in the southeast corner of the Gulf of Finland. His studies included the Sortavala teachers’ training course in southeastern Finland, before that part of Finland was ceded to the U S S R following the Second World War. Perhaps influenced by his origins in mainly Finnish-speaking Ingria – the area around today’s Saint Petersburg and one of the areas included in the Fennoman dreams of a Greater Finland – Hämäläinen was responsive to Fennoman ideas regarding the protection of other Fenno-Ugric peoples and cultures. He participated in the Estonian War of Independence, and he took great interest in the folklore of his native Ingria as well as in the culture of the Sámi, on which he published both texts and photographs.25

31978_Kortegangas.indd 59

2020-12-11 10:23:43

60

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

One of the main initiatives of Lapin Sivistysseura in Helsinki (see page 12 for more on this society) was to work toward including Sámi as a school subject for the Sámi pupils in the standard elementary school. The F NB S, in its treatment of the subject, wanted to hear the opinion of the school boards in Lapland, as well as Hämäläinen’s view on the issue. Hämäläinen stated that he could not support the proposition, since the school boards did not unanimously support it. Hämäläinen added that since the differences between the Sámi dialects in Finland were so great, it would have been difficult to apply the proposition. Hämäläinen thus withdrew his support, as did the FNBS that chose to discard the initiative from Lapin Sivistysseura.26 Hämäläinen did, however, suggest the establishment of a wholly new school in Paatsjoki in Inari, to cater to the needs of Inari Sámispeaking pupils. Hämäläinen’s suggestion was possibly not meant seriously: the initiative was expensive and for this reason was not supported by the FNBS.27 Hämäläinen’s suggestion can also be viewed in light of the priority of quality of education. As inspector, Hämäläinen wished for no half-hearted initiatives for introducing Sámi as a language of instruction, since these could lower the quality of tuition. A school designed for Sámi pupils would be a more manageable unit, also from the point of view of quality education. For the elementary school inspector, equality and egalitarianism meant maximum emphasis on the universal quality of tuition.

S á m i E du c ati on: A C h o ic e b e t w e e n t h e  Man of Culture a n d t h e R e in d e er Herder? Antti Hämäläinen and Frans Saarelma (in office 1930–32), the elementary school inspector of the Länsipohja district, south and west of Hämäläinen’s district, both debated whether or not education should be adapted to the life of the Sámi. Hämäläinen, in his book Tunturien mailta, describes his years in Lapland and contrasts the views of the Finns who were positive toward preserving Sámi language and culture and the Sámi who were in favour of the expansion of Finnish language and culture. According to Hämäläinen, the group of Finns working to protect Sámi language included such personalities as Inari vicar Tuomo Itkonen. This group maintained that “the Lapps that leave behind their own way of life and become Finnish cannot carry out their main

31978_Kortegangas.indd 60

2020-12-11 10:23:43

Finland 61

livelihood, reindeer herding, as efficiently. And without it, they cannot survive in the harsh struggle with the Finns, but collapse little by little and vanish.” This would be lamentable not only economically but also because the preservation of Sámi culture was “an interesting feature for scientific research.” Hämäläinen describes the views of the Sámi who wanted to learn Finnish: if the Sámi would not learn Finnish, they would admittedly maintain their language, but at the same time, they would preserve their “primitive culture” and be left behind from civilization. Hämäläinen designated Sámi as a language of instruction to have a culture-bearing function. However, as this culture was “primitive,” providing education in Sámi would in fact damage the Sámi. It is difficult to conclude whether Hämäläinen was making reference to an actual group of Sámi who held this view. It seems, in either case, that this latter view was the one Hämäläinen himself adhered to.28 Frans Saarelma presented his ideas in a discussion at the meeting of the teachers of the district of Lapland in 1930. The chair of the meeting was Antti Hämäläinen. The meeting attendees discussed the issue of whether the boarding facilities in the Sámi areas should be modelled according to Sámi or Finnish customs. Saarelma considered boarding schools the only rational way to organize elementary education in the sparsely populated Sámi areas in the future. Another point of discussion was whether the hostesses of the residence buildings should be Sámi- or Finnish-speaking. Saarelma presented two contrasting points in a manner quite similar to Hämäläinen’s: “First: We want to preserve the Lapps as Lapps, as pristine persons. In this case we believe that culture will spoil the Lapp women and men. If we think thus, let us have some uneducated Lapp woman as the hostess of the boarding facilities. Second: would it not, even if culture causes damage and unhappiness, be wrong to prevent culture from spreading?”29 After presenting these two points, Saarelma concluded that the choice of future policies was completely dependent on whether the task was to “educate the Lapps to reindeer herders, or to a people of culture.” Apart from the fact that Saarelma did not consider the Sámi way of life a true culture, he also believed this way of life was best conveyed by Sámi hostesses, in Sámi. Both Hämäläinen and Saarelma considered Sámi as a language of instruction to have a culture-bearing function. The “culture” this language would transmit seems not to have been worth preserving in the articulations of the two inspectors.30

31978_Kortegangas.indd 61

2020-12-11 10:23:44

62

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

Hämäläinen’s and Saarelma’s arguments resemble the articulations of the nomad school inspectors in Sweden: Sámi was considered a culture-bearing language, yet the culture behind the language was hardly worth preserving. In contrast to these nomad school inspectors, Hämäläinen and Saarelma did not give reindeer herding high priority. This is testament to the contextual factor that agriculture was, in the eyes of these inspectors, the livelihood of choice even in northernmost Finland. In Sweden, as we have seen, the educational authorities considered reindeer herding the only livelihood that could render productive the mountainous Swedish Sámi areas.

T h e 1 9 3 8 C o mmi ttee a n d V ic a r T u o m o I tkonen A 1938 governmental committee appointed to develop the economic conditions of Lapland reported on the question of language of education. Among the members of the committee was Tuomo Itkonen, the Inari vicar and author of the North Sámi ABC book. According to the committee, the Sámi in Finland had almost perfectly adapted to the Finnish culture and way of life. Given this, the committee supported the idea of at least some Sámi-language teaching in elementary schools with Sámi pupils. The committee also supported the idea of printing Sámi-language teaching material, stating that societal attention should generally be directed toward enabling the Sámi people to “satisfy their need of cultivation” also in their own language. To reach this goal, the report suggested that the elementary schools of Lapland with Sámi-speaking pupils would provide tuition in their mother tongue. In this articulation, cultivation and Sámi language are positively correlated, contrary to the earlier views of Hämäläinen and Saarelma in which Sámi language and culture were discrete from higher culture. Nevertheless, the function was the same: Sámi in schools was a link to Sámi culture. Still, the fundamental assumption of the 1938 committee was that the Sámi were first and foremost Finnish, as they were almost perfectly adapted to Finnishness. If this condition was secured in the schools, then Sámi pupils could receive some tuition in their mother tongue. The committee confirmed in their report this connection between primary Finnishness and secondary Sáminess, stating that Sámi culture was a valuable part of “the common cultural capital of the people of Finland.” Whether Sámi was used in the schools in

31978_Kortegangas.indd 62

2020-12-11 10:23:44

Finland 63

practice is a different question. Tuomo Itkonen reports in his 1970 memoirs that the committee’s suggestions for measures to support Sámi language varieties in standard elementary schools were totally ignored by the government.31 Itkonen was well acquainted with Sámi culture: he was one of the founding members of Lapin Sivistysseura. Itkonen, himself vicar of Inari, was the son of Lauri Arvid Itkonen, an earlier vicar of the same parish. According to his memoirs, as a schoolboy Itkonen already identified more with the Inari locals, whether Sámi- or Finnishspeaking, than with teachers from southern Finland.32 One of the most notable manifestations of the general interest Itkonen took in Sámi culture was the publication of Samikiel Abis, an alphabet book in the most widely spoken Sámi language variety, North Sámi. Itkonen encountered many hurdles when trying to finance and publish the book, and he reported in 1970 that he had received hardly any support from the government of Finland. His persistence led to the book’s publication in 1935.33 In his memoirs, Itkonen accounted for his reasons for writing the book. Itkonen’s deep interest in Sámi language and culture led to actions for Sámi language both locally, considering the Inari Sámi variety, and generally. In the memoirs, he described an experiment he had carried out among the Sámi in the Angeli village in Inari. In 1929, he had held some pre-confirmation instruction for a number of Sámi youngsters there. As teaching material, he used the catechism and Bible history book translated into Sámi by Vicar Aukusti Hakkarainen in the first decade of the twentieth century. Itkonen reported, referring to the intelligibility function of Sámi as a language of instruction: “the most talented pupils learned to read in their mother tongue astonishingly quickly and even the slowest learned at least to spell in a fully satisfying manner.” His auxiliary teacher was a Sámi man, Juhani Jomppanen. After the experiment in Angeli, Itkonen travelled to Outakoski, where he held a service in the Outakoski elementary school. Itkonen highlighted the importance of the full intelligibility of teaching or preaching. In Outakoski, the local teacher Josef Guttorm interpreted the service from Finnish to North Sámi. The congregation sang psalms in North Sámi in an “extraordinarily forceful manner.” It was obvious, noted Itkonen, “how much the mother tongue was loved here.” Itkonen paraphrases his auxiliary teacher Jomppanen, stating that for Sámi speakers, hearing a sermon in Finnish was like “a soup

31978_Kortegangas.indd 63

2020-12-11 10:23:44

64

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

without salt.” Itkonen pointed out that these experiences made him realize more than ever that education in the mother tongue of the Sámi children was both necessary and beneficial.34 Itkonen actively tried to expand the use of Sámi in tuition in ways other than the publication of the A B C book. In 1930, he managed to get funding from the Chapter of the Diocese of Oulu to send two of the Inari catechists, Laura Lehtola and Agneta Valle, to Outakoski in the summer to study Sámi for five weeks with Josef Guttorm. The application for funding was first discarded by the F N B S but was accepted by the chapter after a second attempt. As Itkonen concluded in his memoirs, these problems demonstrated how improbable it was that teachers in the standard elementary schools, administered by the F N B S and not by the chapter, would ever get funding for learning Sámi. This reflects the wider context of education and language policies in Finland during the first half of the twentieth century. The initiatives toward using Sámi in the schools were propelled by enthusiastic individuals and were in most cases ignored by the government and the educational authorities.35

S á m i T e ac h e rs a n d S á mi Li terature in   F in l a nd During the first half of the twentieth century, of all the standard elementary schools of Lapland, only the two Utsjoki schools (the Outakoski school and, from 1929 onward, the Utsjoki church village school) had Sámi teachers. Elementary school inspector Antti Hämäläinen mentioned the schools in his inspection report for the fall term of 1933, noting that tuition was provided in Sámi in both schools.36 Also, in many other areas in Lapland the school districts had enough Sámi children to require tuition in Sámi according to the law of 1921 stating that if a school district had more than twenty pupils with a mother tongue other than Finnish or Swedish, the municipality was obliged to provide education in that language. However, initiatives toward widening instruction in Sámi met with either passive or active opposition from the educational authorities.37 Josef Guttorm’s son Hans Aslak Guttorm continued his father’s work as a teacher in the Outakoski elementary school. He used Sámi in teaching, as his father had done. Hans Aslak was also a writer, and he actively defended the language and culture of the Sámi. Hans Aslak published poems and short stories in North Sámi, such as the 1941

31978_Kortegangas.indd 64

2020-12-11 10:23:44

Finland 65

book Koccam spalli (The Rising Gust of Wind) that depicted the everyday life of Sámi people in the Finnish-Norwegian borderland. He also published a proposal for the national anthem of the Sámi people, although his version did not make it to the official Sámi anthem. That honour was granted to the contribution of Guttorm’s fellow Sámi teacher Isak Saba, across the national border in Norway. Hans Aslak Guttorm was one of the founding members of the Samii Litto, the first organization of the Sámi in Finland, founded in 1945. In short, Guttorm had considerable influence on the development of Sámi culture.38 In 1939, Hans Aslak Guttorm published the article “Sabmelažža arvu” (“On the Value of the Sámi”) in the Sámi-language periodical Sabmelaš (the Sámi). This periodical, published in Finland since 1934, offered a forum for Sámi writers, mainly from Finland but also internationally, to share their ideas. Even if Sabmelaš functioned as a cultural forum for Sámi writers, the publisher, Lapin Sivistysseura, a society founded in Helsinki in 1932, was in its early years (in the 1930s and 1940s) a society of mostly Finnish rather than Sámi intellectuals. However, the society aimed to develop and protect Sámi language and culture in Finland.39 In the article “Sabmelažža arvu,” Hans Aslak Guttorm defended the value of the Sámi people, contrary to any claims that the Sámi would be different from other “enlightened people.” The article depicted not being enlightened as leading a pagan and non-Christian way of life. Guttorm dispelled any such claims and concluded that the Sámi were a civilized Christian people with the same value as any other people. This kind of depiction about the Sámi as a distinct people, not in relation to other nations or states and not as a minority within a nation state, resembles the ideas of the Norwegian Sámi teacher Per Fokstad, discussed in chapter 4.40 Hans Aslak Guttorm’s literary work connected him to a network of Sámi teachers across the Sámi area who created Sámi literature and contributed to the emergence of a Sámi public sphere in the early twentieth century. One of the first teachers-cum-authors was Pedar Jalvi, also from the culturally vibrant Sámi village of Outakoski in Utsjoki, Finland. Jalvi worked as a journalist and collected Sámi folklore. Due to his untimely death, Jalvi’s work as a teacher as well as his literary production were cut short. In his brief career, he was one of the Sámi writers who applied a transnational Sámi framework, notably in his poem and short story collection Muohtačálmmit

31978_Kortegangas.indd 65

2020-12-11 10:23:44

66

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

(Snowflakes, or Muottačalmit according to an older North Sámi orthography). The poem that shares the book’s title can be interpreted as depicting the Sámi national awakening of the early twentieth century in the metaphor of a snowfall, where the flakes, symbolizing the Sámi in different countries, melt in the warming spring sunshine to form streams, lakes and, eventually, seas.41 For these teachers and writers, Sámi clearly held a culture-bearing and a progressive function. The language was at the root of uplifting a whole culture. The seeds to this uplifting were ideally to be planted in the elementary schools, in Sámi.

T h e C at e c h is t Schools in F in n is h L apland If the nomad school of Sweden was in a number of ways a new version of earlier ecclesial school forms, the catechist school system in Finland was a direct continuation of the school forms implemented by the Church of Sweden from the seventeenth century onward. The fact that the itinerant catechist schools administered by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland42 had the main responsibility for elementary education in northern Finland until the 1920s, and provided a part of elementary education until the years following the Second World War, meant essentially two things. First, the children attending ecclesial elementary schools received an education that was inferior in duration and curriculum to that provided through the standard elementary school system. Second, the catechist school system ran parallel to the administration of the growing network of standard elementary schools. Given that the ecclesial schools were under the administration of the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu, the leading school authority in this area was the chapter,43 local vicars made up the middle level, and finally the itinerant church teachers, the catechists, formed the teacher collective. The catechists were the face of the church toward the locals in the areas without village churches to attend regularly. They gained a fabulous reputation as all-around persons, working as teachers, substitute clergymen, and even substitute midwives and doctors when no medically trained person was around.44 Until 1927, a majority of schoolchildren in the Finnish Sámi areas received their education in the ecclesial itinerant catechist schools. The teachers of these schools, the catechists, were most often local people, either Sámi or Finnish speakers, who had completed a one-year formal

31978_Kortegangas.indd 66

2020-12-11 10:23:44

Finland 67

3.2  Sámi poet and teacher Pedar Jalvi, 1905

education at the teachers’ training course for itinerant school teachers, or had no formal teachers’ education at all, apart from short courses with local vicars. According to a guideline from 1915 formalizing earlier practices, the yearly tuition period for a catechist was thirty-six weeks. Travelling between far-flung Sámi villages, the catechists were to spend six weeks in each village of their district.45 In the documents considering the catechist schools of the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu, the ecclesial school authorities presented as an unproblematic fact that both Sámi and Finnish were in use in a number of catechist schools, mainly in the Utsjoki and Inari areas. This is not surprising, considering that Bishop Koskimies and a number – although not all – of the local vicars had a positive attitude toward Sámi as a language of instruction, which led to an ameliorating language situation among the catechists in the early years of the twentieth century. Bishop Koskimies and the Language of Instruction in the Catechist Schools The bishops of the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu, Gustaf Johansson and his successor J.R. Koskimies, sympathized to a certain degree with

31978_Kortegangas.indd 67

2020-12-11 10:23:46

68

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

the language and culture of the Sámi. This was also true of some of the vicars in Finnish Lapland, notably Tuomo Itkonen in Inari. This positive attitude was reflected in the Sámi skills of the catechists. The chapter of the diocese encouraged local Sámi-speaking youngsters to become catechists, as chapters in Sweden and Finland had done for centuries.46 Bishop Juho Rudolf Koskimies, the bishop of Finland’s northernmost diocese between 1900 and 1936, was interested in Fennoman ideology. He was a member of Akateeminen Karjala-Seura (Academic Karelia Society), a Fennoman elite society with dreams of annexing adjacent areas with Fenno-Ugric populations to Finland. Following the example of many Fennoman-influenced members of the Finnish early twentieth-century intelligentsia, Koskimies changed his Swedish surname (Forsman) to the Finnish Koskimies in the early years of the twentieth century.47 He acknowledged the importance of Sámi children learning Finnish, even if he promoted the use of Sámi in schools. Koskimies believed that mastering Finnish was beneficial in “all worldly affairs,” as he stated during a bishop’s visitation in Inari in 1902.48 If Finnish was beneficial for “all worldly affairs,” Sámi had a different function to Koskimies’s reasoning. In 1919, Bishop Koskimies wrote to Det Norske Bibelselskap (Norwegian Bible Society) to ask about purchasing Sámi-language Bibles and New Testaments from Norway. Koskimies reported that no translations for said books were available in Finland, and the Sámi population in Finland remained in a “relatively low cultural position,” lacking access to the holy books in their own mother tongue. Koskimies hence articulated a positive correlation between access to the Gospel in Sámi and the prospects of a higher cultural standing. Sámi culture, in Koskimies’s view, was worth preserving, and this was best carried out in Sámi language. The culture-bearing and progressive functions of Sámi language were clearly formulated, whereas the bishop portrayed Finnish as having an added resource function in all worldly affairs in Finland.49 Why was the Sámi language worth preserving then? Bishop Koskimies advised the vicars of his diocese to learn to use the mother tongue of the churchgoers. During a bishop’s visitation in the Utsjoki parish in 1907, he tried to persuade the local vicar P.R. Heikinheimo to learn some Sámi. According to the minutes of the visitation, “no external law” stipulated that the vicar should learn Sámi. “But there is one law” that obliged the clergy to preach in Sámi, reminded the

31978_Kortegangas.indd 68

2020-12-11 10:23:46

Finland 69

bishop: “the law of love.” Koskimies was probably referring to the famous Bible passage in Galatians 5:14, which states that the only law that really matters is the command to “love your neighbour as yourself.”50 Citing Biblical support for preserving Sámi language may be unsurprising from a bishop. However, there could have been a certain national security aspect in Koskimies’s rationale. His predecessor, Bishop Gustaf Johansson, saw a soft power national security function in allowing Sámi language to flourish. According to Johansson, keeping the Sámi content secured their loyalty to the Finnish state in the northern areas bordering several other nation states. This soft power function was also underscored by Johansson’s and Koskimies’s colleague Eivind Berggrav across the border in the Diocese of Hålogaland in Norway. Historians Knut Einar Eriksen and Einar Niemi describe this function aptly with the Latin motto ubi bene, ibi patria.51 Among the clergy in northern Finland, the soft power function was also related to a certain political argument for preserving and protecting Sámi language. The status of Finnish was at times repressed under Russian rule. The meeting minutes of the Chapter of the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu stated in 1920 that since Finland had “with the help of God” been liberated from language oppression, it was only righteous to support instruction in Sámi. The argument is comparable to inspector Kerkkonen’s articulations insofar as the chapter portrayed the Sámi as a discrete nationality and culture. Contrary to Kerkkonen, however, the chapter supported and recommended instruction in Sámi and the preservation of this culture and its language. Bishop Koskimies noted in 1907 that “for a people, their own language is such a treasure, that wherever a people grasp its value, they hold it as their most important thing.”52 It should be noted for a full understanding of the context that not all clergymen or church authorities were open-heartedly positive toward the use of Sámi in elementary education. The fact that bishop Koskimies had to encourage his clergymen to learn the language of their parishioners suggests that there were, in many cases, pragmatic and motivational obstacles to learning Sámi.53 The Catechist School: Sámi Teachers Wanted The meeting minutes for the Chapter of the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu showed the group preferred Sámi-speaking catechists to Finnish

31978_Kortegangas.indd 69

2020-12-11 10:23:46

70

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

speakers in the Sámi areas. In 1912, when introducing candidates to fill a number of new catechist’s positions, the chapter emphasized the importance of knowledge of the local conditions and skills in Sámi language. Vicar Itkonen, from Inari, recommended Anna “Anni” Aikio (called Anni Kitti after marrying) for the fourth catechist’s position in the Inari parish since she knew both of the Sámi varieties spoken in the area (North Sámi and Inari Sámi). Vicar Pekka Harald Heickell, from Sodankylä, recommended Sabina Kangas to be the fourth catechist in the Sodankylä parish. This fourth catechist would have the partly Sámi-speaking Sompio region as her work field. Heickell endorsed Kangas because she understood and was acquainted with the people and the region with all its hardships. According to the vicar, she would also be able to quickly learn Sámi. In the articulations of Vicar Heickell and the chapter, knowing the local language, people, and conditions made a good teacher for the children in the catechist schools. The chapter followed the recommendations of the vicars and hired both Aikio and Kangas.54 In the annual report for the catechist schools in 1920, the chapter again considered candidates for catechists’ positions. The chapter now doubted the competence of two catechists (one in Inari and the other one in Utsjoki) who taught in Sámi but were “Finnish-born.” For this reason, the chapter was not fully convinced “to what extent and how successfully” these catechists were able to teach in Sámi. The chapter prioritized native-level Sámi skills over formal competence among the teachers for reasons of intelligibility.55 Arguments for the use of Sámi as a language of instruction in the catechist schools came not only from an ecclesial source. In 1906, a governmental committee was appointed to continue the work of an earlier committee (established in 1901) to further the economic development of Lapland. Among the members of the committee was N.W. Holmberg, a Sámi-Finnish bilingual catechist who worked in Utsjoki for a long period. In its published report from 1908, the committee emphasized that farming and keeping livestock rather than herding reindeer was the most secure source of income for the inhabitants of Lapland in the future; it also underscored the role of the catechist schools in the sparsely populated northern areas. What is more, the report stated that instruction was to be provided in Sámi at least in the catechist schools in the Utsjoki and Paatsjoki (in Inari) districts, and preferably even in the standard elementary schools of these districts. The report paired the national economic ideal of farming with a

31978_Kortegangas.indd 70

2020-12-11 10:23:46

Finland 71

recommendation for continued use of Sámi in the schools, possibly because the report included opinions from its different members. In either case, the contrast to Sweden and the reasoning of the planners and authorities of the nomad school system could not be starker. The ideal citizen educated in the nomad school was a reindeer herder who spoke Swedish, whereas the ideal of the Finnish catechist school, according to the 1908 report, was a sedentary farmer who spoke Sámi.56 Still another committee report from 1929 recommended that the catechist school should continue to play a substantial role in the elementary education of children in Lapland due to the locals’ positive attitude toward the catechist schools and the sparse population. (As a reminder, the 1921 law stated that pupils living further than five kilometres from the nearest elementary school were exempt from compulsory education in standard elementary schools.)57 Language Pragmatism in the Catechist Schools Judging by the Finnish-speaking catechist Laura Lehtola and the Sámi-speaking catechist Anni Kitti (née Anna Aikio), both working in the Inari parish, the world view of the catechists corresponded with their employment in the service of the Lutheran Church. Both wrote their memoirs, Lehtola in an almost 200-page book titled Viimeinen katekeetta (The Last Catechist) and Kitti in an 11-page leaflet published in Inari Sámi and Finnish by the parish of Inari, called Oovt sámmilii máttááttijjee eellim kuáttá – Erään saamelaisopettajan elämästä (On the Life of a Sámi Teacher). Both memoirs, with clear religious undertones, were published in 1984. Lehtola, originally a Finnish-speaker, viewed as self-evident adapting to the mother tongue of her students and teaching in that language, whether it was Finnish or Sámi. Reciting a discussion she reported having with the Finnish-minded standard elementary school teacher Olga Huurre in Inari, Lehtola noted that for herself, it had always been obvious that she would teach a child “in the language and by those means that she/he best understands.” Given that Lehtola looked back at discussions from decades before she wrote her memoirs, there is of course the possibility she portrayed herself in an exaggeratedly positive light. However, the same kind of pragmatism regarding the intelligibility of the teaching situation apparent in catechist Lehtola’s reported teaching methods comes across in the 1912 report as well as the minutes of the Chapter of the Diocese of

31978_Kortegangas.indd 71

2020-12-11 10:23:46

72

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

Oulu, which was ultimately in charge of the catechist schools of Lapland, as discussed previously.58 Notwithstanding the above, Laura Lehtola expressed reservation in her memoirs as to whether it had been the right choice to let the Sámi languages flourish in the catechist schools. Lehtola referred to an unnamed Namibian politician who had criticized the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland for supporting the local languages in its missionary activities in Namibia. According to the politician, it would have been better to use English from the very beginning. Lehtola commented, “This same church has, in our own catechist schools, favored the languages of Lapland. I wonder whether we also here have done a disservice?” This quote is part of a wider discussion in which Lehtola also treated the subject of the expanding standard elementary school system. She postulated that, in contrast to the catechist schools, the standard elementary schools showed little consideration for “Sámi language and Sámi way of life,” and that “foreign culture,” that is, Finnish culture, gained a “crushing predominance” in these schools. At the same time, Lehtola admitted that the advent of the standard elementary school had been a great advancement to the locals. For Lehtola, Finnish culture was designated as foreign, thus revealing that she considered Sámi language and culture in the Sámi regions as the norm. The function of Sámi was the preservation of the original Sámi culture. Finnish, however, Lehtola portrayed as the language of progress and advancement.59 Anni Kitti described in her memoirs how she became a catechist teacher. Before hiring Kitti, the parish of Inari employed three catechists, one of them teaching in Sámi. The Inari parish school district was too expansive for only three teachers to cover, and the chapter decided that a fourth was needed. This fourth catechist needed to be able to teach in both Inari and North Sámi, be at least eighteen years old, and have finished elementary school. Since Kitti was qualified, she was hired and sent to the town of Hämeenlinna in southern Finland to attend a teachers’ training course for itinerant schools. In Kitti’s Inari Sámi-Finnish bilingual memoirs, the language question is in no way portrayed as complicated. This substantiates earlier testimonies of the unproblematic position of Finnish and Sámi language varieties existing as parallel languages of instruction in the catechist schools. The language of the pupils was the most natural choice since this made teaching as intelligible as possible.60

31978_Kortegangas.indd 72

2020-12-11 10:23:46

Finland 73

In conclusion, within the catechist school system administered by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, Sámi was in use rather widely and commonly. There was a certain pragmatism in the articulations on the language of instruction. The position of Sámi language was never really debated or discussed. This pragmatism stemmed from the long history of the church in the field of Sámi education, and the principle that the most efficient way of distributing the Gospel was to use the vernacular language, Sámi. This traditional Lutheran pragmatism stands in stark contrast to the following discussion on the use of Sámi in the schools of Finnish Petsamo, subject to Finnish modernization and colonization initiatives.

S á m i T e ac hers : A g e n t s o f In d ir e c t Rule i n Petsamo? Finnish Petsamo is a narrow strip of land that reached from modernday northeastern Finland to the Arctic Ocean. The area, now part of Russia, was part of Finland between 1920 and 1947. The majority of the population of Petsamo (53 per cent in the early 1920s) was of Orthodox denomination, setting it apart from the rest of the overwhelmingly Lutheran Finland. Among the Orthodox population of Petsamo, the Sámi counted a few hundred and were part of a population called Skolt Sámi that lived on both sides of the Finnish/Soviet border. The Sámi of Petsamo lived under Russian rule for centuries and then under Finnish rule in Finnish Petsamo until a majority of them were “evacuated” to Finland after the Second World War. The Finnish Petsamo included three Sámi villages. Two of the villages were under great assimilative pressure because of Finnish agricultural colonization. The third village, Suonikylä (Suõ nnjel in Skolt Sámi), was viewed by Finnish politicians and cultural authorities as a Sámi village in a very original state. Suonikylä became a target for preservationist segregation projects. Discussions on elementary education were a part of this enthusiasm for preservation. Suonikylä preservation ideas and the educational parts of it are some of the clearest examples of early twentieth-century Nordic educational authorities and intellectuals actively seeking models for Sámi education outside the borders of the nation state. The Suonikylä Sámi themselves were active in asking for protection for their ancient rights and lifestyle. All protection plans fell through when Finland had to cede the Petsamo area to the Soviet Union after the Second World War.61

31978_Kortegangas.indd 73

2020-12-11 10:23:46

74

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

The most active supporter of the Suonikylä project was the Lapin Sivistysseura. The driving force of the protection project within the society was Karl Nickul, its secretary. Nickul’s ethnographic interest in Suonikylä developed somewhat accidentally, as he came into contact with Skolt Sámi culture first as a geodesist, mapping the area that in 1920 had come under Finnish rule. Nickul stated the key issue of educating the Skolt Sámi in a very clear and concise manner, which was “how civilized nations should treat primitive peoples.” Nickul discussed this issue in letters he sent to several prominent scientists and scholars, such as professors and scholars at Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris. Nickul also consulted philosopher Bertrand Russell, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (USA), the National Research Council (U SA ), and the Progressive Education Association (U S A).62 Apart from the international correspondence, Nickul’s collections contain letters from locals in Petsamo, including the Finnish elementary school teacher Anni Tattari in Suonikylä. As a teacher in the Skolt Sámi area, she was acquainted with the Suonikylä question on a very practical level. Tattari was not of Sámi origin, but she was Orthodox like the majority of the Skolt Sámi. She also learned Skolt Sámi, even if it is unclear whether she used it in tuition.63 Tattari’s descriptions of the Skolts, especially the Skolt children, ranged from maternalistically protective to moralizing and hierarchizing arguments. In a letter to Nickul, Tattari wondered whether the Skolt Sámi should have any elementary education at all, or if they should be left alone to be educated by the wilderness they inhabited. While answering her own ponderings, she formulated her idea of what should be the core content of elementary education among the Sámi: “If you think of school as a fosterer, a fosterer of a steadfast, decent character, if it could leave some good principle in the heart of a Skolt child, or if it would leave some good piece of knowledge, that would help him/her in a more practical manner in the questions of his/hers life, then the school would serve a purpose even in Suonikylä, still without damaging the Skolt culture.” In Tattari’s assessment, higher education is portrayed as damaging to the Skolt culture. The role education should play here, according to Tattari, was to help the Sámi be more Sámi. In this way, Tattari’s perspective resembles that of nomad school inspector Vitalis Karnell, who wanted the nomad schools to educate the reindeer-herding Sámi in Sweden into better and healthier reindeer-herding Sámi.64

31978_Kortegangas.indd 74

2020-12-11 10:23:46

Finland 75

The Petsamo area was, in a way, a concentrated laboratory of the ideas Finnish educational authorities had on educating the Sámi. When it comes to discussion of the role the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland played in education, Petsamo was a special case. Clergyman F.E. Lilja had the task of organizing and coordinating the ecclesial activities and structures in the Petsamo area. In the early 1920s, Lilja combined this work with his employment as elementary school inspector of the region. In the 1920s, the Petsamo area had around 1,500 inhabitants. The biggest ethnic group was Finns. Apart from them, Karelians,65 Sámi (mostly Skolt Sámi), and Russian groups inhabited the area. A slight majority of the population in Petsamo was of Orthodox confession, including a great number of the Skolt Sámi, which means the Lutheran Lilja did not have direct contact with the majority of the Skolt Sámi through the church. However, as the elementary school inspector, he was in charge of the education of the Sámi as a part of the total population. In the 1920s, three elementary schools were running in Petsamo. All of them had Finnish as the language of tuition, as Armas Aavikko, the elementary school inspector of the area after Lilja, reported in 1922.66 In his yearly report from 1921, Lilja himself remarked to the FNBS in Helsinki about problems in the schools. The tuition could not be carried out full-scale, due to the “original and undeveloped character of the pupils and to the complete lack of school experience.” Another reason for poor learning results was that a number of the pupils had poor skills in Finnish, the language of tuition. Judging by the memoirs of Hilja Vartiainen, the first teacher in Suonikylä, the solution was to use an interpreter and make the pupils work hard to learn Finnish, as well as to use some simple phrases in Sámi to encourage the students to listen to the teacher. Here, through the intelligibility function, Sámi was reserved as an auxiliary language for learning the contents of the curriculum, including the Finnish language.67 Karl Nickul regarded the intelligibility and learning issues in the schools as a significant failure, and he wanted to educate a teacher for the Skolt Sámi among the population itself. In April 1941, Nickul wrote to teacher Jaakko Pohjola, Tattari’s successor as the teacher in the Suonikylä elementary school, asking whether it would be possible to find a Sámi pupil for future studies at a teachers’ training course. Early in 1941, Nickul also wrote to his Skolt Sámi friend Jaakko Sverloff about the matter. In the letter, Nickul stated that besides having a teacher, Skolt Sámi youngsters should be educated to other

31978_Kortegangas.indd 75

2020-12-11 10:23:46

76

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

offices with societal importance. As a positive example, he mentioned the Sámi teachers Josef and Hans Aslak Guttorm, and their work in elementary education in Outakoski, Utsjoki, where they provided instruction in North Sámi. Nickul’s idea about staffing some of the local government offices with Sámi employees evokes the British indirect rule practised in the colonies. In 1933, Nickul contacted British anthropologist Lucy Mair about the principles of indirect rule. He received a number of reading recommendations from Mair, including The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa by Frederick Lugard and Principles of Native Administration and their Application by Donald Cameron. In his letter to Mair, Nickul thanked her for the pieces of information on the indirect rule and especially for her interest in the Suonikylä project to “protect the Skolt culture.” He closed the letter by stating that it was “very encouraging for us to know that people, who are already engaged in the protection of primitive people, are in sympathy with us.” The correspondence between Mair and Nickul suggests a connection between ideas of progressive education, educating Sámi teachers, and the principle of indirect rule.68 In general, the use of Skolt Sámi in tuition in Petsamo was a question that did not evoke strong emotions. The teachers, and especially Hilja Vartiainen, reported the difficulties with the Skolt Sámi not knowing any Finnish when they started school. However, as discussed above, the solution was to exclude Sámi from tuition, apart from its role as a mere auxiliary of learning Finnish, the main language of instruction. Nickul’s push to educate and hire teachers among the Suonikylä Sámi is, however, to be interpreted as an initiative toward providing tuition in Skolt Sámi. The function of Sámi language and native teachers was, for Nickul, the preservation of the Suonikylä Sámi culture he so highly admired, albeit from a social standing that was above the Sámi themselves. When the USSR claimed Petsamo and Finland had to cede it after the Second World War, the region had been a part of Finland for about twenty years. Due to this short period of Skolt-Finnish history, the great majority of the Skolt Sámi population of Petsamo was evacuated to Finland. In the eyes of Finnish authorities, although not necessarily according to the locals in northern Finland, in only twenty years, the Sámi of Petsamo had become “our Sámi,” who needed to be evacuated out of the way of the Russians.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 76

2020-12-11 10:23:46

Finland 77

C o n c l u si ons The duality of the elementary school system in Finland is apparent in the functions that regional authorities of both the standard and the ecclesial elementary schools envisioned the languages of instruction to have. Much like the nomad school inspectors of Sweden, the elementary school inspectors prioritized quality of education. Moreover, even if the Finnish inspectors, such as Kaarlo Kerkkonen and Antti Hämäläinen, portrayed themselves as positive toward Sámi language as such, they were convinced that, in the long run, the progress elementary education was to bring about could only be reached in Finnish. The superficially positive attitude toward Sámi as a language of instruction had at least partly nationalist undertones. Finnish nationalism included an expansive element that treated the FennoUgric Sámi as a “sister language,” in the words of Kerkkonen. This sisterhood was, however, clearly conditioned and hierarchical. Josef Guttorm and Hans Aslak Guttorm, teaching in Sámi at the standard elementary school of Outakoski, Utsjoki, held a different opinion about which language of instruction had a more progressive function. According to the Guttorms, the Sámi could uplift their own culture only in Sámi language and hence become something other than mere “Lapps,” overlooked and patronized by the Finns. Sámi teacher and author Pedar Jalvi also regarded the Sámi in this light. His famous poem “Muohtačálmmit” is a case in point, portraying the Sámi people and their contribution to Sámi culture as snowflakes that form first brooks, and then rivers that reach the sea. Karl Nickul, the secretary of the scholarly society Lapin Sivistysseura, planned a protection area for a part of the Sámi in the Petsamo area that pertained to Finland between 1920 and 1947. Nickul, who engaged in a wide international correspondence about his protection plans, envisioned a certain indirect rule for the Sámi in the Suonikylä village of Petsamo, including Sámi-speaking teachers. In Nickul’s plans, Sámi teachers had an important role as both preservers and modernizers of the Sámi way of life. These plans fell through due to a lack of interest from Finnish politicians and the ceding of Petsamo to the U SSR after the Second World War. The ecclesial authorities, the bishop and the clergymen of Finnish Lapland, highlighted the intelligibility function more than the quality of education in relation to the use of Sámi language. The Chapter of

31978_Kortegangas.indd 77

2020-12-11 10:23:46

78

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu in fact prioritized native-level Sámi skills over formal competence among the teachers for reasons of intelligibility. The long Lutheran mission tradition in the area contributed to this idea. It was paramount that the teachers and the pupils understood each other, as this had also been one of the guiding principles of Lutheranism: the word of God was to be made intelligible for every people and individual. The ecclesial authorities, such as Bishop J.R. Koskimies and Vicar Tuomo Itkonen, also considered Sámi to have a culture-bearing function, as did elementary school inspectors Kerkkonen, Hämäläinen, and Frans Saarelma working within the standard elementary school system. The difference between the ecclesial and the standard elementary school authorities was that the former group considered Sámi culture both viable and worth preserving, whereas the latter group considered it a dying culture. Inspector Kerkkonen believed in the power of the “state language” among the Sámi in the North: Finnish in Finland and Norwegian in Norway. He admitted that the Sámi formed their own culture and nation, but without their own state this nation and culture were doomed to disappear under the pressure of Finnish and Norwegian state administration, including schooling. Inspector Vihtori Lähde was more supportive of the use of Sámi in schools than his predecessors and successors; however, Lähde’s attitude never translated into increased use of Sámi in practice. Bishop Koskimies believed in a certain soft power function in allowing Sámi to flourish within the ecclesial elementary school system. In the northern areas of Finland bordering several states, the fact that the Sámi were content would, according to the bishop, translate into loyalty and respect toward Finnish law and authorities. Nevertheless, Koskimies was clear that in all “worldly affairs,” solid skills in Finnish were a necessity for the Sámi. In the areas where Sámi language had a strong position, the local Sámi considered learning Finnish a useful extra resource rather than a threat. The status of Finnish was also strong, since it had been in use as the church language for centuries. The key difference between the standard elementary school system and the ecclesial catechist school system was that the ecclesial education authorities emphasized the intelligibility function of Sámi as language of instruction above other functions. The authorities of the standard elementary schools, for their part, similar to the nomad school inspectors of Sweden, viewed Finnish as the language of progress and better-quality education in the long run.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 78

2020-12-11 10:23:46

4 Norway

Sámi education in the early twentieth-century Norway stands out in two ways in comparison with Finland and Sweden. First, the language assimilation in schools with Sámi pupils was more rigidly and systematically regulated in legislation than in the neighbouring countries. Second, the Sámi opposition to the school policies was better organized and more active than the Sámi opposition in Sweden and Finland. In most cases, the legislative documents on Sámi language regulated not only the use of Sámi but also the use of Finnish, or Kven, the other historical minority language of northern Norway. As a rule, Sámi and Kven were treated equally in the legislation, that is, the use of both languages was prohibited except as an auxiliary language. As this book focuses on the Sámi, the Kven-speakers will only be discussed when pertinent to the context of the book. The Finnishspeaking Kvens in northern Norway (bordering Finland and Russia) constituted a national security threat according to the strong supporters of language assimilation. It was, in part, for this reason that the language policies in the north of Norway were particularly stringent. The assimilation policies were called “Norwegianization” (fornorskning) among both the educational authorities and the Sámi teachers opposing the policies.1 The exclusion of Sámi language and culture in Norwegian schools was clearly defined, in principle. In practice, some schools allowed for more Sámi than others, and the strong assimilation policies in many schools led to a strong backlash in the form of a vital Sámi opposition. Sámi teachers such as Anders Larsen, Isak Saba, and Per Fokstad criticized the school policies but were also powerhouses behind an active cultural movement not only referring to the Sámi

31978_Kortegangas.indd 79

2020-12-11 10:23:46

80

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

minority in Norway but to the totality of the Sámi in northern Europe. They founded newspapers, wrote novels, ran for national politics and produced a stream of writings promoting Sámi rights and opposing Norwegianization policies. Even if the activity subsided in the late 1920s, Sámi teachers continued to contribute to a strong Sámi cultural movement until the Second World War. To provide the backdrop for this movement, the chapter at hand starts with the school and language policies around 1900. Since a decree issued in 1898, all instruction in the Norwegian elementary schools was to be provided in Norwegian. According to the decree, dubbed “the Wexelsen decree” after the minister of church and education Vilhelm A. Wexelsen (in office 1891–93, 1898–1903), Sámi could be used only as an auxiliary language in the schools, and only when absolutely necessary. The year 1898 marked the culmination of a longer period of gradual tightening of the regulations on the language of instruction. A great part of the discussions on language of instruction in the elementary schools of northern Norway used the 1898 language decree as reference. It should therefore be highlighted that similar to the situation in Finland, a certain legally sanctioned space existed for Sámi language as an auxiliary language in schools, even if this space was minimal.2 Since 1818 until the end of the twentieth century, the elementary schools in Norway were administered under the same governmental department as the church, the Department of Church and Education (Kirke- og undervisningsdepartementet). Under this national level of the department were the regional educational authorities, the skoledirektører (directors of schools). The terms of the directors of schools of Finnmark County, Bernt Thomassen and Christen Brygfjeld, were characterized by an intensification of assimilative language policies in schools. Lyder Aarseth succeeded Brygfjeld in 1933, and a certain relaxing of the language policies ensued, although Aarseth held the same general view about the benefits of language assimilation as his predecessors. School laws prepared in the 1920s and implemented in the 1930s institutionalized reform pedagogical ideas that had already been in use in many places, and eased the transition from elementary to higher education. However, the laws did not alter the status of Sámi that was continuously allowed only as an auxiliary language.3 In 1902, as a part of the intensifying assimilative measures, and only a few years after the Wexelsen decree of 1898, Finnmark became

31978_Kortegangas.indd 80

2020-12-11 10:23:46

Norway 81

the first county in Norway with the office of a county director of schools. The director was responsible for the schools in his district, and he participated in the preparation of legislation and supervised adherence to laws and regulations in schools. The first director of schools in Finnmark was Bernt Thomassen (in office 1902–20). He is a well-known and well-researched person in Sámi school history in Norway. In many cases, he has had the questionable honour of epitomizing the strong assimilation policies, together with his successor Christen Brygfjeld (in office 1923–33). Wexelsen, the then minister of Education and Church Affairs and the namesake of the “Wexelsen decree,” hand-picked Thomassen for the position. Thomassen never sought the position of director of schools in Finnmark, but Wexelsen persuaded him to accept the appointment. Thomassen, a native of Sør-Trøndelag in southern-central Norway, had graduated at the age of eighteen from a teachers’ training course as the valedictorian of his class. Before his employment in Finnmark, Thomassen had travelled in England and Scotland, studying the school systems there.4 Thomassen was a zealous bureaucrat with the mission of extending elementary education to all parts of Finnmark. From the very beginning, he took his employment with utter seriousness and rigidness. In his first year in office, Thomassen sent a circular to the elementary school boards of his county, stating that bonus salary was granted for teachers who showed enthusiasm and competence in teaching the children of “foreign nationalities” Norwegian. Thomassen designated the Sámi and the Kven as “foreign nationalities.” Both foreign and national are significant since they mark a distance from the Norwegian nation, although with very different connotations. While Thomassen acknowledged that the Sámi and the Kvens formed their own nations, these nations were designated as foreign to Norway. For this reason, they were to be “Norwegianized.” The children of these foreign nationalities were, therefore, to learn Norwegian.5 In a letter to the Department of Church and Education, Thomassen designated Norwegian as the only possible option to progress for the Sámi and Kven minorities: “In Norwegianization, and in its application as soon as possible, I see not only a national task but as much an issue of welfare for the majority of the Lapp and Kven population in northern Norway. With Norwegianization, the path to development and progress is cleared even for them.”6 Thomassen presented Norwegian culture and language as having a progressive function, as

31978_Kortegangas.indd 81

2020-12-11 10:23:47

82

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

a common good for all Norwegians, including the Sámi minority. In the context of elementary education, Norwegianization meant essentially forceful language assimilation in elementary schools with Sámi pupils. With expanding the use of Norwegian, Thomassen sought to bring development and progress to the Sámi. According to the director, the Sámi could not attain these goals otherwise. Thomassen regarded the assimilation of the minorities as a development that benefited both the Norwegian state as a collective and Sámi individuals in particular. This notion of the common good characterized the educational thinking of not only Thomassen but also his successors, as well as his colleagues across the national border in both Sweden and Finland.

S á m i T e ac h e rs in t he Foreground o f t h e S á m i N at io nal Movement In 1906, Sámi teacher Isak Saba launched a debate that triggered director Thomassen to elaborate on his attitude toward the roles of Norwegian and Sámi languages as languages of instruction. Saba was an elementary school teacher from Finnmark. He was also, between 1906 and 1912, the first Sámi member of the Norwegian parliament, for the socialist Arbeiderpartiet. Saba was an avid supporter of using Sámi language in schools. Even so, he clearly and openly acknowledged the power and benefits of the majority language of Norway. In 1906, Saba was interviewed in the Norwegian newspaper Skolebladet. In the interview that started a long-lived debate in said newspaper, Saba criticized the strict assimilative language policies and the official discouragements to use Sámi in instruction. Nevertheless, Saba stated that learning perfect Norwegian should be the goal for all Sámi pupils.7 In the interview, Saba referred to the director of schools Thomassen as “Bobrikov” after the Russian governor-general of Finland, Nikolay Bobrikov. Bobrikov was murdered by Eugen Schauman, a Finnish nationalist, in 1904. The assassination followed a few years of fortifying Russian centralizing policies, called Russification in the patriotic circles of the Grand Duchy of Finland. According to Saba, Bobrikov was appointed by the tsar to “Russify” Finland, while Thomassen was appointed by the minister of Education and Church Affairs, V.A. Wexelsen, to Norwegianize Finnmark.8

31978_Kortegangas.indd 82

2020-12-11 10:23:47

Norway 83

The juxtaposition of the political situation of the Sámi in Norway and that of Finland within the Russian Empire allowed Saba to portray the Sámi as a nation as strong and worthy as any. Just as Finland was a nation fighting for its existence under Russification policies, the Sámi also formed a nation, which was suffering under Norwegianization policies. In Saba’s view, Sámi as a language of instruction had a strong culture-bearing function. Without Sámi language, the future of Sámi culture was unpromising. Thomassen’s response came in a couple of weeks. He dismissed Saba’s claim in the original interview that the use of Sámi in schools would have been prohibited. In his response late in 1906, and in another article early in 1907, Thomassen confirmed that no such prohibition existed. Saba stated that it was no surprise the school director publicly denied that Sámi language in schools was prohibited altogether. Saba bolstered his original claims by revealing that Norwegian-speaking teachers received extra salary for their work in the elementary schools. According to Saba, the teachers also knew that the authorities discouraged them from using the auxiliary languages (Sámi and Kven); this was why teachers in many schools with an apparent need for tuition in the pupils’ native languages only provided instruction in Norwegian.9 Thomassen accused Saba of complicating the Norwegianization process in schools. To Thomassen, Saba’s ideas that Sámi and Norwegian could coexist in the schools of northern Norway seemed ambivalent. Thomassen posed the following rhetorical question: “Are we here in a Norwegian country or in some kind of a Lappish state?” Thomassen’s rhetoric clearly conveyed the attitude that where “a Norwegian country” was a fully legitimate concept, “some kind of a Lappish state” was not.10 Judging by the interview, Saba accepted that Norwegian language had a prominent position in schools with Sámi pupils. According to Saba, the children had to master Norwegian as perfectly as Norwegian children did, otherwise they would not make it in the “competition,” Saba did not elaborate on what kind of competition he had in mind. This stance can be interpreted as a social evolutionist argument but it also highlights the need for Sámi to speak the majority language in order to manage in economic and civic terms. Saba was, however, against the total extermination of the Sámi language through assimilation in the elementary schools. On the other hand, if Norwegianization

31978_Kortegangas.indd 83

2020-12-11 10:23:47

84

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

simply meant that the Sámi children learned Norwegian besides Sámi, then Saba indicated he could give his whole-hearted support to Norwegianization. In fact, he hoped that Sámi children would learn to speak Norwegian as fluently as the Norwegian-speakers.11 Saba did not regard the extermination of Sámi language as a precondition for assuming full-scale Norwegian citizenship; in fact, his view was quite the contrary. According to Saba, it was absurd that Sámi language was “if not persecuted, at least frowned upon” in the elementary schools. He compared the language policies to a situation where universal civil rights would be dependent on mastering the majority language of the country. In the interview, Saba elevated the Sámi to a nation that had to adapt in certain terms to the fact that they lived in Norway, but that should otherwise have the same linguistic, cultural, and civil rights as the Norwegians. This applied to every nation, including the Sámi in Norway and the Finnish nation suppressed under Bobrikov. That Norwegian happened to be the state language did not, according to Saba, inhibit the rights of the Sámi.12 Saba took the Sámi question to the institutionalized political sphere, as the first Sámi to become a member of the Storting (Norwegian parliament) in 1906 through an alliance with the Norwegian Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet or A P ). In spite of the successful election outcome, Saba received little support from his party in the Storting for Sámi issues.13 In Saba’s election program that especially focused on political issues concerning the Sámi of Finnmark, Lutheran arguments for using Sámi as a language of instruction assumed an explicit institutional political expression. Saba had four main points in his program, three of which touched upon economy and the livelihoods of fishing, agriculture, and reindeer herding. Saba’s first point, however, was cultural and religious and concerned the use of Sámi in schools and in church services: “1 a. The service shall in the future be held in Sámi to the same extent as before. 1 b. School books in religion and the Bible and hymnals shall also in the future be published in Sámi.”14 Saba’s program does not point toward a radical shift or new claims for more rights. Rather, it suggests there was a risk that existing practices, such as publishing Sámi-language school books and holding services in Sámi would disappear. According to Saba, more acceptable language policies had preceded the current assimilative measures that the government had implemented or planned to implement. Saba’s points as a part of the Arbeiderpartiet election platform expressed a specifically Sámi perspective, since supporting cultural rights of the

31978_Kortegangas.indd 84

2020-12-11 10:23:47

Norway 85

minority populations in Norway was otherwise a low priority for the Arbeiderpartiet.15 In addition to Sámi teachers, other Sámi individuals also challenged the dominance of Norwegian in schools during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In 1917, Klemet Persen Stabursnes, a Sámi from Kistrand in central Finnmark, complained to the local school board about the current language situation in schools and demanded that Sámi and Norwegian should be used equally in tuition. The school board conveyed the complaint to the school director, who forwarded it to Bishop Gustav Dietrichson. Dietrichson sent it to the Department of Church and Education. Finally, Thomassen, the director of schools, informed the school board in Kistrand, citing the department, that no changes in the policies were planned, since the current school law allowed Sámi to be used only as an auxiliary language. This was a reference to the decree of 1898.16 In Thomassen’s letter to the bishop, discussing Persen Stabursnes’s complaint, the director of schools expressed his concern about a language conflict in the making. Thomassen connected Persen Stabursnes’s case to clergyman Jens Otterbech’s activities for Sámi and Kven languages. Otterbech had worked as a clergyman both in Finnmark and in Vestlandet in the southwest of Norway. He was an ardent proponent of the right of the Sámi to preserve their culture and language within the system of elementary education. Otterbech was active in Norsk Finnemission (Norwegian Lapp Mission Society), a missionary society founded in the west Norwegian region of Vestlandet in the 1880s. The society organized social and religious services for Sámi, often in the Sámi language. In 1910, Otterbech was one of the powerhouses behind a new missionary society, Det norske lutherske Finnemisjonsforbund (Norwegian Lutheran Lapp mission society), that claimed to be more radical and democratic than Norsk Finnemission. The two societies joined together in 1925 to found Norges Finnemisjonssellskap (called Norges Samemisjon since 1966).17 Otterbech received the most votes among the local clergy to succeed Dietrichson in the Diocese of Hålogaland in 1918. However, the Department of Church and Education appointed Johan Nicolai Støren as bishop, due to Otterbech’s unconventional views, which included the afore discussed positive stance toward Sámi language and culture but also pacifism.18 According to Thomassen, Otterbech received assistance from Det norske lutherske finnemisjonsforbund. As Thomassen pointed out,

31978_Kortegangas.indd 85

2020-12-11 10:23:47

86

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

many of the driving forces in the society were from southern Norway, and thus, according to the director, not well acquainted with the realities up north. Thomassen was afraid that if Persen Stabursnes’s and Otterbech’s ideas spread to wider Sámi and also Kven circles, the authorities would encounter a “battle going on throughout the line.”19 In militantly defensive terms, the school director lamented the initiatives of Otterbech and Det norske lutherske finnemisjonsforbund for preparing more room for Sámi language in schools. Thomassen also mentioned that he was aware of a book that Otterbech was editing in co-operation with the society, Fornorskningen i Finmarken. Fornorskningen i Finmarken (“Norwegianization in Finnmark”)20 was published in 1917, 400 years after Luther published his theses for a reformed Christianity. The book was dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther. The book’s introduction ends with a note on why it was published to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. It was, wrote the authors, “because one of the main principles of the reformation was this: preach the Gospel in the mother tongues of the peoples.” That the criticism of the book toward language assimilation stemmed from Lutheran doctrine was very clear from the beginning.21 The authors of the book published by Det norske lutherske finnemisjonsforbund were clergymen and teachers mainly from Finnmark, including Anders Larsen. A Sámi teacher born in Kvænangen on the border of the Troms and Finnmark Counties, Larsen was one of the leaders of the early twentieth-century Sámi movement for more rights for Sámi language and culture. Apart from his work as a teacher in Repparfjorden, Finnmark, Larsen published a number of books on Sámi culture and language, and was the editor of the Sámi-language newspaper Sagai Muittalægje that was published twice monthly between 1904 and 1911. The newspaper, published in North Sámi and focusing mainly on Sámi culture, played an important role in raising awareness among the Sámi of a shared history, faith, and self-esteem.22 Larsen’s novel Bæivve-Alggo was also seminal in the sense that it was the very first novel written in Sámi (in North Sámi, more precisely). In the book, Larsen describes the life of his native Finnmark and the fishing livelihood of the Sámi of the coastal areas. In BæivveAlggo, Larsen also points out some of the negative consequences of Norway’s discriminatory policies targeting the Sámi. Larsen also aimed to ameliorate the self-image of the Norwegian Sámi with the

31978_Kortegangas.indd 86

2020-12-11 10:23:47

Norway 87

4.1  Isak Saba (first from the left), teacher and first Sámi member of Parliament, with his colleagues from the Norwegian Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet [A P ])

novel, whose main character, a Sámi youngster, rediscovers his Sámi identity after harsh years in a school and its dormitory.23 In his text in Fornorskningen i Finmarken, Larsen postulates that mother tongue elementary education would improve learning results. He recounts a number of examples from religious instruction in elementary schools: “During the first school years, when a child’s mind is most open for impressions, they understand little or nothing about what the teacher tells them about God, nothing about the moving story of the child in Bethlehem. The school devotion [assembly with religious contents] often becomes an empty ceremony and loses its constructive character.”24 This notion by Larsen, that foreign language could only convey an empty shell instead of true religious substance, was in line with the main message of Fornorskningen i Finmarken. The book centres on the importance of religious instruction given in the native language

31978_Kortegangas.indd 87

2020-12-11 10:23:48

88

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

4.2  Jens Otterbech, Norwegian clergyman and proponent of Sámi rights, with family in Kistrand, ca. 1900

of each population, as it was one of the main ideas of the Lutheran Reformation. “The Lapp children’s school still awaits its reformation,” Larsen wrote at the end of his chapter, interlacing the message of the chapter with the general theme of the book.25 Larsen called for more Sámi-language instruction, but similarly to Saba, he posed the question as to whether Sámi children should learn Norwegian. “Yes, and yes again,” was Larsen’s answer. According to Larsen, the Sámi children wanted to learn and would succeed in learning Norwegian. It was after all the “official language of the country,” the mastering of which was a self-evident goal for all Sámi in Larsen’s view. Larsen argued that a certain amount of Sámi language would result in a “truer, healthier and greater culture” than was currently the case. This development toward greater culture would become the “happiness and blessing” of the Sámi in Norway.26 In Larsen’s reasoning, the cultural progress brought about by elementary education needed to be carried out in Sámi rather than in

31978_Kortegangas.indd 88

2020-12-11 10:23:51

Norway 89

Norwegian. Larsen, who himself had gone through a Norwegian-only elementary education wrote that the Sámi children missed out on the tuition for the pragmatic reason that they did not understand the language of instruction. “I can speak from my own experience,” Larsen wrote, having been both pupil and teacher in the schools for Sámi children. He referred to his experiences: “I cannot remember anything of what the teacher said to me during my first school years, since I did not understand him, and I certainly was not the least gifted pupil. These years were wasted, so to speak, and a wasted childhood can never be reclaimed.”27 Besides the strong Lutheran ideology that was the main message of the book, Larsen’s text in Fornorskningen i Finmarken concludes with articulations about the intelligibility function, as well as on the culture-bearing and progressive functions of Sámi, when used in instruction. Learning Norwegian was important in Larsen’s view; however, this learning did not mean that Sámi could not be used in tuition.

S ám i: A n A u x il ia ry o f Assi mi lati on or a L an g uag e o f C u lt u r a l a nd Materi al Progres s Apart from the Sámi teachers, a number of Norwegian-speaking teachers highlighted the benefits of using Sámi as a language of instruction. This is exemplified in a letter written by teacher T. Eriksen in Lyngen in Troms, the neighbouring county to Finnmark. Troms County had a smaller number of Sámi and Kven inhabitants, and, apart from a short border with Finland, it did not border Finland and Russia as Finnmark did. Hence, the Department of Church and Education prioritized the Norwegianization policies in Finnmark ahead of Troms. For instance, in 1910, Troms County received less than one-tenth of the funding for extra salary for Norwegian teachers in areas with Sámi and Kven pupils when compared to Finnmark.28 Despite the fact that the educational authorities gave lower priority to Troms County than to Finnmark County, some areas in Troms were as much mixed-language environments as most of Finnmark was. According to teacher Eriksen, his school district was the “most backward with regard to enlightenment” of all the school districts in Troms; the district could, according to him, be compared to the “most problematic” districts of Finnmark. Eriksen believed the reason for the backwardness was that the parents of the pupils spoke Sámi with

31978_Kortegangas.indd 89

2020-12-11 10:23:51

90

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

their children. Eriksen wrote that the lack of enlightenment was so severe that the parents did not even realize the advantage of their children learning Norwegian. Rather, they viewed Norwegianization with suspicion. In this context, the teacher was forced to learn some Sámi so that it could be used as an auxiliary language. As learning Sámi took time and work, Eriksen applied for extra salary from Finnefondet, a special item in the national budget that granted extra salary to teachers successful in Norwegianization. The function of Sámi as a language of instruction was to get the Sámi to learn Norwegian, which for Eriksen was the language of enlightenment. Here, two functions are intertwined. The function of Norwegian was, in the socio-political context, a cultural and material progress of the Sámi. The function of Sámi, in the context of Sámi education, was assimilative, to speed up language assimilation through the learning of Norwegian among the children. Eriksen, then, was willing to use Sámi in order to rectify the “backward” situation in his school district, where Sámi was prominent in the homes of the schoolchildren.29 It should be noted that Eriksen’s notion that the use of Sámi could actually benefit the language assimilation was not unique for its time. In the early years of Norway’s elementary school system, the school authorities viewed the use of Sámi and Finnish in tuition as a pragmatic means to carry out language assimilation. In a letter sent to the regional elementary school director in Tromsø Chapter in 1900 (the chapter administrated both Finnmark and Troms Counties until 1902), teacher Andreas Arild from Kvalsund, in northern Finnmark, applied for extra salary from Finnefondet. Arilds’s description of his work and the local conditions resembles the argumentation in Sweden and Finland regarding the importance of the knowledge of the local way of life. Arild, a native Norwegian-speaker and native of his working district, explained that he was “fully proficient in both Lappish and Kven” and well acquainted with the local conditions. As a teacher in a school district where the population was “almost exclusively of Lappish, Kven or mixed origin” he had a “good basis to further Norwegianization.” He could also show that the average grade in the subject of Norwegian language of his “non-Norwegian” pupils had ameliorated significantly during his years as teacher at the school.30 Another application for the extra salary that was granted for a successful implementation of the principles of Finnefondet came in 1901 from Christen Brygfjeld. In 1923, Brygfjeld would, as director

31978_Kortegangas.indd 90

2020-12-11 10:23:51

Norway 91

of schools of Finnmark County become an important figure in representation and implementation of the Norwegianization policies. In a manner typical of the teachers applying for the extra salary, Brygfjeld attached the Norwegian grades of his pupils to show how well the Norwegianization work was progressing.31 What was funded by Finnefondet was gradually restricted in the early twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, students at Tromsø teachers’ training course could receive funding for studying Sámi and Kven languages. This funding was revoked around the turn of the century, while the decrees of 1880 and 1898 stated that Sámi and Kven were no longer to be used in schools as languages of tuition, unless absolutely necessary.32 However, the letters of Arild and Brygfjeld show that the praxis did not change as suddenly. Teachers Eriksen and Arild were not positive toward supporting the minority languages as such, but to put it in Arild’s words, they sought to “further Norwegianization” through using Sámi and Kven as auxiliary languages. Knowing one or both of the minority languages in the north could be a pragmatic advantage in the teachers’ Norwegianization work. Sámi as a language of instruction had a function of intelligibility, similar to that in Sweden and Finland. It also had an assimilative function: as a pedagogical auxiliary for conveying instruction and a tool for assimilating the Sámi. A function of Sámi language quite different from the assimilative one is discernible in clergyman Peter Astrup’s letters to director of schools Brygfjeld. Astrup, from Lyngen in Troms County, wrote to Brygfjeld in April and May 1922 about the need to support the roots of Sámi culture. Astrup had applied for the position of vicar in Karasjok, Finnmark. A condition he had stated for accepting a possible offer was that the government would aid him in funding a Sámi folk high school that would be established in Karasjok; however, Astrup never became vicar in Karasjok, and a Sámi folk high school was established only years later.33 Astrup defended the idea of a folk high school, since he considered it to be a more economically efficient way to preserve Sámi culture than teaching Sámi language and culture in the elementary schools. The latter would have required a reorganization of the teachers’ training. Astrup wrote that the current policies should be continued in the elementary schools, but that the Norwegian nation had a duty to provide “this small people with a folk high school to protect their values of nationality.”34

31978_Kortegangas.indd 91

2020-12-11 10:23:51

92

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

Astrup considered supporting Sámi culture important from various angles. Interestingly, the Lutheran principle of preaching the Gospel in every people’s mother tongue was not among the clergyman’s arguments. Instead, Astrup highlighted that the Sámi language, as the language of a nation and a culture, had an inherent value that should be preserved. However, due to the fact that the Sámi were currently living as a “rootless proletariat,” they should be educated about their own roots, so that they themselves could uplift the language and culture from this state of rootlessness. The preferred forum for this kind of education was the folk high school. In this regard, while sharing the paternalism of Thomassen and Brygfjeld, Astrup’s reasoning diverged substantially from the school directors, who maintained that the Sámi could never be uplifted from their inferior position without the help of the Norwegians and through Norwegian language.35

P e r F o k s ta d a n d t h e Second Wave o f   S á m i N at ionali sm Sámi teachers Isak Saba and Anders Larsen articulated their claims within the general assumption that Norwegian was, and should be, the main language of the elementary schools even in the Sámi regions. Per Fokstad, who was a generation younger than both Saba and Larsen, was considerably more radical with regard to the language question. This was expressed notably in his 1924 plan for a Sámi school system.36 Fokstad studied first at the Tromsø teachers’ training course (Tromsø Seminar), where Saba and Larsen had also studied. Later, he studied at the Askov folk high school in Denmark where, influenced by Danish nationalist ideas, he discovered his own Sámi identity. Fokstad also studied at Woodbroke College in Birmingham, England, and at Institut du Panthéon and Collège de France in Paris. During his sojourns in England and France, he became acquainted with the situation of the Welsh minority in the United Kingdom and the Jewish minority in France, noting the parallels between these minority populations and their struggles for political and cultural rights, and those of his own Sámi people. Fokstad’s frame of reference was international when he articulated his claims for Sámi rights.37 Seven years prior to his 1924 Sámi school plan, Fokstad had contributed a chapter to Fornorskningen i Finmarken, in which he treats the consequences of the lack of Sámi in religious instruction: “Nothing

31978_Kortegangas.indd 92

2020-12-11 10:23:51

Norway 93

could grow in the spiritual life, so spiritual growth never occurred.” Like Larsen, Fokstad concluded that the tuition in Christianity was to little avail. According to Fokstad, the lack of Sámi in religious instruction led to stagnation in the spiritual development of the Sámi children. Fokstad presented a number of pragmatic arguments why education provided exclusively in a foreign language was wasted. These arguments resembled the reasoning in Anders Larsen’s chapter. Fokstad remarked that the main problem with elementary education in a foreign language is that “no relation of reliance was created between the pupil and the teacher.” According to Fokstad, it was elementary education in Sámi rather than in Norwegian that would establish this link and evoke the interest of the Sámi children to learn.38 In Lutheran teaching, and in teaching generally, Fokstad considered the use of Norwegian unwise since many Sámi pupils did not know this language very well. Apart from this intelligibility function, Fokstad also put forward a more political idea, an argument about the intrinsic value of each people’s mother tongue. On the final page of the chapter in Fornorskningen i Finmarken on mother tongue education, he quotes a verse by N.F.S. Grundtvig, the famous Danish nationalist theologian, pedagogue, and philosopher. This verse depicts the mother tongue as the “language of the heart,” the only force that could “awaken a people from hibernation.” Fokstad also observed that the lack of Sámi-language tuition distanced the children from their home and their culture, which led to “a disdain for one’s own nation.” Fokstad deemed this only logical for, “if you disdain the mother tongue that is essentially national, you also disdain your people.” The culturebearing and progressive functions are apparent. There is no reason to doubt that Fokstad actually found Grundtvig’s ideas inspiring. At the same time, the fact that he closes his chapter with Grundtvig’s words can be interpreted as a strategic reference to elements of Nordic majority nationalisms. Quoting one of the foremost Nordic nationalist idealists and pedagogues for a cause demanding more space for Sámi language in schools was a smart move because Fokstad connected the Sámi cause to the general Nordic context of nationalism. If Grundtvig’s ideas could be applied to the Sámi, then this population could be viewed as a nation in its own right living next to other Nordic nationalities and having essentially the same cultural rights. This was, as we have seen, also what Saba stated in more straightforward terms, comparing the Sámi national struggle to that of Finland. Of course, the director of schools was in the

31978_Kortegangas.indd 93

2020-12-11 10:23:51

94

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

position of either crediting or disqualifying these arguments with Sámi nationalist contents with an authority granted by the Norwegian government. Christen Brygfjeld, Thomassen’s successor, used the latter option, as became quite clear in the comments on the school plan that Fokstad published a few years later. In either case, Fokstad’s reasoning on the value of Sámi as a language of instruction can be seen as a parallel to the reasoning of other Norwegian and Nordic intellectuals inspired by nationalism.39 In 1920, Bernt Thomassen, the first director of schools of Finnmark, left his office to take up the director’s office in Trøndelag in central Norway. Karl Ivarson took over the Finnmark director position in the same year. After a very short period in office of continuing the main lines of work previously carried out by Thomassen, Ivarson died in 1922. Christen Brygfjeld followed Ivarson as the director of schools of Finnmark. Brygfjeld was born in Nordland, the county south of Troms. Prior to his appointment to the position of director of schools, he had worked as a teacher in Talvik and as the director of the boarding school of Ledesby, both in Finnmark. He was thus well informed about the educational context of his new district.40 County governor of Finnmark Hagbarth Lund wrote to the Department of Church and Education about Brygfjeld’s appointment as director of schools in Finnmark in 1923. Lund was quite clear about where the focus of director of schools of Finnmark’s focus should lie: “I know that Director of Schools Brygfjeld has the same view on the work of Norwegianization as Director of Schools Thomassen had, why I greeted his appointment with contentment.” Lund carried on to comment on the language situation of Finnmark and the “problems” that were to be overcome.41 In a letter Brygfjeld wrote in July 1923 to the Department of Church and Education in Kristiania (now Oslo), he emphasized the “enlightenment” brought about by having Norwegian as the language of instruction, using as examples the school district where he had been a teacher as well as a neighbouring school district in Finnmark. The latter district had earlier had mostly Sámi-speaking teachers. Before the Norwegian “enlightenment” had reached this area through Norwegian as the language of instruction, Brygfjeld wrote, “theft, adultery, drunkenness and fighting with knives” had been the order of the day. Much like his predecessor Thomassen, as well as the school inspectors of Finland and Sweden, Brygfjeld considered elementary education in the majority language as the path to cultural and material progress.42

31978_Kortegangas.indd 94

2020-12-11 10:23:51

Norway 95

Brygfjeld’s letter of 1923 to the Department of Church and Education was written to refute criticism put forward by Per Fokstad. Brygfjeld portrayed Fokstad as a radical with the mission of making Sámi the main language of tuition in the elementary schools in Finnmark. Indeed, Fokstad had ideas rather radical for his time. He wrote down these ideas in 1924 as a coherent and comprehensive school plan for a Sámi school system in Norway. Fokstad intended this plan to be applied in schools with Sámi pupils. According to Fokstad’s plan, the teachers were to be Sámi and all other instruction apart from Norwegian classes was to be given in Sámi. The school plan allocated Norwegian the status of a school subject among others. Norwegian was planned to enter the curriculum only in the fifth year of elementary school. In addition to this, schools with Sámi, Kven, and Norwegian pupils should have parallel classes so that the Sámi could have their own classes with Sámi as the sole language of tuition. Fokstad wrote that boarding schools would be a pragmatic solution in the sparsely populated mountain Sámi areas. The boarding schools with mountain Sámi (nomadic reindeer-herding Sámi) pupils should take the mountain Sámi livelihood into consideration so that this livelihood would not be foreign to the children. With regard to religious instruction, Fokstad’s school plan made clear that all religious education was to be given in Sámi throughout elementary school. To make the instruction more vivid, teachers should take up examples of religious everyday life of the Sámi, including examples from the Laestadian movement that had a strong influence in the Sámi areas. This reasoning shows that Fokstad was well acquainted with the ideas of progressive education, focusing on the children and their natural surroundings. These latter ideas interestingly resemble parts of the fundamental ideas of the nomad school system in Sweden. It is clear, however, that Fokstad had in mind a Sámi school that was fully as efficient and advanced as the Norwegian schools. As discussed in chapter 2, many Sámi individuals criticized the nomad schools for not meeting the standards of the regular Swedish elementary schools.43 Also noteworthy here is that a parallel school system to cater to the needs of a minority language within a nation state was not a foreign idea in the early twentieth-century Nordic countries. In Finland, the elementary school system was created as a bilingual parallel system from the outset, where most of the Swedish-speaking children went to Swedish-speaking schools and most of the Finnish-speaking children

31978_Kortegangas.indd 95

2020-12-11 10:23:51

96

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

to Finnish-speaking schools. As discussed in chapter 3, the legislation allowed some space for the use of Sámi as the main language of tuition, even if Finnish was the language of instruction in all standard elementary schools with Sámi pupils, apart from the Outakoski and Utsjoki church village schools. The fact that the Swedish speakers in Finland were a much larger minority than the Sámi played a certain role, but they also had a high socio-cultural position being the traditional cultural and political elite of Finland – quite contrary to the social position of the Sámi.44 Fokstad’s plan was very ambitious and presented a Sámi strand in the educational system reaching from elementary education all the way to a Sámi folk high school. Folk high school was a Nordic institution of adult education for students who were not eligible for academic studies. Three Sámi folk high schools were opened in the 1940s and the 1950s, one in each country discussed in this book. Fokstad, with his plans for a folk high school in the 1920s, was much ahead of his time. Moreover, Fokstad went further than his Sámi teacher colleagues Anders Larsen and Isak Saba in his claims for the use of Sámi in schools. This divergence is best explained by the different functions the teachers envisioned for Sámi as a language of instruction, both in the educational and the socio-political contexts. Saba and Larsen considered Sámi language to be a small yet important part of the general Norwegian school system in Sámi areas. Norwegian was the main language that was beneficial for the Sámi as an added resource, and it had a progressive function as it would help the Sámi children keep up with other children of Norway. Sámi language, however, needed to be included in the curriculum because of the culture-bearing and intelligibility functions it had, according to Saba’s reasoning.45 Fokstad, however, sketched a school system parallel to the Norwegian one. Within this school system, Sámi would not be an auxiliary language but the primary language of tuition. In a wider context, Fokstad highlighted the culture-bearing function of Sámi but also the progressive function. Differently from directors Thomassen and Brygfjeld, and in a manner more radical than Saba and Larsen, Fokstad believed that Sámi language, and only Sámi, could uplift the Sámi to a new level of cultural and material welfare. Per Fokstad wrote his school plan at least partly in order to influence the work of a committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament to reform the elementary school system. The committee’s work from

31978_Kortegangas.indd 96

2020-12-11 10:23:51

Norway 97

1922 to 1927 resulted in a number of laws in the 1930s concerning the elementary schools. Some of the changes were significant, such as the easier transition from the elementary schools to secondary education, and the institutional breakthrough for reform pedagogical ideas. In the case of Sámi education and language policies, however, little changed. The committee took the conventional view on the common benefits of Norwegianization and maintained the Wexelsen decree of 1898. The committee portrayed the governmental boarding schools in a positive light and encouraged the establishment of more boarding schools in the north. The school committee also stated that a stronger assimilation policy should be applied to the Kvens than to the Sámi. Norwegian historians Eriksen and Niemi have explained this formulation with the security politics argument that applied more strongly to the Finnish-speaking Kvens inhabiting the regions bordering Finland and Russia. Norwegian authorities were more suspicious toward the Kvens than the Sámi since the former population spoke the language of a foreign – and bordering – nation state, Finland. Nevertheless, the stance the committee took toward language was clear and made no special consideration to either Sámi or Kven language: “The special task of the school [system] in Finnmark and partly in Troms is to distribute knowledge of the language of the country, which is to be common to all its inhabitants.” As we have seen, this common state language was Norwegian (in the case of Finnmark normally riksmål).46 Fokstad elaborated on his ideas of the function of the mother tongue for the Sámi in a 1940 article in the North Sámi-language periodical Sabmelaš, published by Lapin Sivistysseura in Finland (see also pages 12, 65). In the article, Fokstad operates in a cross-border context, drilling into the situation of Sámi culture and language without framing it in a single nation state. Fokstad’s text was not a critique toward policies imposed from the outside. Rather, it was a call for the Sámi to develop their culture. The title of the article, “Veähaš jurdagak samii čeärdalaš tilii pirra” (“Some Thoughts on the National Situation of the Sámi”), as well as Fokstad’s use of the concept Samieädnam (the Sámi land, comparable with Sápmi), highlight the idea of the Sámi as a nation in their own right. Being a nation was conditional, according to Fokstad: a people had to be interested in and aware of itself in order to become a nation. Fokstad mentioned a number of important names in the forefront of Sámi culture from across the Sámi areas of the northern Nordic countries, including the teachers and authors Anders Larsen and Pedar Jalvi.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 97

2020-12-11 10:23:51

98

Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

In order for the Sámi to survive as a nation, their “enlightenment” had to be maintained and uplifted. This meant development in both cultural and political terms. Sámi language was a natural part of this enlightenment work. “Only Sámi language fits the Sámi,” noted Fokstad, “it is warm and versatile, humble like the people itself. It is full of clear words. Without doubt, it is the mirror of the soul of the Sámi race.”47 Fokstad added that Sámi was the language with which the Sámi people communicated with God. Fokstad assigned a paramount role to Sámi language in the uplifting of the Sámi enlightenment, as the inner language of the people, both in a national and a religious sense. What was needed, according to Fokstad, was a “rehabilitation” of Sámi enlightenment through Sámi-language literature, music, and other aspects of culture. Fokstad ended his article with an appeal to the Sámi people: “Let us try to revitalize the esteem of our race, so that our worth will rise!” As before, the Grundtvigiannationalist elements are highly visible in Fokstad’s text. As Fokstad had quoted already in 1917, Grundtvig thought that it was only the mother tongue that could “awaken a people from hibernation.” In the Sabmelaš article, the culture-bearing and progressive functions reserved for Sámi language become even more apparent than in Fokstad’s school plan.48

Di re c to r o f S c h o o l s C hri s ten Brygfjeld a n d   t h e S á m i as a “ F a i led Culture” Brygfjeld’s letter from 1923, in which he criticized the Sámi-language tuition Fokstad promoted, did not give a reason why Norwegian in schools would lead to progress and Sámi to decadence respectively. He described a development where Norwegian language and social problems were portrayed as a relationship of strong negative correlation. That Brygfjeld thought there was something inherent in Norwegian that made it superior to Sámi is obvious even when, or just because, it remained implicit. In a letter from a few days earlier on the same subject, Brygfjeld commented on the language situation in the elementary schools. He wrote that the authorities had sought to meet the requests of some Sámi for more Sámi language in churches and schools. According to Brygfjeld, allowing for more Sámi in these instances had in no way helped uplift the Sámi from the “low stage of culture” they currently stood on. He referred to his own experience as a teacher in

31978_Kortegangas.indd 98

2020-12-11 10:23:51

Norway 99

the northern regions, and admitted that at first, he had believed the Sámi could develop into an independent culture. However, Brygfjeld counted a number of failed attempts from the Sámi to uplift their own culture. Among these failed attempts, Brygfjeld counted the newspaper Sagai Muittalægje (the News Reporter, 1904–11) and the activity of Saba and Larsen that had waned from lack of an interested public and readership. Brygfjeld concluded that the Sámi had neither “the capacity nor the will” to use their language as a written language and that they had never showed any real affection to “their language or their ‘culture.’”49 As the word culture inside quotation marks suggests, the director held a clear culturally hierarchized view on the Sámi population when compared to the Norwegians. Since the Sámi had no real culture in his view, Sámi as a language of instruction could have no real culturebearing or progressive function. In his same letter, Brygfjeld set out to describe the relationship between Norwegian and Sámi not only in terms of cultures, but also in terms of races. Brygfjeld warned the Sámi against stirring up “hatred between the races” in northern Norway, since this hatred would only be to the disadvantage of the “weaker” race, the Sámi.50 In a letter dated 1925, Brygfjeld returned to the subject of Fokstad’s school plan. In the letter, written to Anton Ræder, an Oslo secondary school principal and chair of the 1922–27 school committee, director of schools Brygfjeld argued against Fokstad’s school plan. The implementation of such a plan was unthinkable, wrote Brygfjeld, because the Norwegian skills of the Sámi pupils needed to be on par with the skills of the Norwegian-speaking pupils. According to Brygfjeld, in the school districts that had religious instruction in Sámi, to achieve this, teachers had to spend considerable extra time teaching Norwegian to the pupils. “This P. Fokstad’s school plan,” stated Brygfjeld, “is essentially nothing else than some old rehash from Stockfleth’s time.” As the director of schools himself added, Nils Vibe Stockfleth was a Norwegian missionary and clergyman in mid-nineteenth-century northern Norway. He translated religious texts to North Sámi and argued for an increased use of Sámi language in the elementary schools, making reference to Lutheran doctrine.51 Brygfjeld’s comparison of Fokstad’s school plan and Stockfleth’s ideas points in two directions. First, it shows that Brygfjeld had little understanding of Stockfleth’s language policies. In the letter to Ræder, Brygfjeld wrote that Stockfleth’s initiatives toward more Sámi language

31978_Kortegangas.indd 99

2020-12-11 10:23:51

100 Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

in schools had not entailed any positive results. Rather, they had put the Sámi children at a disadvantage compared to Norwegian children, since they learned poor Norwegian and were thus left behind in “competition with the Norwegians.” Brygfjeld also highlighted the progressive function of the majority language of the country. He referred to Stockfleth when pointing out that the older functions of language gave way for the new, progressive function of Norwegian for a good reason. Brygfjeld discredited and disqualified Fokstad’s ideas, branding them as obsolete in a contemporary Norwegian context. Norwegian was the language of progress and modernity, and Sámi a language of the past.52 Interestingly, however, a 1927 letter from Brygfjeld to the school board of Karasjok, presents a more tolerant view on the question of language of instruction and Christianity. Brygfjeld wrote that Christianity in Karasjok was taught in Sámi, and would probably be so for “a long time.” For this reason, Brygfjeld accepted the use of the Sámi-language textbook by Volrath Vogt in this school subject. If the school board would at some point consider the introduction of a new textbook, then Brygfjeld recommended one written in Norwegian. Brygfjeld was not enthusiastic about the fact that Christianity was still taught in Sámi. However, probably due to the long tradition of this language as a tool to facilitate the intelligibility of teaching in missionary contexts among the Sámi, Brygfjeld could spare a certain tolerance toward the continuation of such a practice in the schools of Finnmark. There was a complexity and variation within the language policies, when the rigid principles met with tradition and practice in the schools of northern Norway.53 In other instances, director of schools Brygfjeld argued for an assimilation policy wider than the language assimilation in schools. In his letter to the Department of Church and Education in 1923 he stated explicitly that the assimilation in schools was not enough. According to Brygfjeld, Norwegianization could not advance only through founding schools and employing Norwegian teachers whose task was to introduce “a crumb of knowledge” of Norwegian to Sámi children. A more thorough Norwegianization of the cultural landscape was needed. Brygfjeld supported the idea of colonizing Finnmark through offering free farmland for Norwegian-speaking families to settle in the north. The director thought this should have been made a national priority. At the same time, offering free land might have relieved the pressure and lack of farmland that sent many Norwegians to North

31978_Kortegangas.indd 100

2020-12-11 10:23:51

Norway 101

America as emigrants. “Stop the emigration flow to America,” Brygfjeld declared, “and send it northwards.”54 The colonization idea was not Brygfjeld’s. Since the beginning of the century, the government, together with an organization founded for this purpose (Selskabet til fremme af Finmarkens Jordbrug), had promoted agricultural colonization as a means to assimilate the language minorities of the northern areas. For instance, a law introduced in 1902 stipulated that in order to buy land, the buyer had to speak Norwegian. This policy never succeeded since many of the farmers used to the milder climate and better soil of southern Norway gave up farming in the harsh and barren north after a few futile attempts at harvesting. The law of 1902 aimed to secure the regions bordering Finland and targeted the Finnish-speaking Kvens more aggressively than the Sámi. The law left some leeway for interpretation considering the language requirements, and it was never strictly followed.55 Brygfjeld claimed in 1933 that the law was only meant to keep foreigners from Finland and Russia from buying land. However, the letter from 1923 analyzed above shows without doubt that he believed Norwegian agricultural colonization, combined with language assimilation in schools, could help assimilate the Sámi and Kven populations. This contextualization elucidates the assimilative function that Brygfjeld envisioned Norwegian to have in schools with Sámi pupils.56

D ir e c to r o f S c h o o l s Lyder Aarseth: A   S h if t in g Vi ew? According to Lydolf Lind Meløy, who worked as a teacher in Finnmark during Lyder Aarseth’s term, Aarseth’s appointment to director of schools in Finnmark in 1933 implied a certain shift in the attitudes on Norwegianization, even if the assimilation policies continued until the years following the Second World War. Lind Meløy noted that Aarseth had a positive view of the use of Sámi as an auxiliary language. Aarseth, who was born, raised, and educated in western Norway, worked as a teacher at the Kautokeino boarding school from 1913 until his appointment as director of schools of Finnmark.57 When interpreted within the methodological framework of functions of language of instruction, Aarseth’s perspectives both do and do not stand out in comparison with his predecessors. He highlighted the importance of Sámi as an auxiliary language more than directors Thomassen and Brygfjeld did. At the same time, Aarseth was very

31978_Kortegangas.indd 101

2020-12-11 10:23:51

102 Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

clear about the function of Sámi in schools: it was an auxiliary of Norwegianization. This is apparent in the correspondence concerning the planned folk high school for the Sámi that would be run by the missionary society Norges Finnemisjonssellskap. In a letter to the society’s general secretary Sigurd Heiervang, Aarseth elaborated on his views regarding Sámi as a language of instruction, not only in the planned folk high school but also in the elementary schools. Aarseth highlighted the function of intelligibility. He admitted that the school policies in the elementary schools had led to situations where Sámi pupils learned little due to the language barrier between the Sámispeaking pupils and the Norwegian-speaking teachers. In a 1934 correspondence between Aarseth and the Department of Church and Education, the latter questioned why a non-Sámi-speaking teacher was hired for Kautokeino, even though a teacher with skills in Sámi was needed. In his response, Aarseth explained that there had been no adequate Sámi-speaking applicants for the teacher’s vacancy. However, the teacher who had been hired would take a course in Sámi during the upcoming winter. This teacher would use the language in tuition in the following term. The correspondence shows that still in 1934, both the director of schools and the department tolerated and even encouraged the use of Sámi as an auxiliary language.58 There was no doubt that for Aarseth, Sámi was an auxiliary of Norwegianization. According to him, “those Sámi that have published anything of worth have done so in Norwegian,” probably due to the fact that the Sámi themselves understood the only way to elevate their “spiritual and material culture” was through the Norwegian language. Here the similarities are striking to Bernt Thomassen’s 1917 articulation that “with Norwegianization, the path to development and progress is cleared even for [the Sámi].” Like his predecessors, Aarseth fully backed the progressive function of Norwegian as a language of instruction. Aarseth was more open to the use of Sámi as an auxiliary than his predecessors were, but it was indeed an auxiliary – an auxiliary of language assimilation in schools.59 Historians Eriksen and Niemi write that Aarseth’s views on tuition in Sámi changed after the Second World War toward a more accepting stance on the use of Sámi in schools. However, during the 1930s, Aarseth’s views on languages of instruction were rather well in line with the views of his predecessors. Where Sámi had intelligibility and assimilative functions, Norwegian was the language of progress. Like his predecessor Brygfjeld, Aarseth considered the role of Sámi as an auxiliary language particularly important within the subject of Christianity.60

31978_Kortegangas.indd 102

2020-12-11 10:23:51

Norway 103

B is h o p B e r g g r av ’ s S ámi Romanti ci sm The educational system and the Church of Norway were important components of the multi-institutional Norwegianization policies of the early twentieth century. Bishop Gustav Dietrichson (in office 1910–18), of the Diocese of Tromsø (called the Diocese of Hålogaland since 1918), criticized Sámi opposition for being “unhealthy for the patria,” even if he understood its claims to a certain degree. Yet, there always existed a strand of opposition inside the church against harsh language policies in both church and school.61 In general terms, the church with the bishops, notably Eivind Berggrav, bishop of the Diocese of Hålogaland (in office 1928–37), perceived the Finnish-speaking Kvens as foreigners and intruders, whereas the attitude toward the Sámi was paternalistic. In 1899, the Department of Church and Education ruled that clergymen were not allowed to counter Norwegianization policies. The first years of the twentieth century saw further tightening of the language policies, and even if the bishops and some of the clergymen criticized the strictest assimilation measures, the church became closely bound in the sphere of the Norwegianization policies.62 The bishop of the Diocese of Hålogaland had at least consultative powers with regard to elementary education in Finnmark and Troms. Judging by the archives, both the directors of schools and the Department of Church and Education consulted the bishop often and kept him apprised of topical discussions and debates regarding the language policies in schools. Bishop Eivind Berggrav was an especially important figure within the Norwegianization policies.63 Berggrav’s father was a bishop and his maternal grandfather was a vicar. Born in Stavanger in the southwestern tip of Norway, Berggrav was brought up in southeastern Norway in a home connected to the ecclesial and cultural elites of turn-of-the-century Norway. Leaving Hålogaland in 1937, he moved on to become the bishop of the Diocese of Oslo. During the Second World War, Berggrav led the ecclesial resistance to the German occupation of Norway. He was also an important figure in international Lutheran and ecumenical organizations. In comparison with Olof Bergqvist in Sweden and J.R. Koskimies in Finland, who spent a major part of their careers in the northern dioceses, Berggrav’s time in Hålogaland could be seen as an interval in an otherwise southern Norwegian and international professional life. Berggrav considered that the Church of Norway had an important role as a part of the state in furthering the goals of Norwegianization,

31978_Kortegangas.indd 103

2020-12-11 10:23:52

104 Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

even if he preferred more moderate methods than unconditional language assimilation. Berggrav thought it was important to create some space for the Sámi and Kven languages in order to make the minorities feel at home in Norway. This was especially true about the Sámi, whom Berggrav viewed in a much more positive light than the Kvens.64 In his travel book and memoirs from his years in Hålogaland, Berggrav admitted to feeling uneasy as a southerner in the north. He reported having initially worried about how to approach a “foreign people, the language of which I do not even understand.” However, he added that more important than knowing every sound in the language of the Sámi was respecting them as human beings and as a people. Through this respect, Berggrav reported, he could reach a Christian sense of unity with the Sámi. Berggrav was positive toward Sámi language and culture, but he never saw the subject important enough to learn Sámi himself during his ten-year period as bishop of northern Norway.65 Berggrav criticized the Norwegianization policies in the elementary schools for being too strict. He argued that the old practice of teachers using Sámi as an auxiliary language seemed to have disappeared altogether while the educational authorities highlighted the assimilative side of the language policies. Berggrav wished to see more Sámi used in schools, especially in religious instruction. This attitude stemmed from a strategic reasoning related to a soft power function: in giving the Sámi and Kven minorities more leeway to use their languages in schools, the risk of them being disloyal toward the government of Norway could be minimized in the border areas. Berggrav viewed the Finnish-speaking Kvens, among whom the Laestadian revival was rather common, as a threat to the Church of Norway and Norwegian government alike. In a manner reminiscent of Berggrav’s colleague on the Swedish side, Olof Bergqvist, the bishop of Hålogaland viewed the Sámi as a minority that posed less threat and required a more responsible treatment from the government when compared to the Finnish speakers (Kvens in Norway) in the schools. Interestingly, Berggrav regarded Sweden as a smarter example of organization of minority language policies in schools. As an instance of these smarter policies, Berggrav mentioned religious instruction in the mother tongue of the pupils. In Sweden, however, the nomad school inspectors valued Sámi mostly as a medium to convey Lutheran instruction in the most efficient manner possible. Portraying the

31978_Kortegangas.indd 104

2020-12-11 10:23:52

Norway 105

situation in Sweden in this way allowed Berggrav to further his own arguments for the use of Sámi in religious instruction in Norway.66 In his memoirs from the Hålogaland years, Berggrav observed that it was impossible to think that the “core” of the Sámi people would live any other kind of life than a nomadic life. In a letter from April 1938 to the Finnish geodesist Karl Nickul, who was interested in creating a preservation area for the Skolt Sámi of the Petsamo area, Berggrav wrote positively about Nickul’s preservation plans. Berggrav, who at the time of writing the letter had recently moved to Oslo to become bishop in the capital, also answered a question Nickul posed about preservationist ideas in Norway. According to Berggrav, such a discussion in Norway had mainly been the concern of “Lapp-lover Carl Schøyen and others.” Carl Schøyen, a Norwegian poet and author, was deeply interested in Sámi culture, publishing the book Tre stammers møte (The Encounter of Three Tribes) in 1918 and I sameland (In Sámi Country) in 1924. Apart from this group of “Lapp-lovers,” Berggrav reported that preservationist plans were never much introduced or debated in Norway. His articulation about the “core” of the Sámi people that must continue to lead a nomadic life, resembled Nickul’s articulations in Finland and the articulations of nomad school inspectors Calleberg and Karnell in Sweden. Berggrav designated Sámi culture as a nature culture, but pointed out there was no need to isolate this culture but rather help the Sámi in whatever way could make them stronger so that they could defend themselves when encountering Norwegian culture. Sámi culture was to be preserved, but it could not survive without help from the Norwegians, or the Finns or Swedes in the neighbouring countries.67 According to Bishop Berggrav, the Sámi children had already gained a basic knowledge of the Lutheran faith in their homes. They were, in this respect, not inferior to other children in Norway. The bishop reported having been surprised by the level of knowledge in Christianity among the Sámi children. He was offended, both himself and on behalf of the Sámi, by comments his friends and colleagues made in more southern parts of Norway. These colleagues were hard pressed to understand how Berggrav could live in the far north. Such comments sounded “dead and stupid”68 to Berggrav. While positive toward the Sámi culture, Berggrav still acknowledged that the Sámi were essentially different from Norwegians. Berggrav was aware of his own limitation in evaluating a culture that was not his own and stated

31978_Kortegangas.indd 105

2020-12-11 10:23:52

106 Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

that what generated the cultural distance between “us” and “them” was that “we,” that is, the Norwegians, viewed the Sámi from a Norwegian rather than a Sámi perspective. In a somewhat exoticizing tone, he described the Sámi who lived in the north: this north was where life was whereas narrowness and boundedness of perspective characterized southern Norway. Berggrav’s attitude, resembling that of a number of Lutheran clergymen and bishops in Sweden and Finland, was positive toward the Sámi but at the same time patronizing and exotifying.69

C o n c l u s i ons The movement of teachers propagating Sámi language use in schools was stronger in Norway than in Sweden or Finland. This was partly due to the larger Sámi population of Norway when compared to its neighbouring countries: the Sámi in Norway counted around 20,000, compared to 8,500 in Sweden and 2,300 in Finland.70 An important background for this Sámi movement was the clearly formulated set of language assimilation policies (called Norwegianization by both the educational authorities and the Sámi). Since these policies were codified in laws and regulations, they were also easier targets to attack and oppose than the more ambiguous formulations of language use in the schools with Sámi pupils in Sweden and Finland. The work of the Sámi teachers promoting Sámi language was not a mere reaction to governmental educational policies in Norway, however. A more active narrative is discernible in the writings of a number of teachers. “Sámi lands to the Sámi” is the famous final line of a song by teacher Isak Saba, still in use today as the official Sámi national anthem. Saba’s teacher colleagues Anders Larsen and Per Fokstad were writers who, partly inspired by the Norwegian nationalist ideas introduced in the teachers’ training courses they attended, created a Sámi public sphere with Sámi nationalist undertones that emerged in novels, a newspaper, and a variety of other texts, including a comprehensive school plan for a Sámi-language school system. Saba and Larsen admitted to the necessity of the pupils learning perfect Norwegian. At the same time, they underscored the culture-bearing and intelligibility functions of Sámi: Sámi language preserved the culture and made the teachings more understandable for the pupils. Because of these functions, the teachers wanted Sámi used as language of instruction parallel to Norwegian. Per Fokstad was more radical

31978_Kortegangas.indd 106

2020-12-11 10:23:52

Norway 107

than Saba and Larsen, and he advocated for Sámi as the main language of instruction. In Fokstad’s reasoning, which directly referenced N.F.S. Grundtvig, the progressive function stands out. He believed, similarly to teacher Josef Guttorm in Finland, that the development of Sámi culture could only take place in Sámi language. This activity, while not simply a reaction, played out against the backdrop of an official language policy that allowed the use of Sámi in schools only as an auxiliary of teaching. The directors of schools of Finnmark County were the leading regional educational authorities who had both legislative and executive powers. The most important figures to this post during the first half of the twentieth century were Bernt Thomassen, Christen Brygfjeld, and Lyder Aarseth. These directors expressed very clearly the progressive function they considered Norwegian as language of instruction to possess. Thomassen and Brygfjeld considered Sámi a lower culture. The common benefit for both Norway and the Sámi was full assimilation of the Sámi into Norwegian citizens. The directors showed certain tolerance toward the use of Sámi as an auxiliary language, especially in the tuition of Christianity. The function of Sámi as an auxiliary was not only to render the teaching intelligible and thus facilitate learning but also to speed up the language assimilation from Sámi to Norwegian. The 1933 appointment of Lyder Aarseth to the director of schools of Finnmark implied a gradual change for less strict language policies in schools. However, Aarseth held the same fundamental view of the functions of Norwegian and Sámi as his predecessors: Norwegian was the language of progress, and Sámi an auxiliary of the language assimilation, which was one of the highest priorities of the elementary school network of northern Norway. Even if the Church of Norway participated in the assimilation policies in the early twentieth century, some of the ecclesial authorities had a more positive attitude toward Sámi than the directors of schools. This was especially true of Bishop Eivind Berggrav. Berggrav wished that Sámi would persist at some level within the school system, as it was a bearer of a culture that was original in northern Norway. Like his colleague J.R. Koskimies in northern Finland, Berggrav believed that keeping the Sámi content ensured peaceful borders. Another example of more positive attitudes among the clergy appears with clergyman Peter Astrup, who, in his letter to director of schools Brygfjeld, referred to the progressive function of Sámi language and the need to uplift Sámi culture in Sámi language.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 107

2020-12-11 10:23:52

108 Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

There was a certain complexity to the language policies that included local variations in the intensity of the assimilative policies. Even such eager advocates of language assimilation as Brygfjeld could tolerate the use of Sámi in religious instruction. The Lutheran language tradition lived on in the minimal space it was granted in Norway, and in the articulations of the directors of schools who were some of the most hard-line supporters of language assimilation in schools. When compared to Sweden and Finland, however, the assimilative language policy in the elementary schools was more structured and zealous, since Sámi was used in schools to speed up language assimilation into Norwegian. The criticism of this policy by such Sámi teachers as Isak Saba, Anders Larsen, and Per Fokstad was complex. These teachers were not simply for or against Norwegian or Sámi as languages of instruction. It was the functions of these languages that mattered. Each language had specific functions: Norwegian as the state language of the country and Sámi as the preserver and developer of Sámi culture.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 108

2020-12-11 10:23:52

5 Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North, 1900–1940

The extension of early twentieth-century elementary education systems to the Nordic Sámi areas entailed a set of exclusions of Sámi culture and language. That said, it also entailed the envisioned inclusion of the Sámi to the economy and citizenship of the three Nordic countries through a universal elementary education system. The three countries demonstrate important differences. For instance, while the educational policies in Norway, and to a certain degree also in Finland, aimed at a full assimilation of Sámi pupils to the majority culture, the Swedish nomad school system aimed at a segregation of only the Sámi engaged in large-scale reindeer herding. Swedish educational authorities considered reindeer herding an economically productive livelihood in the mountain areas of Sweden, whereas their Norwegian and Finnish counterparts prioritized agriculture as the source of subsistence ahead of traditional Sámi livelihoods. Yet also in Sweden, the educational authorities considered it a necessity to modernize the reindeer-herding livelihood of the Sámi, and a specific school system – the nomad school – was created and implemented for this purpose. In all three countries, a number of Sámi teachers emerged at the forefront of an opposition calling for changes to the educational policies that many Sámi experienced as discriminatory. The teachers became important figures since they were directly affected by the language policies and had an educational background that enabled the creation of a Sámi public sphere. Within this public sphere, including newspapers and works of fiction in both Sámi and the majority languages, Sámi teachers voiced opposition to the educational policies and expressed ideas of a Sámi nation struggling for its cultural,

31978_Kortegangas.indd 109

2020-12-11 10:23:52

110 Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

linguistic, and civil rights. As teacher and clergyman Gustav Park declared during the first nationwide meeting of the Swedish Sámi in 1918, the fact that the Sámi did not have their own state did not nullify their basic human rights. Karin Stenberg, also a Sámi teacher in Sweden, framed the struggle of the Sámi in a colonial context, castigating Swedish authorities for hypocritically supporting oppressed people in other parts of the world while continuing to impose discriminatory policies on the Sámi. Stenberg’s international outlook was not unique among Sámi teachers. The Norwegian Sámi teacher Per Fokstad discovered his Sámi identity when studying the circumstances of other minority groups during his travels in Europe. The lived realities of the Welsh in the United Kingdom and of the Jews in France made him realize that there was an international set of problems related to minority populations. In 1924, Fokstad published a comprehensive school plan for a Sámi-language educational system that was parallel to rather than complementary to the Norwegian system. Norwegian educational authorities criticized the plan vehemently, indicating that Fokstad’s ideas of education in Sámi were still much ahead of their time. Fokstad and Stenberg serve as examples to show that many Sámi individuals had an international and progressive view of the possibilities for the Sámi culture to flourish. A couple of decades later, Fokstad and his Sámi teacher colleague on the Finnish side of the border, Hans Aslak Guttorm, expressed notions of an active Sámi culture in the newspaper Sabmelaš, published in Sámi in Finland. According to Fokstad and Guttorm, only the Sámi language could uplift the culture of the Sámi, and it was paramount that pioneering literary and cultural figures wrote and performed their works in Sámi. Even if the revival of Sámi culture took decades to develop and really blossomed following the inclusion of the Sámi political movement into the global movement for Indigenous rights since the 1970s, Sámi teachers such as Stenberg, Fokstad, and Guttorm paved the way for such a political force, showcasing Sámi culture and furthering claims for governmental policies more sympathetic to Sámi culture and language. The early twentieth-century educational initiatives of Norway, Sweden, and Finland affecting the Sámi must be considered in the general context of educational history. In all three countries, the decades preceding and following the turn of the twentieth century witnessed an important allocation of government funds to the building of a system of elementary education that would teach the

31978_Kortegangas.indd 110

2020-12-11 10:23:52



Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education 111

populations of the countries theoretical and practical skills necessary in a modern state. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, governments in the Western world, influenced by pedagogical ideas developed to address such societal challenges as industrialization and urbanization, considered elementary education an important tool to solve several types of social problems, including poverty and exclusion. Especially in the case of Norway and Finland, the education of Sámi children differed insignificantly from this general imperative. In Norway and Finland, the governments and the regional educational authorities perceived elementary education as the distributor of a standard know-how and model for Norwegian and Finnish citizenship. Within this structure, Sámi language as language of instruction had no function. The authorities considered the majority languages of the countries as the best conveyors of the goals of the curricula. In Norway, Sámi could in some cases be used as an auxiliary of the assimilation process. Where Sámi children were monolingual Sámi speakers when starting school, teachers could use Sámi until the level of Norwegian was established enough to render this intelligibility function of the language redundant. The assimilation narrative applies generally also for Finland, but two schools in the northernmost Finnish municipality of Utsjoki constituted an exception to this story: in the Outakoski and the Utsjoki church village schools, there was the occasional possibility for Sámi children to attend elementary school in Sámi. The teachers in the Outakoski school, Josef Guttorm and Hans Aslak Guttorm, were also important figures in framing opposition to language policies. The leeway for Sámi language in Finland was the result of a double minority context: first, Finnish had been a minority language in the Russian Empire that Finland had been part of as an autonomous grand duchy between 1809 and 1917. A number of Finnish politicians and government officials thought that since Finnish had been repressed under Russian rule, Finland should not act in the same way toward the Sámi population. Sámi also shares the same linguistic origins as Finnish, and many educational authorities and clergymen who had Finnish nationalist sympathies considered it a task for the Finnish nation to protect its “sister language.” Finland had a considerable Swedish-speaking population when the elementary education system was built, and an education system parallel to the Finnish-speaking one was developed for their needs. As a certain awareness existed of Finland’s multilingual reality, the legislation for the schools allowed

31978_Kortegangas.indd 111

2020-12-11 10:23:52

112 Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

some space for smaller minority languages such as the Sámi, even if this legislation on the use of Sámi was rarely followed in practice. Another more significant exception from the rule of assimilation in Finland was the itinerant catechist school system administered by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. This system was a direct continuation of the missionary education tradition instituted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Finland was a part of Sweden. The catechist schools were gradually discontinued in Sweden in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Catechist schools continued, however, to be active in northern Finland until the 1950s, mainly due to lack of resources to expand the standard elementary education system to this sparsely populated area in the first half of the twentieth century. In the catechist schools, the teachers (known as catechists) often used Sámi in teaching. This positive attitude toward Sámi arose from the Lutheran mission tradition that had propagated the use of vernacular languages in teaching for reasons of intelligibility. Parallel to the general Western narrative of equal and uniform education for all pupils, a narrative of segregation exists within the context of early twentieth-century education. Minority groups were often targeted within the educational systems: many schools in the former European colonies of South America, and in the existing ones in Africa and southeastern Asia for instance, educated Indigenous children in segregation from European children in the early twentieth century.1 These schools had different goals and levels of ambition than the schools designed for Western pupils. The debate on the education of the Skolt Sámi in Finland bears traces of these ideas of educational segregation connected to the notion of colonial indirect rule. Karl Nickul, the scholar deeply invested in Skolt Sámi education, corresponded about his ideas with, for example, Lucy Mair, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, and a specialist on indirect rule. First and foremost, however, it is the education carried out in segregation of the reindeer-herding Sámi of Sweden’s mountain regions that stands out in a Nordic comparison. As the name nomad school suggests, this school system, founded in 1913, aimed to educate these children into a modernized livelihood of nomadic reindeer herding. The network of nomad schools covered the main Sámi areas of Sweden, and the school system was independent of Sweden’s standard elementary education system. The education authorities considered the Sámi incapable of modernizing their way of life by themselves.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 112

2020-12-11 10:23:52



Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education 113

The nomad school was a way to implement a controlled modernization of the livelihood of reindeer herding in order to render the mountain areas of northern Sweden productive, according to the first inspector of the nomad school system, Vitalis Karnell. The notion that modernization needed to break in from the outside was also the reason why Karnell and his successors prioritized Swedish as the language of instruction in the nomad schools. Their thinking was that the Sámi pupils needed to be educated to remain Sámi reindeer herders, but their livelihood was simultaneously to be modernized into a more economically efficient form. As a result, general opinion among education authorities was that the reformation of the way of life was to be carried out in Swedish, the language of the modern Swedish nation state. Among the Swedish Sámi, views diverged on the question of language of education. Generally, whenever and wherever the existence of the Sámi language was threatened, the attitudes were negative toward using only Swedish in schools. So, for instance, in Sorsele and Arjeplog in the Swedish province of Lapland, local Sámi opposed the language policies of the schools that provided no tuition time for Sámi language. But where local Sámi assumed that Sámi language would survive in the domestic sphere outside school hours, many Sámi, including Gustav Park, wished that only Swedish would be used in tuition. Park criticized the nomad schools for their segregating curriculum that offered the Sámi of Sweden a second-class citizenship compared to other Swedes. Park called for a reformation of the education system so that Sámi children would be treated with the same standards as all other Swedish children. Swedish as language of instruction was, for him, a guarantee of equality with other Swedes. Park assumed, however, that Sámi language would survive in the homes of the pupils. Sámi teachers in Norway and Finland likewise acknowledged that acquiring the majority language of the country was beneficial for all Sámi children. In Norway, Isak Saba stated he was not against the children learning Norwegian. In fact, they needed to learn perfect Norwegian, Saba wrote. But if this learning came at the cost of Sámi language disappearing, he strongly opposed the language policies. In all three countries, the education authorities held quality of education as one of the guiding principles of their work. In Sweden, nomad school inspectors Erik Bergström and Axel Calleberg supported the use of Sámi language in the nomad schools in principle. In practice,

31978_Kortegangas.indd 113

2020-12-11 10:23:52

114 Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education in the Nordic North

however, this use of Sámi was always subordinate to the imperative of the highest-quality education. Ensuring this quality meant essentially using Swedish teaching material and employing Swedish-speaking teachers with formal teachers’ education. In Norway, directors of schools of Finnmark County Bernt Thomassen and Christen Brygfjeld portrayed education in Norwegian and social problems among the Sámi in a relationship of direct negative correlation. Only high-quality teaching in Norwegian could uplift the Sámi from their wretched position, according to the directors. In Finland, the inspector of the elementary schools of the District of Lapland Kaarlo Kerkkonen expressed a similar correlation to that held by his colleagues in Norway. Education in Finnish was a common good, according to Kerkkonen, and denying Sámi children this good implied leaving them behind in terms of equal education. This progressive function of the majority language was a recurring argument among the education authorities in all countries. Sámi teachers such as Hans Aslak Guttorm, Per Fokstad, and Sara Nutti were of a diametrically opposite opinion about this function. To these teachers, Sámi language was not only the bearer of the culture of the ancestors, it was also the medium through which Sámi culture would be uplifted to a new burgeoning. The teachers wanted the future Sámi generations to know the majority languages of each country for pragmatic purposes: in order to partake in the civic and economic life of the states. But the future of Sámi culture lay in the hands of Sámi-speaking authors, publishers, artists, and teachers. As Per Fokstad stated in a text from 1917, quoting the words of the famous Grundtvig, only the mother tongue could awaken a people from hibernation. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the educational systems in the north of the Nordic countries had resulted in various negative effects for Sámi culture. Assimilation policies, but also the type of segregation promoted in the Swedish nomad schools, entailed the exclusion of Sámi language varieties, as well as traditional livelihoods and subsistence patterns. The goal of assimilation was to include Sámi children into a universal Finnish or Norwegian citizenship respectively. In doing so, however, assimilation excluded Sámi language and culture. The segregation of the nomad school in Sweden, on the other hand, constructed an idealized Sámi livelihood based on modernist notions of national economy and to a certain extent, cultural and racial hierarchies that did not correspond with the actual Sámi way of life. Most

31978_Kortegangas.indd 114

2020-12-11 10:23:52



Language, Citizenship, and Sámi Education 115

importantly, Sámi language was excluded from the curriculum of the nomad schools. Similar to many other contexts of educational history of minority populations, education’s more inclusive elements fuelled the criticism against parts of the education policies. The Sámi movement of the early twentieth century consisted largely of Sámi teachers, who operated in a liminal zone between the majority and Sámi societies. They had access to both societies and could formulate the criticism and claims of the Sámi in the language and format of the majority public sphere. In the decades following the Second World War, Sámi activists in all countries took up the baton from such pioneers of the Sámi movement as Karin Stenberg, Hans Aslak Guttorm, and Per Fokstad. Assimilation and segregation policies in schools continued, and even intensified in some cases, in the years following the war. Parallel with these policies, however, a strengthening Sámi movement gained momentum and, in the 1970s, joined the global Indigenous movement. This international Indigenous framework, backed by the United Nations, provided the Sámi political movement with a powerful tool that the governments of Sweden, Finland, and Norway listened to more eagerly than to earlier claims of Sámi individuals. By the turn of the third millennium, the Sámi had their own representative bodies in all the Nordic countries, and their political representation and claims for rights were deeply embedded in the international framework of the rights of Indigenous peoples. Today, Sámi children in Sweden, Finland, and Norway can attend all Sámi-speaking educational systems from kindergarten to the university. Important limitations apply to this rule, depending for instance on the home region of the children: Sámi education is mainly provided in the traditional Sámi home areas whereas a growing part of the Sámi population nowadays resides in the urban centres of the central and southern parts of the Nordic countries. In the autumn of 2018, a Helsinki comprehensive school opened a bilingual stream that enables Sámi-speaking children in Helsinki to attend parts of their elementary education in Sámi. The possibility of receiving one’s elementary education in Sámi in the capital is also an indication of what the future of Sámi education and Sámi culture is likely to hold in the Nordic countries: it will be as urban, international, and full of technology as any Nordic culture, while aiming to maintain deep, strong roots in the language and traditions of the northern homeland.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 115

2020-12-11 10:23:52

31978_Kortegangas.indd 116

2020-12-11 10:23:52

Notes

i nt roduct i o n   1 For the localities, I use the majority language versions of their names, even if this in many cases means using the Swedified, Finnified, and Norwegianized versions of Sámi localities (e.g., Inari [Finnish] instead of Aanaar [Inari Sámi], Anár [North Sámi], Aanar [Skolt Sámi], or Enare [Swedish]; or Karasjok [Norwegian] instead of Kárášjohka [North Sámi] or Kaarasjoki [Kven/Finnish]). As these examples illustrate, some of the localities have official names in several Sámi varieties, and in addition to that, in Kven, Meänkieli (the current term for the Finnish dialects spoken in northern Sweden), or Finnish, or in Swedish in Finland. In making the decision on the name forms used, clarity has been the guiding principle.   2 Josef Guttorm to Bishop J.R. Koskimies, 18 January 1908, Coll. 108.4, J.R. Koskimiehen arkisto (JRKA), National Library of Finland (NLF).  3 Svenska lapparnas landsmöte i Östersund, 130.   4 Larsen, “Fornorskningen i de nuværende skoler i Finmarken,” 37.   5 Olsen, “Responsibility, Reciprocity and Respect,” 33–4.

c ha p t e r o n e   1 These varieties are, from south to north and from east to west: South Sámi, Ume Sámi, Pite Sámi, Lule Sámi, North Sámi, Inari Sámi, and Skolt Sámi.  2 Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 38, 44; Kulonen, SeurujärviKari, and Pulkkinen, The Saami. A Cultural Encyclopedia, s.v. “Lapp.”   3 The definition of Sámi is contested. Estimates of the size of the populations range from 50,000 to over 100,000.  4 Manker, De svenska fjällapparna, 62.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 117

2020-12-11 10:23:52

118

Notes to pages 8–15

  5 See for example, Sjögren, Den säkra zonen, 16; Englund, Samhällsorientering och medborgarfostran i svensk skola under 1900-talet, 14, 20; Forsell, Urbana Infantil, 25–31.   6 Minde, “Assimilation of the Sami,” 126–9; Henrysson and Flodin, Samernas skolgång till 1956, 16–20; Kähkönen, Katekeetat Suomen Lapissa 200 vuotta, 465–66; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 82.   7 See for example, Hansen and Evjen, “Kjaert barn, mange navn,” 30.   8 Between 1938 and 2009, Lapland formed a province of its own.   9 Kotljarchuk, “Kola Sami in the Stalinist Terror,” 62, 76; Kotljarchuk, “Indigenous People, Vulnerability and the Security Dilemma,” 63–82. 10 I have borrowed the idea of presenting the context of the book in a number of keywords from Kiara M. Vigil, who, in her turn, has borrowed it from the American studies tradition. See Vigil, Indigenous Intellectuals, 16–23. 11 Ahonen and Rantala, “Introduction: Norden’s Present to the World,” 14. 12 Högnäs, “The Concept of Bildung,” 37; Sørensen, Norsk Idéhistorie III, 344; Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 82–4, 101–12. 13 Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 149. 14 Jernsletten, Samebevegelsen i Norge, 152; Lantto, Tiden börjar på nytt, 4–6, 296; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 133–4, 306–8; Pääkkönen, Saamelainen etnisyys ja pohjoinen paikallisuus, 141–51; Zachariassen, Samiske nasjonale strategar, 23. 15 A Danish philosopher and educator whose ideas on nations and nationalism were influential in the turn-of-the-century 1900 Nordic region. See for instance Hall, Korsgaard, and Pedersen, Building the Nation. 16 Jernsletten, Samebevegelsen i Norge, 151; Bråstad Jensen, Skoleverket og de tre stammers møte, 131–3; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 133–4; Lantto, Tiden börjar på nytt, 4–6, 289, 291. 17 Nyyssönen, “Suomalainen koululaitos ja saamelaiskysymys,” 156; Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 8; Mörkenstam, Om “Lapparnas privilegier,” 99; Norlin and Sjögren, “Kyrkan, utbildningspolitiken och den samiska skolundervisningen,” 421. 18 Dahl, Språkpolitik og skolestell i Finnmark, 330; Nordblad, Jämlikhetens villkor, 332–3; Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 130–4, 177. 19 Kortekangas, “Useful Citizens, Useful Citizenship.” 20 Bråstad Jensen, Skoleverket og de tre stammers møte 44–51; Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 75–6, 87–90. 21 Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 94–100, 230–4; Lantto, Lappväsendet; Mörkenstam, Om “Lapparnes privilegier,” 107, 260. 22 Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 137–9, 244–51.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 118

2020-12-11 10:23:52



Notes to pages 15–18

119

23 Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 77–80. 24 Race biology is a concept that was widely commented upon in Swedish media, for example, after the premiere of the 2016 drama film Sami Blood and following the 2016 publication of a White Paper on the historical relations between the Church of Sweden and the Sámi: see Lindmark and Sundström, De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. 25 Lundmark, Lappen är ombytlig, ostadig och obekväm, 63; Henrysson, Darwin, ras och nomadskola; Pusch, Nomadskoleinspektörerna och socialdarwinismen. 26 Svanberg and Tydén, I nationalismens bakvatten, 37; Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 113–15; Bråstad Jensen, Skoleverket og de tre stammers møte 45–9; Jernsletten, Samebevegelsen i Norge, 20; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 454; Isaksson, Kumma kuvajainen, 200–3, 214, 230, 325–6. 27 Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 52–4. 28 Named after Johan Skytte, one of the founders of the school and the chancellor of Uppsala University and member of the Council of the Realm of Sweden. 29 Lindkjølen, “Kirkens rolle i samisk opplæring”; Norlin and Sjögren, “Kyrkan, utbildningspolitiken och den samiska skolundervisningen vid sekelskiftet 1900”; Henrysson and Flodin, Samernas skolgång till 1956, 3; Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 52; Lindmark, “Svenska undervisningsinsatser och samiska reaktioner,” 354–6; Rasmussen, “Samiske prester i den svenske kirka i tidlig nytid,” 283–314. 30 Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 52: Lindkjølen, “Kirkens rolle i samisk opplæring,” 2–3; Kristiansen, “Den norske kirken og det samiske,” 1055–57. 31 Buchardt, “Religion, Education and Social Cohesion. Transformed and Traveling Lutheranism in the Emerging Nordic Welfare States during the 1890s–1930s,” 82, 83, 107. 32 Kähkönen, Katekeetat Suomen Lapissa 200 vuotta, 276–7; Elenius, “Stiftsledningen och minoritetspolitiken,” 469; Mustakallio, Pohjoinen hiippakunta: Kuopion–Oulun hiippakunnan historia 1850–1939, 437–41; Bråstad Jensen, Skoleverket og de tre stammers møte, 151–72; Elenius, “Minoritetsspråken i nationalistisk växelverkan. Samiska och finska som kyrkospråk och medborgarspråk,” 41–3; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 288; Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 222, 237, 261–2. 33 See for example, Nordblad, Jämlikhetens villkor; Lindmark, “Colonial Encounter in Early Modern Sápmi,” 131–46; Fur, Colonialism in the Margins; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 16; Shanley and Evjen, Mapping Indigenous Presence; Kortekangas, “Uusia suuntia, vanhoja

31978_Kortegangas.indd 119

2020-12-11 10:23:52

120

Notes to pages 18–26

rajoja,” 351–7; Kortekangas, “Globaalit ideat ‘Pohjan perillä,’” 86–92; Kortekangas, “Inclusion through Exclusion.” 34 Myhre, Den norske skoles utvikling, 78–80; Ahonen, “Millä opeilla ­opettajia koulutettiin?” 249. 35 Bråstad Jensen, Skoleverket og de tre stammers møte, 53. 36 Sjögren, Den säkra zonen, 63–4; Nordblad, Jämlikhetens villkor, 279–80. 37 Rantala, “Kansakoulunopettajat,” 108; Lehtola, Viimeinen katekeetta, 12; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 82–4.

c h a p t e r t wo   1 “Lapparna glada åt nomadskolan,” Stockholms-Tidningen, 20 November 1935.   2 Norlin and Sjögren, “Kyrkan, utbildningspolitiken och den samiska ­skolundervisningen,” 409–10; Henrysson and Flodin, Samernas ­skolgång till 1956, 4–5, 8–13.   3 Henrysson and Flodin, Samernas skolgång till 1956, 7, 10.   4 Norlin and Sjögren, “Kyrkan, utbildningspolitiken och den samiska ­skolundervisningen,” 417.  5 Bergqvist, Förslag till omorganisation af lappskoleväsendet, 3–7; Norlin and Sjögren, “Kyrkan, utbildningspolitiken och den samiska ­skolundervisningen,” 419; Sjögren, Den säkra zonen, 46.  6 Bergqvist, Förslag till omorganisation af lappskoleväsendet, 21; Lindmark, “Diaspora, Integration and Cantonization,” 20; Forsgren, “Language and Colonialism: Two Aspects,” 98, 100.  7 Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 115–18; Calleberg, “Nomader och nomadskolor,” 368–70.  8 Bergqvist, Bland svenskar, finnar och lappar, 115.  9 Bergqvist, Förslag till omorganisation af lappskoleväsendet, 21. 10 Sjögren, Den säkra zonen, 17. 11 Laula, Inför lif eller död? 12 Franzén, “K Vitalis Karnell.” 13 Karnell, Inspection report (Inspektörsberättelse) 1918, D:IV :1, (Rikets nomadskolors arkiv, RN S ), (Regional State Archives in Härnösand, Sweden, R SAH). 14 Laula, Inför lif eller död?, 3–5; Lantto, Tiden börjar på nytt, 46, 58–9, 61–2. 15 Svenska lapparnas landsmöte, 130. 16 Ibid., 133–6. 17 Ibid., 151.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 120

2020-12-11 10:23:52



Notes to pages 27–35

121

18 Svenska lapparnas landsmöte, 130; Sjögren, Den säkra zonen, 83. 19 Norlin and Sjögren, “Kyrkan, utbildningspolitiken och den samiska ­skolundervisningen,” 409–10; Henrysson and Flodin, Samernas skolgång till 1956, 4–5, 8–13; Anderzén, “Kyrkans undervisning i Lappmarken,” 389–91. 20 Karnell, Inspection report (Inspektörsberättelse) 1918 (Vitalis Karnell) D :I V :1, (RN S ), (RS AH). 21 Svenska lapparnas landsmöte, 24–5, 149. 22 “Våra lappar måste tillbaka till kåtalifvet,” 81. 23 Karnell, Inspection report (Inspektörsberättelse) 1917 (Vitalis Karnell) D :I V :1, (RN S ), (RS AH). 24 Lundmark, “Lappen är ombytlig, ostadig och obekväm,” 63–75. 25 Karnell, Inspection report (Inspektörsberättelse) 1917 (Vitalis Karnell) D :I V :1, (RN S ), (RS AH). 26 The forest Sámi had reindeer like the mountain Sámi, but had their ­pasture lands in forests and the Bothnian coastlands rather than in the open mountains of the Scandes. 27 “Historik”; Korhonen, “Här har ni mig,” 172–7. 28 Lindholm and Stenberg, Dat läh mijen situd, 5–6; See also Lantto, Tiden börjar på nytt, 109. 29 Lantto, Tiden börjar på nytt, 93, 109; Lindholm and Stenberg, Dat läh mijen situd, 3; Karin Stenberg to Carl Lindhagen 7 October 1922, A :2 42, (Carl Lindhagens samling, CLS ) (Stockholm City Archives, SSA ). 30 Lindholm and Stenberg, Dat läh mijen situd, 88. 31 Ibid., 5. 32 Ibid., 69–70. 33 Svensk författningssamling för 1925 (S FS 1925):511; Sjögren, Den säkra zonen, 73. 34 Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 26 October 1927, Luokta-Mávas lappby, A1, (R NS), (R SA H); Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 24 July 1926, Umbyns lappby, A1, (RN S ), (RS AH); Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 11 July 1927, Luokta-Mávas lappby, A1, (RNS), (RSAH); Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 15 July 1927, Tuorpons lappby; Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 8 May 1932, Mittådalens lappby, A1, (R NS), (R SA H). 35 Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 15 July 1927, Tuorpons lappby, A1, (RN S ), (RS A H). 36 Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 12 July 1927, Luokta-Mávas lappby, A1, (RN S ), (R SA H).

31978_Kortegangas.indd 121

2020-12-11 10:23:52

122

Notes to pages 36–42

37 Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 23 April 1932, Grans och Rans lappby, A1, (RN S ), (R SA H); Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 16 January 1926, Luokta-Mávas lappby, A1, (RN S ), (RS AH); Sjögren, Den säkra zonen, 108. 38 Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 13 September 1929, Sarivuoma lappby, (the meeting took place in the Gaitsaluokta camp in Norway), A1, (RN S ), (R SA H); Anderzén, Teaching and Church Tradition, 12; Mustakallio, “Laestadianismen, den ­finskspråkiga minoriteten,” 49. 39 Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 15 August 1928, Könkämä lappby, A1, (RN S ), (RS AH). 40 Bergström, Inspection report (Inspektörsberättelse) 1925 (Erik Bergström) D :I V :1, (R N S ), (RS AH). 41 Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 9 September 1928, Umbyns lappby, A1, (RNS), (R SA H). 42 Bergström, Inspection report (Inspektörsberättelse) 1929–30 (Erik Bergström) D: I V:1, (RN S ), (RS AH). 43 Ibid. 44 Henrysson and Flodin, Samernas skolgång till 1956, 44–5; “Calleberg, Claës Axel.” 45 Calleberg, Inspection report (Inspektörsberättelse) 1933–34 (Axel Calleberg) D: I V:1, (RN S ), (RS AH); Aikio-Puoskari, Saamen kielen ja ­saamenkielinen opetus, 106. 46 Calleberg, Inspection report (Inspektörsberättelse) 1938–39 (Axel Calleberg) D: I V:1, (RN S ), (RS AH); Elenius, “Minoritetsspråken i nationalistisk växelverkan,” 33; Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 119; Nordblad, Jämlikhetens villkor, 332–3. 47 Sjögren, Den säkra zonen, 113; Bergström, Inspection report (Inspektörsberättelse) 1929–30 (Erik Bergström) D:IV :1, (R NS), (R SA H); Calleberg, Inspection report (Inspektörsberättelse) 1938–39 (Axel Calleberg) D: I V: 1, (RN S ), (RS AH) (RN S ), (R SA H). 48 Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 164–5; Sjögren, Den säkra zonen, 139. 49 Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 3 April 1932, Sirkas lappby and Tuorpons lappby, A1, (R NS), (R SA H); Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 15 July 1927, Tuorpons lappby; Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 8 May 1932, Mittådalens lappby, A1, (R NS), (R SA H); Minutes of the meeting of the nomad school board (protokoll), 24 July 1926, Umbyns lappby, A1, (RN S ), (RS AH).

31978_Kortegangas.indd 122

2020-12-11 10:23:52



Notes to pages 42–53

123

50 Rutfjäll and Lundmark, ABC bland fjällen, 46, 92–3, 105. 51 Lundmark, “Terese Torgrim,” 20–1. 52 Holmström, Nomadskola: en lapplärarinnas upplevelser, 7–12, 41. 53 “Lapparna glada åt nomadskolan,” Stockholms-Tidningen, 20 November 1935; Sara Nutti, 11 November 1935, L:2:1, Ernst Manker’s Archive (E MA ), Nordic Museum Archives (N M A), 14–15. 54 Sara Nutti, n.d., L :2:1, (EM A), (N M A), 1–2. 55 Ernst Manker to Sven Haglund, 22 November 1935, E:1:A :3, (EMA ), (NMA ). 56 Ernst Manker to Karl Nickul, 16 March 1938, B a:1, (K NA  I), (SA F). 57 Laila Jääskeläinen to Ernst Manker, 19 December 1935, E:1:A:3, (EMA ), (NMA ).

c ha p t e r t h re e  1 Kähkönen, Katekeetat Suomen Lapissa 200 vuotta, 276–7; Lehtola, “Katekeettakouluista kansakouluihin,” 52; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 446, 454; Nyyssönen, “Principles and Practice,” 84; Kylli, “Misjon og utdanning,” 54.   2 “Hans Kejserliga Majestäts nådiga kungörelse”; “Laki oppivelvollisuudesta”; Aikio-Puoskari, Saamen kielen ja saamenkielinen opetus, 144; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 83, 87; Lehtola, “Katekeettakouluista kansakouluihin,” 52; Kähkönen, Katekeetat Suomen Lapissa 200 vuotta, 35–7.   3 Hämäläinen, Inspection reports (Tarkastuskertomukset), syyslukukausi (fall term) 1933, Ee:18, Kouluhallituksen kansanopetusosaston II arkisto (K K A I I ), National Archives of Finland (NA F); Nyyssönen, “Saamelaisten kouluolot 1900-luvulla,” 64.  4 Karttunen, Kansakoulutarkastajat ja heidän seuraajansa, 8.   5 Ibid., 55.  6 Kerkkonen, Lapin piirin kansakoulut, 14.   7 Contrary to Kerkkonen’s claim, the Norwegian legislation guaranteed a certain space for Sámi language as an auxiliary language in schools, even if this space was minimal. Kerkkonen, Lapin piirin kansakoulut, 14.  8 Kerkkonen, Lapin piirin kansakoulut, 14.   9 Ibid., 14–15. 10 Or more accurately, in the Finnish case Fenno-Swedish bilingual, and in the case of Norway riksmål-landsmål bilingual. 11 Kerkkonen, Lapin piirin kansakoulut, 15. 12 Ibid., 14–15.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 123

2020-12-11 10:23:52

124

Notes to pages 53–64

13 Kerkkonen, Overview reports (Yleiskatsaus) 1907, 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911, En:3, Kouluhallituksen kansanopetusosaston I arkisto (K K A I), (NA F ), Helsinki; Kerkkonen, Overview report (Yleiskatsaus) 1912, En:4, (K K A I ), (N AF). 14 Guttorm to Koskimies, 18 January 1908, Coll. 108.4, (J R K A ), (NLF). 15 Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 87, 120–2; Kähkönen, Katekeetat Suomen Lapissa 200 vuotta, 280. 16 Meeting minutes of the Chapter of the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu (Pöytäkirjat), 26 November 1933, Attachment 5, paragraph 3 on the ­ecclesial schools 1929–31, Ca:83, Oulun hiippakunnan tuomiokapitulin arkisto (O TA), National Archives of Finland in Oulu (NA FO). 17 Kerkkonen, Lapin piirin kansakoulut, 15. 18 Virtanen, Fennomanian perilliset, 106; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 178; Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik, 82–3. 19 Karttunen, Kansakoulutarkastajat ja heidän seuraajansa, 59. 20 Lähde, Overview report (Yleiskatsaus) 1914, En:5, (K K A I), (NA F); Lähde, Overview report (Yleiskatsaus) 1921, En:9, (K K A I), (NA F); Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 158. 21 Saukko, “‘Lapsia Jumalan valtakuntaa varten.’” 22 Saukko, “‘Lapsia Jumalan valtakuntaa varten,’” 52; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 97; Kerkkonen, Lapin piirin kansakoulut, 30. 23 Saukko, “‘Lapsia Jumalan valtakuntaa varten,’” 78–9; Lehtola, Kolmen kuninkaan maa, 298–9; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 97. 24 Hämäläinen, Tunturien mailta, 224. 25 “Antti Hämäläinen”; Karttunen, Kansakoulutarkastajat ja heidän ­seuraajansa, 74–5. 26 Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 300. 27 For this interpretation, see Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 300–1. 28 Hämäläinen, Tunturien mailta, 223–4. 29 Minutes of the District Meeting 1930, Ca:1, Pohjois-Lapin piirin ­kansakouluntarkastajan arkisto (PLPKKA), (NA FO). 30 Minutes of the District Meeting 1930, Ca:1, (PLPK K A ), (NA FO). 31 Lapin taloudelliset olot ja niiden kehittäminen, 169–70; Itkonen, Pippinä ja pappina; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 354. 32 Itkonen, Pippinä ja pappina, 36–7. 33 Ibid., 324, 327. 34 Ibid., 317. 35 Itkonen, Pippinä ja pappina, 316; Nyyssönen, “Principles and Practice.” 36 Hämäläinen, Inspection reports (Tarkastuskertomukset), syyslukukausi (fall term) 1933, Ee:18, (KKA I I ), (N AF).

31978_Kortegangas.indd 124

2020-12-11 10:23:53



Notes to pages 64–71

125

37 Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 288, 290. 38 Lehtola, The Sámi People, 51; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 84, 422–3. 39 Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 308. 40 Guttorm (“Asgu”), “Sabmelažža arvu,” 3–4. 41 Jalvi, Muottačalmit, 5–6; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 133–5. 42 The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland is a direct continuation of the Church of Sweden, separated from its mother church when Sweden ceded Finland to Russia in the early nineteenth century. 43 The chapter was led by the bishop and included four other members: three clergymen and a lawyer. 44 Norlin and Sjögren, “Kyrkan, utbildningspolitiken och den samiska skolundervisningen,” 403, 414–31; Nahkiaisoja, “Kansanopetus 1873–1920,” 280–4; Lehtola, Viimeinen katekeetta, 84–6, 103. 45 Kähkönen, Katekeetat Suomen Lapissa 200 vuotta, 148–9. 46 Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 95, 98–9; Henrysson and Flodin, Samernas skolgång till 1956, 3. 47 Mustakallio, Pohjoinen hiippakunta, 365–6. 48 Koskimies, Bishop’s visitation minutes (Piispantarkastuspöytäkirjat), Inari, 19–21 July 1902, Eb:18a, (OTA), (N AFO). 49 Koskimies to Det Norske Bibelselskap, 13 December 1919, Coll. 108.109, (J R K A ), (N LF). 50 Koskimies, Bishop’s visitation minutes (Piispantarkastuspöytäkirjat), Utsjoki, 19–21 July 1907, Eb:138, (OTA ), (NA FO). 51 Mustakallio, Pohjoinen hiippakunta, 282; Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 222. 52 Kylli, “Misjon og utdanning blant samer”; Meeting minutes of the Chapter of the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu (Pöytäkirjat), 28 September 1920, Ca:70, (O TA), (N AFO); Koskimies, Bishop’s visitation minutes (Piispantarkastuspöytäkirjat), Utsjoki, 19–21 July 1907, Eb:138, (OTA ), (NA F O ). 53 Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 90. 54 Meeting minutes of the Chapter of the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu (Pöytäkirjat), 11 January 1912, Attachment “Uudet katekeetat,” Ca:62, (O T A ), (N AFO). 55 Meeting minutes of the Chapter of the Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu (Pöytäkirjat), 28 September 1920, Attachment “Lappi” paragraph 13 on the ecclesial schools 1919, Ca:70, (OTA), (NA FO). 56 Neuvottelukomitealta. 57 Kähkönen, Katekeetat Suomen Lapissa 200 vuotta, 338–9; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 288.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 125

2020-12-11 10:23:53

126

Notes to pages 72–83

58 Lehtola, Viimeinen katekeetta, 124. 59 Ibid., 173–4. 60 Kitti, Oovt sámmilii máttááttijjee eellim kuáttá, 3–5. 61 Mustakallio, Pohjoinen hiippakunta, 424–5; Saarinen and Suhonen, Koltat, karjalaiset ja setukaiset, 38. Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset, 254, 330–1, 340. 62 Lehtola, Nickul. Rauhan mies, rauhan kansa, 91–3; Nickul to the Division of Anthropology and Psychology, National Research Council Washington D C , 27 October 1939, Ba:1, (KN A I ), (S AF). 63 Elementary school inspector Antti Hämäläinen to the National Board of Schools (Kouluhallitus), 2 May 1936, Da:1, (PLPK K A ), (NA FO); Rahkonen, “Petsamon kansakoulut,” 389. 64 Anni Tattari to Karl Nickul, 29 December 1933, Ba:5, (K NA I), (SA F). 65 A population speaking a Fenno-Ugric language close to Finnish. 66 Mustakallio, Pohjoinen hiippakunta, 424–5; Armas Aavikko, Petsamon piirin yleiskatsaus 1922 (overview of the Petsamo district), Piiritarkastajien yleiskatsaukset 1920–23, En 9 (overviews of the district inspectors), (KKA I ), (N AF). 67 F.E. Lilja, Overview of the Petsamo district (Petsamon piirin yleiskatsaus) 1921, En 9, (KKA I ), (N AF); Vartiainen, Koulupaikan neitinä kolttain parissa, 67–80. 68 Karl Nickul to Lucy Mair, 5 May 1937, Ba:1, (K NA I), (SA F); Karl Nickul to Jaakko Pohjola, 7 April, 1941, Ba:5, (K NA I), (SA F); Karl Nickul to Jaakko Sverloff, 12 January 1941, Ba:5, (K NA I), (SA F).

c ha p t e r f o u r   1 Bråstad Jensen, Skoleverket og de tre stammers møte, 44–51.   2 Minde, “Assimilation of the Sami,” 127–9; Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 58.   3 Bråstad Jensen, Skoleverket og de tre stammers møte, 175–6.   4 Lind Meløy, Internatliv i Finnmark, 99; Hoëm, Fra noaidiens verden til forskerens, 468.   5 Circular by Bernt Thomassen 20 October, 1902.   6 Bernt Thomassen to the Department of Church and Education, 24 January 1917, B:16, Skoledirektøren i Finnmark (SF), Regional State Archives in Tromsø (R S AT).   7 “Et interview med kirkesanger Isak Saba.”  8 Ibid.   9 “Et interview med kirkesanger Isak Saba”; Thomassen, “Det merkelige interview”; Isak Saba, “Fornorskningen i Finmarken.”

31978_Kortegangas.indd 126

2020-12-11 10:23:53



Notes to pages 83–91

127

10 Thomassen, “Fornorskningen.” 11 “Et interview med kirkesanger Isak Saba.” 12 Ibid. 13 Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 118–19. 14 Sagai Muittalægje, 1 March 1906; Finmarken, 11 July 1906. Here as ­printed in Jernsletten, Samebevegelsen i Norge, 37. 15 Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 118. 16 Bernt Thomassen to the elementary school board in Kistrand, 7 May 1917. The letter is dated 1917 but it is probably from 7 May 1918, given that Thomassen’s letter to the bishop, preceding the decision by the department, is dated 6 April 1918, and also precedes the letter dated 7 May 1917 in the order of the copy book, which covers the years 1918–19, B:17, (S F), (RS AT). 17 “Jens Otterbech.” 18 Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 124; Bråstad Jensen, Skoleverket og de tre stammers møte, 163. 19 Bernt Thomassen to the bishop of the Diocese of Tromsø (from 1918 on called Diocese of Hålogaland) 6 April 1918, B:17, (SF), (R SA T). 20 Finnmark spelled with a single n, as in Finmarken. 21 Hidle and Otterbech, Fornorskningen i Finmarken, 8. 22 Bjørklund, “Anders Larsen og hans samtid,” 20. 23 Kulonen, Seurujärvi-Kari, and Pulkkinen, eds, The Saami. A Cultural Encyclopedia, 192. 24 Larsen, “Fornorskningen i de nuværende skoler i Finmarken,” 35. 25 Ibid., 37. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 34. 28 Bernt Thomassen the director of schools of Troms and Nordland Counties, 12 May 1910, Db:434, Skoledirektøren i Troms (ST), (R SA T). 29 T. Eriksen to the director of schools of Troms and Nordland Counties, 18 April 1914, Db:434, (S T), (RS AT). 30 A.B. Arild to the director of schools of the Diocese of Tromsø, 2 June 1900, Db:434, (S T), (RS AT). 31 Christen Brygfjeld to the Diocese of Tromsø, 13 July 1901, Db:433, (ST), (R S A T ). 32 Minde, “Assimilation of the Sami,” 126–9. 33 P. Astrup to the director of schools in Finnmark, Christen Brygfjeld, 21 April 1922, DbII:162, (S F ), (R S A T ); Lund, “Folkehøgskolen og samane.” 34 Astrup to the director of schools in Finnmark, Christen Brygfjeld, 21 April 1922, DbII:162, (S F), (RS AT).

31978_Kortegangas.indd 127

2020-12-11 10:23:53

128

Notes to pages 92–102

35 P. Astrup to Christen Brygfjeld, 30 May 1922, DbII:162, (SF), (R SA T). 36 Bråstad Jensen, “Per Pavelsen Fokstad,” 268. 37 Ibid., 266–71. 38 Fokstad, “Hvordan fornorskningen i barneskolen grep ind i mit liv,” 39–40. 39 Ibidl, 42. 40 Lind Meløy, Internatliv i Finnmark, 102–3. 41 Department of Church and Education to Christen Brygfjeld, 4 July 1923, copy of the county governor’s letter to the Department of Church and Education, Da:144, (S F), (RS AT). 42 Brygfjeld to the Department of Church and Education, 3 July 1923. 43 Fokstad, “Nogen antydninger til forslag,” 281–5. 44 See, for example, Tägil, “Ethnic and National Minorities,” 12, 17. 45 “Et interview med kirkesanger Isak Saba.” 46 Myhre, Den norske skoles utvikling, 86–90; Eriksen and Niemi, Den ­finske fare, 256–7. 47 The North Sámi word nali (nálli in modern ortography) can mean race, descendance, and family. Race is used as the most accurate translation, although it should be seen as a word with positive rather than negative connotations as the word race has later gained in the Nordic countries. 48 Fokstad, “Veähaš jurdagak samii čeärdalaš tilii pirra,” 2–3; Fokstad, “Hvordan fornorskningen i barneskolen grep ind i mit liv,” 44. 49 Brygfjeld to the Department of Church and Education in Kristiania, 29 June 1923. 50 Brygfjeld to the Department of Church and Education, 29 June 1923. 51 Christen Brygfjeld to Anton Ræder, 7 March 1925, DbII:162, (SF), (R S A T ); Bråstad Jensen, Skoleverket og de tre stammers møte, 24–30. 52 Brygfjeld to Ræder, 7 March 1925. 53 Christen Brygfjeld to the Karasjok school board, 27 July 1927, HV III:465, (S F ), (R S A T ). 54 Brygfjeld to the Department of Church and Education, 30 July 1923, B :20, (S F ), (RS AT). 55 Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 79–81, 126–8. 56 Brygfjeld to the Department of Church and Education, 5 January 1933, paraphrased in Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 126. 57 Lind Meløy, Internatliv i Finnmark, 108; “Lyder Aarseth.” 58 Lyder Aarseth to Sigurd Heiervang, 1 September 1934. DbII:168, (SF), (R S A T ); Department of Church and Education to Lyder Aarseth, 27 February 1934. HVI I I :469, (S F), (RS AT); Lyder Aarseth to the Department of Church and Education, 6 March 1934. HV III:469, (SF), (R SA T).

31978_Kortegangas.indd 128

2020-12-11 10:23:53



Notes to pages 102–12

129

59 Aarseth to Heiervang, 1 September 1934, Db:168; Thomassen to the Department of Church and Education, 24 January 1917. 60 Aarseth to Heiervang, 1 September 1934, Db:168; Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 261. 61 Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 122, 261. 62 Ibid., 65, 263–4; 299. 63 Ibid., 261–4. 64 “Eivind Berggrav”; Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 222, 239, 263–4, 267–8. 65 Berggrav, Spenningens land, 62. 66 Bråstad Jensen, Skoleverket og de tre stammers møte, 170; Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, 222. 67 Berggrav, Spenningens land, 10. 68 Ibid., 69. 69 Ibid., 63–9. 70 As estimated in Manker, De svenska fjällapparna, 62.

c ha p t e r f i ve   1 The local contexts of education in most European colonies were complex and included native schools based on both assimilation and segregation, see for example, Gonzalbo Aizpuru and Ossenbach Sauter, Educación rural e indígena, 15–22; Taylor, Indonesia: Peoples and Histories, 287–90; Nordblad, Jämlikhetens villkor.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 129

2020-12-11 10:23:53

31978_Kortegangas.indd 130

2020-12-11 10:23:53

Bibliography

A rc hi ve s National Archives of Finland (N AF) Kouluhallituksen kansanopetusosaston I arkisto (K K A I) En:3 Yleiskatsaukset En:4 Yleiskatsaukset En:5 Yleiskatsaukset En:9 Yleiskatsaukset Kouluhallituksen kansanopetusosaston II arkisto (K K A II) Ee:18 Tarkastuskertomukset National Archives of Finland in Oulu (NA FO) Oulun hiippakunnan tuomiokapitulin arkisto (OTA ) Ca:62 Pöytäkirjat Ca:70 Pöytäkirjat Ca:83 Pöytäkirjat Eb:18a Inarin piispantarkastuspöytäkirjat Eb:138 Utsjoen piispantarkastuspöytäkirjat Pohjois-Lapin piirin kansakouluntarkastajan arkisto (PLPK K A ) Ca:1 Piirikokousten pöytäkirjat Da:1 Lähetettyjen kirjeiden toisteet National Library of Finland (N LF) J.R. Koskimiehen arkisto (JRKA) Coll. 108.4 Saadut kirjeet Coll. 108.109 Lähetetyt kirjeet Nordic Museum archives, Sweden (N M A) Ernst Mankers arkiv (EM A) E :1:A Korrespondens

31978_Kortegangas.indd 131

2020-12-11 10:23:53

132 Bibliography L :2 Övriga trycksaker och avskrifter Regional State Archives in Härnösand, Sweden (R SA H) Rikets nomadskolors arkiv (RN S ) A Protokoll D :I V Inspektörsberättelser Regional State Archives in Tromsø (RS AT) Skoledirektøren i Finnmark (S F) B Kopibøker Da Korrespondanse og saksdokument ordnet kronologisk Db Korrespondanse og saksdokument ordnet kronologisk H Korrespondanse og saksdokument ordnet kronologisk Skoledirektøren i Troms (S T) Db Korrespondanse og saksdokumenter ordnet etter emne Sámi Archives of Finland (S AF) Karl Nickulin arkisto I (KN A I ) Ba:1 Lappia koskeva kirjeenvaihto Ba:5 Kolttien kanssa käyty kirjeenvaihto Stadsarkivet Stockholm (Stockholm City Archives) (SSA ) Carl Lindhagens samling (CLS ) A :2 Brevsamling

P ub l i she d s o u rce s Ahonen, Sirkka. “Millä opeilla opettajia koulutettiin?” In Valistus ja ­koulunpenkki. Kasvatus ja koulutus Suomessa 1860-luvulta 1960-luvulle, edited by Anja Heikkinen and Pirkko Leino-Kaukiainen, 239–52. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2011. Ahonen, Sirkka, and Jukka Rantala. “Introduction: Norden’s Present to the World.” In Nordic Lights. Education for Nation and Civic Society in the Nordic Countries, 1850–2000, edited by Sirkka Ahonen and Jukka Rantala, 9–28. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2001. Aikio-Puoskari, Ulla. Saamen kielen ja saamenkielinen opetus Pohjoismaissa: Tutkimus saamelaisten kielellisistä ihmisoikeuksista Pohjoismaiden kouluissa. Rovaniemi: University of Lapland, 2001. Anderzén, Sölve. “Kyrkans undervisning i Lappmarken under 1800–talet.” In De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. En vetenskaplig antologi, edited by Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, vol. 1, 371–402. Skellefteå: Artos, 2016. – Teaching and Church Tradition in the Kemi and Torne Laplands, Northern Scandinavia, in the 1700s. Umeå: Umeå University, 1997.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 132

2020-12-11 10:23:53

Bibliography 133 “Antti Hämäläinen.” Kansallisbiografia, s.v. Accessed 30 March 2020. http://www.kansallisbiografia.fi/kb/artikkeli/9407/. Berggrav, Eivind. Spenningens land. Visitas-glimt fra Nord-Norge. Oslo: Aschehoug, 1938. Bergqvist, Olof. Bland svenskar, finnar och lappar. Luleå: Svenska kyrkans diakonistyrelses bokförlag, 1939. – Förslag till omorganisation af lappskoleväsendet. Luleå: Ruuth, 1909. Bjørklund, Ivar. “Anders Larsen og hans samtid.” In Anders Larsen “Mearrasámiid birra” – ja eara čállosat. “Om sjøsamene” – og andre skrifter, edited by Ivar Bjørklund and Harald Gaski, 13–35. Karasjok: Cálliid Lágádus, 2014. Bråstad Jensen, Eivind. “Per Pavelsen Fokstad. En stridsmann for samisk utdanning, språk og kultur.” Årbok for norsk utdanningshistorie 2004 21 (2004). – Skoleverket og de tre stammers møte. Tromsø: Eureka forlag, 2005. Brygfjeld, Christen. Published letter to the Department of Church and Education in Kristiania. In Samisk skolehistorie, 29 June, 1923. Accessed 12 March 2020. http://skuvla.info/skolehist/cb-fokstad1-tn. htm. – Published letter to the Department of Church and Education in Kristiania. In Samisk skolehistorie (Kárášjohka 2010), 3 July 1923. Accessed 12 March 2020. http://skuvla.info/skolehist/cb-tyveri-tn.htm. Buchardt, Mette. “Religion, Education and Social Cohesion: Transformed and Traveling Lutheranism in the Emerging Nordic Welfare States during the 1890s–1930s.” In Education, State and Citizenship, edited by Mette Buchardt, Pirjo Markkola, and Heli Valtonen, 81–113. Helsinki: Nordic Centre of Excellence NordWel, 2013. Calleberg, C. Axel. “Nomader och nomadskolor.” In Norrland: Natur, befolkning och näringar, edited by Magnus Lundqvist, 367–402. Stockholm: Geografiska förbundet and Industriens utredningsinstitut, 1942. “Calleberg, Claës Axel.” Vem är det. Svensk biografisk handbok 1943, s.v. Projekt Runeberg. Accessed 31 March 2020. http://runeberg.org/​ vemardet/1943/0140.html. Dahl, Helge. Språkpolitik og skolestell i Finnmark 1814 til 1905. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1957. “Eivind Berggrav.” Norsk biografisk leksikon, s.v. Accessed 31 March 2020. https://nbl.snl.no/Eivind_Berggrav. Elenius, Lars. “Minoritetsspråken i nationalistisk växelverkan. Samiska och finska som kyrkospråk och medborgarspråk.” In Nationsöverskridande

31978_Kortegangas.indd 133

2020-12-11 10:23:53

134 Bibliography kyrkohistoria. De språkliga minoriteterna på Nordkalotten, edited by Daniel Lindmark, 13–47. Umeå: Umeå University, 2016. – Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik: Samer och finskspråkiga minoriteter i ett jämförande nordiskt perspektiv. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2006. – “Stiftsledningen och minoritetspolitiken.” In De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. En vetenskaplig antologi, edited by Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, vol. 2, 469–518. Skellefteå: Artos, 2016. Englund, Tomas. Samhällsorientering och medborgarfostran i svensk skola under 1900-talet. Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1986. Eriksen, Knut Einar, and Einar Niemi. Den finske fare: Sikkerhetsproblemer og minoritetspolitikk i Nord 1860–1940. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1981. “Et interview med kirkesanger Isak Saba.” Skolebladet 46 (1906). In Samisk skolehistorie. Accessed 12 March 2020. http://skuvla.info/​ skolehist/saba06-tn.htm. Fokstad, Per. “Hvordan fornorskningen i barneskolen grep ind i mit liv.” In Fornorskningen i Finmarken, edited by Johannes Hidle and Jens Otterbech, 38–44. Kristiania: Lutherstiftelsens boghandel, 1917. – “Nogen antydninger til forslag til samisk (lappisk) skoleplan, utarbeidet for den parlamentariske skolekommisjon av lærer Per Fokstad, Bonaks, Tana 1924.” Published in Årbok for norsk utdanningshistorie 2004 21 (2004): 285. Forsell, Håkan. Urbana Infantil. Stadsmiljö, pedagogik och kunskapssamhälle i metropolernas tidevarv, ca 1900–1930. Lund: Sekel, 2012. Forsgren, Tuuli. “Language and Colonialism: Two Aspects.” In Education and Colonialism: Swedish Schooling Projects in Colonial Areas 1638– 1878, edited by Daniel Lindmark, 87–121. Umeå: Umeå University, 2000. Franzén, Olle. “K Vitalis Karnell.” Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, s.v. Accessed 31 March 2020. https://sok.riksarkivet.se/sbl/Presentation. aspx?id=12393. Fur, Gunlög. Colonialism in the Margins. Cultural Encounters in New Sweden and Lapland. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Pilar, and Gabriela Ossenbach Sauter, eds, Educación rural e indígena en Iberoamérica. Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1996. Hall, John A., Ove Korsgaard, and Ove K. Pedersen. Building the Nation: N.F.S. Grundtvig and Danish National Identity. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. Hämäläinen, Antti. Tunturien mailta. Turku: Aura, 1945.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 134

2020-12-11 10:23:53

Bibliography 135 “Hans Kejserliga Majestäts nådiga kungörelse angående undervisningsspråket wid lärdoms-, real-och folkskolorna i Finland,” Storfurstendömet Finlands Författningssamling för 1871. Helsinki: Kejserliga Senatens tryckeri, 1871. Hansen, Lars Ivar, and Bjørg Evjen. “Kjaert barn, mange navn: Om forskjellige betegnelser på den samiske befolkningen i Nordland gjennom århundrene.” In Nordlands kulturelle mangfold: Etniske relasjoner i ­historisk perspektiv, edited by Bjørg Evjen and Lars Ivar Hansen, 17–47. Oslo: Pax forlag, 2008. Henrysson, Sten. Darwin, ras och nomadskola: motiv till kåtaskolreformen 1913. Umeå: Umeå University, 1993. Henrysson, Sten, and Johnny Flodin. Samernas skolgång till 1956. Umeå: Umeå University, 1992. Hidle, Johannes, and Jens Otterbech, Fornorskningen i Finmarken. Kristiania: Lutherstiftelsens boghandel, 1917. “Historik.” Samernas utbildningscentrum. Accessed 31 March 2020. http://www.samernas.se/om-samernas/historik/. Hoëm, Anton. Fra noaidiens verden til forskerens. Misjon, kunnskap og modernisering i sameland 1715–2007. Oslo: Novus forlag, 2007. Högnäs, Sten. “The Concept of Bildung and the Education of the Citizen.” In Nordic Lights. Education for Nation and Civic Society in the Nordic Countries, 1850–2000, edited by Sirkka Ahonen and Jukka Rantala, 29–50. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2001. Holmström, Kally. Nomadskola: en lapplärarinnas upplevelser. Stockholm: Norstedt, 1938. Isaksson, Pekka. Kumma kuvajainen: Rasismi rotututkimuksessa, rotuteorioiden saamelaiset ja suomalainen fyysinen antropologia. Inari: Kustannus-Puntsi, 2001. Itkonen, Tuomo. Pippinä ja pappina. Helsinki: WSOY , 1970. Jalvi, Pedar. Muottačalmit. Jyväskylä, 1915. “Jens Otterbech.” Norsk biografisk leksikon, s.v. Accessed 31 March 2020. https://nbl.snl.no/Jens_Otterbech. Jernsletten, Regnor. Samebevegelsen i Norge. Idé og strategi 1900–1940. Tromsø: Univeristy of Tromsø, 1986. Kähkönen, Esko I. Katekeetat Suomen Lapissa 200 vuotta. Rovaniemi: Lapin korkeakoulu, 1989. Karttunen, M.O. Kansakoulutarkastajat ja heidän seuraajansa. Suomen koulutoimen piirihallinnon tarkastajamatrikkeli 1861–1980. Helsinki: V K V ry, 1983.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 135

2020-12-11 10:23:53

136 Bibliography Kerkkonen, Kaarlo. Lapin piirin kansakoulut lukuvuosina 1906–1912. Jyväskylä: Gummerus, 1914. Keskitalo, Pigga, Veli-Pekka Lehtola, and Merja Paksuniemi, eds, Saamelaisten kansanopetuksen ja koulunkäynnin historia Suomessa. Turku: Institute of Migration, 2014. Kitti, Anni. Oovt sámmilii máttááttijjee eellim kuáttá: Erään saamelaisopettajan elämästä. Inarin seurakunta: Inari 1984. Komiteanmietintö N:o 8: 1938. Lapin taloudelliset olot ja niiden kehittäminen: Lapin komitean mietintö. Helsinki 1938. Korhonen, Olavi. “Här har ni mig: om Karin Stenberg, samernas förkämpe i Arvidsjaur.” In År av liv: Luleå stift 1904–2004, edited by Ulf Boström, 172–7. Luleå: the Diocese of Luleå, 2003. Kortekangas, Otso. “Inclusion through exclusion. Comparing elite discourses on the assimilation through education of the indigenous peoples in early twentieth century Norway and Peru” (master’s thesis, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2012). https://thesis.eur.nl/pub/12410/MA%20 thesis%20Kortekangas.Final%20version.doc. – “Uusia suuntia, vanhoja rajoja. Saamelaisten kouluhistorian moniääninen tulevaisuus.” In Saamelaisten kansanopetuksen ja koulunkäynnin historia Suoomessa, edited by Pigga Keskitalo, Veli-Pekka Lehtola and Merja Paksuniemi, 351–7. Turku: Institute of Migration, 2014. – “Globaalit ideat ‘Pohjan perillä.’ Kohti saamelaisen kouluhistorian ­kansainvälisempää kontekstia.” Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 1 (2015): 86–92. – “Useful Citizens, Useful Citizenship: Cultural Contexts of Sámi Education in Early 20th Century Norway, Sweden and Finland.” Paedagogica Historica 53 no. 1&2 (2017): 80–92. Kotljarchuk, Andrej. “Indigenous People, Vulnerability and the Security Dilemma: Sámi School Education on the Kola Peninsula, 1917–1991.” In Sámi Educational History in a Comparative International Perspective, edited by Otso Kortekangas, Pigga Keskitalo, Jukka Nyyssönen, Andrej Kotljarchuk, Merja Paksuniemi, David Sjögren, 63–82. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. – “Kola Sami in the Stalinist Terror: A Quantitative Analysis.” Journal of Northern Studies 6, no. 2 (2012): 59–82. Kristiansen, Roald E. “Den norske kirken og det samiske.” In De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. En vetenskaplig ­antologi, edited by Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, volume 2, 1053–83. Skellefteå: Artos 2016.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 136

2020-12-11 10:23:53

Bibliography 137 Kulonen, Ulla-Maija, Irja Seurujärvi-Kari, and Risto Pulkkinen, The Saami. A Cultural Encyclopedia. Helsinki: The Finnish Literature Society, 2005. Kylli, Ritva. “Misjon og utdanning blant samer i 1800-tallets Finland.” Norsk tidsskrift for misjonsvitenskap 71, no. 2 (2017): 44–57. “Laki oppivelvollisuudesta,” Suomen asetuskokoelma (AsK)101/1921. Lantto, Patrik. Lappväsendet: tillämpningen av svensk samepolitik 1885– 1971. Umeå: Umeå University, 2012. – Tiden börjar på nytt. En analys av samernas etnopolitiska mobilisering i Sverige 1900–1950. Umeå: Umeå University, 2000. Larsen, Anders. “Fornorskningen i de nuværende skoler i Finmarken.” In Fornorskningen i Finmarken, edited by Johannes Hidle and Jens Otterbech. Kristiania: Lutherstiftelsens boghandel, 1917. Laula, Elsa. Inför lif eller död? Sanningsord i de lappska förhållandena. Stockholm, 1904. Lehtola, Laura. Viimeinen katekeetta: opettajana Inarin erämaassa. Juva: WS O Y , 1984. Lehtola, Teuvo. Kolmen kuninkaan maa. Inarin historia 1500-luvulta ­jälleenrakennusaikaan. Inari: Kustannus-Puntsi, 1998. Lehtola, Veli-Pekka. “Katekeettakouluista kansakouluihin. Saamelaisten kouluhistoria 1900-luvun alkupuoliskolla.” In Saamelaisten kansansivistyksen ja koulunkäynnin historia Suomessa, edited by Pigga Keskitalo, Veli-Pekka Lehtola, and Merja Paksuniemi, 44–62. Turku: Institute of Migration, 2014. – Nickul. Rauhan mies, rauhan kansa. Inari: Kustannus-Puntsi, 2000. – Saamelaiset suomalaiset: Kohtaamisia 1896–1953. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2012. – The Sámi People. Traditions in Transition. Inari: Kustannus-Puntsi, 2002. Lind Meløy, Lydolf. Internatliv i Finnmark: Skolepolitikk 1900–1940. Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget 1980. Lindholm, Valdemar, and Karin Stenberg. Dat läh mijen situd: det är vår vilja, En vädjan till den svenska nationen från samefolket. Stockholm: Svenska förlaget, 1920. Lindkjølen, Hans “Kirkens rolle i samisk opplæring.” In Samisk skolehistorie 1, edited by Svein Lund. Karasjok: Davvi Girji, 2005. Accessed 30 March 2020. http://skuvla.info/skolehist/lind-n.htm. Lindmark, Daniel. “Colonial Encounter in Early Modern Sápmi.” In Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity. Small Time Agents in a Global Arena, edited by Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin, 131–46. New York: Springer, 2013.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 137

2020-12-11 10:23:53

138 Bibliography – “Diaspora, Integration and Cantonization: Swedish Colonial Education from a Theoretical, Comparative and Concluding Perspective.” In Education and Colonialism: Swedish Schooling Projects in Colonial Areas 1638–1878, edited by Daniel Lindmark, 15–40. Umeå: Umeå University, 2000. – “Svenska undervisningsinsatser och samiska reaktioner på 1600–1700talen,” In De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. En vetenskaplig antologi, edited by Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, volume 1, 341–69. Skellefteå: Artos 2016. Lindmark, Daniel, and Olle Sundström, eds. De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. En vetenskaplig antologi. Volumes 1 and 2. Skellefteå: Artos, 2016. Lund, Svein. “Folkehøgskolen og samane.” In Samisk skolehistorie. Accessed 31 March 2020. http://skuvla.info/skolehist/fhs-n.htm. Lundmark, Bo. “Terese Torgrim: Från en nomadlärarinnas minnesanteckningar.” In Från skolkåtor och renfjäll: Terese Torgrim och Johan Turi berättar, edited by Bo Lundmark, 13–41. Luleå: Norrbottens museum 1972. Lundmark, Lennart. “Lappen är ombytlig, ostadig och obekväm”. Svenska statens samepolitik i rasismens tidevarv. Umeå: Norrlands universitetsförlag, 2002. “Lyder Aarseth,” Finnmarksarkivene, s.v. Accessed 31 March 2020. http:// finnmarksarkivene.no/?p=1497. Manker, Ernst. De svenska fjällapparna. Stockholm: STF, 1947. Minde, Henry. “Assimilation of the Sami: Implementation and Consequences.” Acta Borealia: A Nordic Journal of Circumpolar Societies 20, no. 2 (2003): 121–46. Mörkenstam, Ulf. Om “Lapparnas privilegier”. Föreställningar om samiskhet i svensk samepolitik 1883–1997. Stockholm: Stockholm University, 1999. Mustakallio, Hannu. “Laestadianismen, den finskspråkiga minoriteten i norra Sverige och de finsk-svenska kyrkliga relationerna från 1890-talet till år 1923.” In Nationsöverskridande kyrkohistoria. De språkliga minoriteterna på Nordkalotten, edited by Daniel Lindmark, 48–65. Umeå: Umeå University, 2016. – Pohjoinen hiippakunta: Kuopion–Oulun hiippakunnan historia 1850– 1939. Helsinki: Kirjapaja, 2009. Myhre, Reidar. Den norske skoles utvikling: Idé og virkelighet. Oslo: Gyldendal, 1992.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 138

2020-12-11 10:23:53

Bibliography 139 Nahkiaisoja, Tarja. “Kansanopetus 1873–1920.” In Inari. Aanaar. Inarin historia jääkaudesta nykypäivään, edited by Veli-Pekka Lehtola, 280–7. Inari: Municipality of Inari, 2003. Neuvottelukomitealta, joka on asetettu keskustelemaan ja lausuntoa ­antamaan Lapinmaan taloudellisten olojen tutkimista varten astetun komitean mietinnöstä. Helsinki, 1908. Nordblad, Julia. Jämlikhetens villkor: Demos, imperium och pedagogik i Bretagne, Tunisien, Tornedalen och Lappmarken 1880–1925. Göteborg: University of Gothenburg, 2013. Norlin, Björn, and David Sjögren. “Kyrkan, utbildningspolitiken och den samiska skolundervisningen vid sekelskiftet 1900.” In De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. En vetenskaplig ­antologi, edited by Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, vol. 1, 403–38. Skellefteå: Artos, 2016. Nyyssönen, Jukka. “Principles and Practice in Finnish National Policies towards the Sámi People.” In First World, First Nations: Internal Colonialism and Indigenous Self-Determination in Northern Europe and Australia, edited by Günter Minnerup and Pia Solberg, 80–96. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011. – “Saamelaisten kouluolot 1900-luvulla.” In Saamelaisten kansanopetuksen ja koulunkäynnin historia Suomessa, edited by Pigga Keskitalo, VeliPekka Lehtola, and Merja Paksuniemi, 63–86. Turku: Institute of Migration, 2014. – “Suomalainen koululaitos ja saamelaiskysymys.” In Saamelaisten kansanopetuksen ja koulunkäynnin historia Suoomessa, edited by Pigga Keskitalo, Veli-Pekka Lehtola, and Merja Paksuniemi, 154–74. Turku: Institute of Migration, 2014. Olsen, Torjer A. “Responsibility, Reciprocity and Respect. On the Ethics of (Self-)Representation and Advocacy in Indigenous Studies.” In Ethics in Indigenous Research Past Experiences – Future Challenges, edited by Anna-Lill Drugge, 25–43. Umeå: Umeå University, 2016. Pääkkönen, Erkki. Saamelainen etnisyys ja pohjoinen paikallisuus. Saamelaisten etninen mobilisaatio ja paikallisperustainen vastaliike. Rovaniemi: University of Lapland, 2008. Pusch, Simone. Nomadskoleinspektörerna och socialdarwinismen 1917– 1945. Umeå: Umeå University, 1998. Rahkonen, Hilkka. “Petsamon kansakoulut.” In Turjanmeren maa. Petsamon historia 1920–1944, edited by Jouko Vahtola and Samuli Onnela, 373–99. Rovaniemi: Petsamo-seura, 1999.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 139

2020-12-11 10:23:53

140 Bibliography Rantala, Jukka. “Kansakoulunopettajat.” In Valistus ja koulunpenkki. Kasvatus ja koulutus Suomessa 1860-luvulta 1960-luvulle, edited by Anja Heikkinen and Pirkko Leino-Kaukiainen, 266–97. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2011. Rasmussen, Siv. “Samiske prester i den svenske kirka i tidlig nytid.” In De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. En vetenskaplig antologi, edited by Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, vol. 1, 283–314. Skellefteå: Artos, 2016. Rutfjäll, Sigrid, and Bo Lundmark. ABC bland fjällen: Nomadlärarinnan Sigrid Rutfjäll berättar. Köping: Lindfors, 1990. Saarinen, Tuija, and Seppo Suhonen, eds, Koltat, karjalaiset ja setukaiset. Pienet kansat maailmojen rajoilla. Kuopio: Snellman-institutti, 1995. Saba, Isak. “Fornorskningen i Finmarken. Svar til skoledirektør Thomassen og sogneprest Opdahl.” Skolebladet 2 (1907). In Samisk skolehistorie. Accessed 12 March 2020. http://skuvla.info/skolehist/ saba07-tn.htm. “Sámi School History.” Sami School History. Accessed 28 August 2017. skuvla.info. Saukko, Tiina. “‘Lapsia Jumalan valtakuntaa varten’: NNK Y :n ulkolähetystyö Inarissa vuosina 1902–1938 ja Riutulan lastenkoti” (master’s ­thesis, Univeristy of Oulu, 2010). Shanley, Kathryn W., and Bjørg Evjen, eds. Mapping Indigenous Presence. North Scandinavian and North American Perspectives. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015. Sjögren, David. Den säkra zonen: Motiv, åtgärdsförslag och verksamhet i den särskiljande utbildningspolitiken för inhemska minoriteter 1913– 1962. Umeå: Umeå University, 2010. Svanberg, Ingvar, and Mattias Tydén. I nationalismens bakvatten. Om minoritet, etnicitet och rasism. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2011. Svensk författningssamling för 1925 (SFS 1925:511). Stockholm: Nordstedts, 1926. Svenska lapparnas landsmöte i Östersund den 5–9 februari 1918. Uppsala and Stockholm: Almqvist&Wiksell, 1918. Sørensen, Øystein. Norsk Idéhistorie III: Kampen om Norges sjel 1770– 1905. Oslo: Aschehoug, 2001. Tägil, Sven. “Ethnic and National Minorities in the Nordic NationBuilding Process: Theoretical and Conceptual Premises.” In Ethnicity and Nation Building in the Nordic World, edited by Sven Tägil, 8–32. London: Hurst & Company, 1995.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 140

2020-12-11 10:23:53

Bibliography 141 Taylor, Jean Gelman. Indonesia: Peoples and Histories. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Thomassen, Bernt. “Circular.” In Samisk skolehistorie. 20 October 1902. Accessed 12 March 2020. http://skuvla.info/skolehist/rundskrivelse-tn. htm. – “Det merkelige interview.” Skolebladet 1 (1907). In Samisk skolehistorie. Accessed 12 March 2020. http://skuvla.info/skolehist/bernt06-tn.htm. – “Fornorskningen.” Skolebladet 12 (1907). In Samisk skolehistorie. Accessed 12 March 2020. http://skuvla.info/skolehist/thomassen07-tn.htm. “Våra lappar måste tillbaka till kåtalifvet.” Svenska Dagbladet, 4 March 1917. In Samernas skolgång till 1956, edited by Sten Henrysson and Johnny Flodin, 79–82. Umeå: Umeå University, 1992. Vartiainen, Hilja. Koulupaikan neitinä kolttain parissa. Jyväskylä: Gummerus, 1929. Vigil, Kiara M. Indigenous Intellectuals. Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Virtanen, Matti. Fennomanian perilliset. Poliittiset traditiot ja sukupolvien dynamiikka. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2001. Zachariassen, Ketil. Samiske nasjonale strategar: Samepolitikk og nasjonsbyggning 1900–1940: Isak Saba, Anders Larsen og Per Fokstad. Karasjok: Čálliid Lágádusa 2012.

31978_Kortegangas.indd 141

2020-12-11 10:23:53

31978_Kortegangas.indd 142

2020-12-11 10:23:53

Index

Aarseth, Lyder, 80, 101–2, 107 Aavikko, Armas, 75 agriculture, 6, 11, 13–5, 21, 25, 29, 62, 84, 109 Aikio, Anna, 70–2 Akateeminen Karjala-Seura (­society), 68 Åland Islands, 31 Angeli, xxi, 63 Arctic Ocean, 73 Arild, Andreas, 90–1 Arjeplog, xxi, 24, 35, 37, 40, 113 Arvidsjaur, xxi, 41; 1937 meeting of the Swedish Sámi, 41 assimilation, 4, 8–9, 11, 17, 21, 23, 48, 52, 57–8, 79–82, 89–90, 97, 100–15 Astrup, Peter, 91–2, 107 Bär, Anders Larsson, 35 Berggrav, Eivind, 17, 69, 103–7 Bergqvist, Olof, 21–4, 29, 103–4 Bergström, Erik, 36–47, 113 boarding schools, 27, 58, 61, 95–7, 101 Bobrikov, Nikolay, 82–4 Bæivve-Alggo (novel), 86

31978_Kortegangas.indd 143

border, 6, 11–5; Finland, 54, 57, 65, 69, 73; Norway, 78–9, 82, 86, 89, 97, 101–7, 110; Sweden, 23, 36–7, 43 Brygfjeld, Christen, 80–1, 90–108, 114 Calleberg, Axel, 22, 39–42, 46–7, 105, 113 catechist schools, 9, 16–7, 19–22, 49–50, 64–73, 78, 112; Finland, 9, 16–7, 19–21, 49–50, 64–73, 78, 112; Sweden, 16, 20, 22, 66 catechists (teachers). See catechist schools Christianity (school subject), 17, 38, 93, 100–102, 105, 107 Church of Sweden, 16, 20, 22, 36, 46, 66 citizen, 3, 11, 13–4, 26–8, 47, 71, 84, 109, 113–14 citizenship. See citizen colonialism, 11, 17, 32 Commissioner of Indian Affairs (usa ), 74 culture-bearing function of language of instruction, 3, 4, 18, 20, 26,

2020-12-11 10:23:53

144 Index 28–30, 36, 44–7, 54, 60–6, 83–96, 109–115 curriculum, 20–1, 26–8, 39–41, 47, 66, 75, 95–6, 113–15 Dat läh mijen situd (book), 30–2 decolonization, 32 Department of Church and Education (Norway), 17, 80–1, 85, 89, 94–5, 100–3 Det Norske Bibelselskap (society), 68 Det norske lutherske Finnemisjonsforbund (society), 85–6 Dietrichson, Gustav, 85, 103 directors of schools (Norway), 4, 80–2, 91, 94–5, 100–3, 107, 114 economy, 8, 11, 13, 84, 109, 114 education: quality, 4, 19, 25–8, 32, 39–42, 47, 59–60, 77–8, 113–14 educational history, 5, 10, 11, 110, 115 elementary education, 5–13; Finland, 50–1, 59, 66, 71, 73–7; Norway, 81–2, 85–9, 93–6, 103, 109–12, 115; Sweden, 20–3, 26–8, 46 elementary school, 3, 9–10, 17–21; Finland, 49–55, 57–60, 63–6, 71–2, 75–8; Norway, 81–2, 90, 95–6, 107, 111; Sweden, 24–6, 29, 40–1 encyclopedic school, 18 Eriksen, T., 89, 127 Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, 9, 49, 58, 72–5, 112 exclusion (in education), 5, 8–10, 45, 48, 79, 109, 114

31978_Kortegangas.indd 144

Fennoman movement, 56–9, 68. See also nationalism: Finland Fenno-Ugric, 6, 24, 56, 68; languages, 6, 24; peoples, 56, 68 Finland, 3–19, 23, 26, 31, 37, 49–83, 89–97, 101–17; Grand Duchy, 12, 82, 111 Finnbygdsutredningen (governmental survey), 40 Finnefondet (governmental fund, Norway), 90–1 Finnish language, 6–14, 19, 22, 24, 36–41, 45, 49–79, 90, 95–7, 101–4, 111, 114; in northern Sweden, 22, 24, 36–41, 45 Finnish-speakers in northern Sweden. See Finnish language: in northern Sweden Finnmark, xxi, 4, 8–9, 80–6, 89–91, 94–7, 100–3, 107, 114; county, xxi, 4, 8–9, 80–6, 89–91, 94–7, 100–3, 107, 114; director of schools, 4, 80–2, 91, 94–5, 100–3, 107, 114 Fokstad, Per, 54, 65, 79, 92–100, 106–10, 114–15; school plan, 92, 94–6, 99, 106, 110 Fornorskningen i Finmarken (book), 86–9, 92–3 function of language of instruction, 3–4, 25, 28, 36, 38, 44–7, 50, 52, 54, 56–9, 61–9, 72, 75–8, 81, 83, 89–93, 96–102, 104, 106–8, 111, 114 Gällivare, xxi, 24, 40, 42 Gran, xxi, 35 Greater Finland, 59 Grundtvig, N.F.S., 13, 93, 98, 107, 118n15

2020-12-11 10:23:53



Index 145

Guttorm, Hans Aslak, 49, 64–5, 76–7, 110–11, 114–15 Guttorm, Josef, 3, 49, 53, 55–6, 63–4, 76–7, 107, 111 Haglund, Sven, 44 Hakkarainen, Aukusti, 63 Hålogaland; diocese, 69, 85, 103–05 Hämäläinen, Antti, 59–64, 77–8 Hämeenlinna, 72; teachers’ training course for itinerant schools, 72 Härjedalen, 42 Härnösand, xxi, 22, 39; diocese, xxi, 22 Heickell, P.H., 70 Heiervang, Sigurd, 102 Heikinheimo, P.R., 68 Helsinki, xxi, 6, 51, 57, 60, 65, 75, 115 Herbart, J.F., 18 Herbartian pedagogy, 18 Holmberg, N.W., 70 Holmström, Kally, 43 Huurre, Olga, 71 Inari, xxi, 17, 58, 60–4, 67–72 Inari Sámi, 60, 63, 70–72, 117n1 inclusion (in education), 5, 8, 10, 109–10 Indigenous education, 8, 11, 110, 112, 115 Indigenous research ethics, 5 Ingria, 59 inspector of the elementary schools (Finland), 24, 50–1, 53, 57–60, 64, 74, 75, 78, 114 intelligibility function of language of instruction, 64, 54, 63, 70, 71,

31978_Kortegangas.indd 145

75, 77–8, 89, 93, 96, 100, 102, 106, 111–12 Itkonen, Lauri Arvid, 63 Itkonen, Tuomo, 60, 62–3, 68, 78 Ivarson, Karl, 94 Jääskeläinen, Laila, 44–5 Jalvi, Pedar, 65, 67, 77, 97 Jewish people, 92, 110 Johansson, Gustaf, 53, 67, 69 Jokkmokk, xxi, 24, 35, 37, 40 Jomppanen, Juhani, 63 Jonsson, Israel Andreas, 35–6 Jukkasjärvi, xxi, 40 Kangas, Sabina, 70 Karasjok, xxi, 91, 100 Karelians, 75, 126n65 Karesuando, xxi, 40 Karnell, Vitalis, 21–30, 35, 41, 46–7, 74, 105, 113 Kautokeino, xxi, 101–2 Kerkkonen, Kaarlo, 51–9, 69, 77–8, 114 Kiruna, xxi, 43 Kistrand, xxi, 85, 88 Kitok, Risten, 42 Kitti, Anni. See Aikio, Anna Koccam spalli (book), 65 Könkämä, xxi, 36 Koskimies, J.R., 50, 53–4, 67–9, 78, 103, 107 Kuopio: Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu, 50, 53–4, 66–9, 78; chapter, 54, 69 Kvalsund, xxi, 90 Kven, 6–7, 16, 79, 81, 83, 85–6, 89, 90–1, 95, 97, 101, 103–4; language, 7, 16, 79, 83, 85–6, 90–1, 97, 101, 103–4; population, 6–7, 81, 86, 89, 95, 97, 101

2020-12-11 10:23:53

146 Index Laestadianism, 22 Lähde, Vihtori, 57–9, 78 Laimoluokta, xxi, 43 language of instruction, 3–4, 17–8, 20–2, 25–6, 29, 35–8, 44–63, 67, 70, 73, 76–8, 80, 83–4, 89–91, 94, 96, 99, 100–2, 106– 7, 111, 113; legislation, 23, 47–8, 79, 81, 96, 111–12. See also Finnish ­language; Norwegian language; Sámi language; Swedish language Lapin Sivistysseura (society), 12, 60, 63, 65, 74, 77, 97 Lapland, 3, 9, 19, 45, 50–3, 57–72, 77, 113–14; Finland, 3, 9, 19, 50–3, 57–72, 77, 114; school district (Finland), 51, 57, 59–61, 64, 114; Sweden, 45, 113 Lapp, xxi, 3, 6, 17, 23, 28–30, 53, 61, 81, 85, 88, 105 Lapp elementary schools (­lappfolkskolor), 20 Lapp schools (lappskolor), 16 Lapp villages (Sámi villages), xxi, 53, 77 Lapparnes egen tidning/ Samefolkets egen tidning (­periodical), 12 Larsen, Anders, 4, 79, 86–9, 92–3, 96–9, 106–8 Laula, Elsa (Laula Renberg), 23, 25 League of Nations, 31 Ledesby, xxi, 94 Leem, Knud, 17 Lehtola, Laura, 64, 71–2 Lilius, Ida, 58 Lilja, F.E., 75 Lindhagen, Carl, 31, 34 Lindholm, Valdemar, 30–3

31978_Kortegangas.indd 146

livelihood, 6, 9, 11, 13–5, 18–9, 21, 25, 29, 44, 46–7, 58, 61–2, 84, 86, 95, 109, 112, 114 lower nomad school, 21–2 Luleå, xxi, 21–2; diocese, xxi, 21–2 Lund, Hagbarth, 94 Lundborg, Herman, 43 Luokta-Mávas, xxi, 35 Lycksele, 16, 37; Sámi school, 16 Lyngen, xxi, 89, 91 Mair, Lucy, 76, 112 Manker, Ernst, 7, 43–4 methodological nationalism, 5 mission (Lutheran), 7, 16–7, 20–2, 27, 36, 46, 55, 58, 78, 85, 99–100, 102, 108 Mittådalen, xxi modernization, 7–13, 27, 41, 47, 51, 73, 77, 100, 109, 111–114 Muohtačálmmit (book), 65, 77 nation state, 54, 65, 73, 95, 97, 113 National Board of Schools (Finland) (fnb s), 49–50, 53, 60, 64 nationalism, 8, 11, 12, 13, 49, 93–4; Finland, 13, 49, 56, 77; Norway, 13, 93–4; Sámi, 12, 92; Sweden, 13 Nickul, Karl, 44, 74–8, 105, 112 nomad school (nomadskola), 4, 10, 13, 18–24, 27–48, 58, 62, 66, 71, 74, 77–8, 95, 104–5, 109, 112–14; boards (nomadskolfullmäktige), 32–3, 35–7, 41, 45 nomad school inspectors (Sweden), 4, 21–4, 28–9, 33, 35–8, 41, 46–8, 62, 74, 77–8, 104–5, 113 Nordic Museum (Stockholm), 43

2020-12-11 10:23:53



Index 147

Norges Finnemisjonssellskap (­society), 85, 102 Norrbotten, 24, 28–9, 38, 40–1 Norsk Finnemission (society), 85 North Sámi, 6, 7, 22, 45, 55–6, 62–4, 66, 70, 72, 76, 86, 99, 117n1 Norway, 4–17, 25–6, 52, 54, 57, 65, 68–9, 79–115 Norwegian Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet), 84, 87 Norwegian language, 4, 6, 18, 80–114; riksmål, 12, 97; landsmål, 11, 12 Norwegianization, 79–84, 86, 89–91, 94, 97, 100–6. See also assimilation Nutti, Sara, 20, 43–5, 114 Oovt sámmilii máttááttijjee eellim kuáttá (book), 71 opposition to school policies, 11, 54, 58, 64, 79, 103, 109 Oslo (Christiania), xxi, 6, 94, 99, 103, 105 Östersund, xxi, 3, 25, 30, 47; 1918 meeting of the Swedish Sámi, 3, 25, 30, 47 Otterbech, Jens, 85–6, 88 Oulu, xxi; province, 9. See also Kuopio: Diocese of Kuopio-Oulu Outakoski, xxi, 3, 50, 53–7, 63–5, 76–7, 96, 111 Paatsjoki, xxi, 60, 70 Pajala, xxi, 43 paliskunta, 15 Park, Gustav, 3–4, 13, 23, 25–8, 33, 35, 37, 42, 47, 110, 113

31978_Kortegangas.indd 147

pedagogy, 11, 18, 40–1 Persen Stabursnes, Klemet, 85–6 Petsamo, 9, 73–7, 105 Piteå, 16; Sámi school, 16 Pohjola, Jaakko, 75 preservation of Sámi culture, 46, 61, 72–3, 76, 105 progressive education, 18, 74, 76, 95; Progressive Education Association (usa ), 74 race, 11, 15–6, 27, 43, 98–9; racial biology, 15–6, 119n24 Ran, xxi, 35 reform pedagogy, 18. See also ­progressive education reindeer herding, 6, 9–10, 13–15, 21, 24–5, 29–30, 44, 46, 58, 61–2, 84, 109, 112–13 religion in education, 16, 37, 84, 119. See also Christianity relocation of Swedish Sámi, 14 Riutula children’s home and ­boarding school, xxi, 58–9 romanticism, 11, 103 Ruong, Per Nilsson, 35–6 Russell, Bertrand, 74 Russia, 5–10, 12, 22, 49, 56–9, 73–6, 79, 82–3, 89, 97, 101, 111. See also Soviet Union; ussr Russification policies (Finland), 56, 82–3 Rutfjäll, Sigrid, 42, 45, 47 Saarelma, Frans, 60–2, 78 Saarivuoma, xxi, 36 Saba, Isak, 8, 65, 79, 82–4, 87–8, 92–3, 96, 99, 106–8, 113 Sabmelaš (periodical), 12, 65, 97–8, 110

2020-12-11 10:23:53

148 Index Sagai Muittalægje (periodical), 12, 86, 99 Same Ätnam (organization), 30 Sámi clergymen, 16. See also Park, Gustav Sámi folk high schools, 30, 91–2, 96, 102 Sámi language: as language of instruction, 3, 4, 18, 20, 26, 28–30, 64, 54, 63, 70, 71, 75, 77–8, 89, 93, 96, 100, 102, 106, 111–12; as school subject, 39, 92, 94–6, 99, 106, 110; varieties, 6, 117n1. See also Inari Sámi; North Sámi; Skolt Sámi; South Sámi; Ume Sámi Sámi teachers, 3–4, 8, 13, 20, 23, 25–8, 30–7, 42–9, 53–6, 63–7, 70–2, 76–9, 82–4, 86–9, 92–100, 106–15 Samii Litto (organization), 65 Samikiel Abis (book), 65 Sápmi, 32, 97 Schauman, Eugen, 82 Schøyen, Carl, 105 secularization: of education, 17 segregation, 8–10, 24–5, 27–9, 73, 109, 112–15 Selskabet til fremme af Finmarkens Jordbrug (society), 101 Seminarium Domesticum, 17 Seminarium Lapponicum, 17 Seminarium Scolasticum, 17 Sirkas (Sirges), xii Skolebladet (periodical), 82 Skolt Sámi, 73–6, 105, 112, 117n1 Sompio, xxi, 70 Sörkaitum (Unna Tjerusj), xxi, 42 Sorsele, xxi, 35, 39, 44, 113 South Sámi, 42, 45, 55, 117n1

31978_Kortegangas.indd 148

Soviet Union, 9–10, 73; Sámi school policy, 9–10. See also Russia; ussr Stenberg, Karin, 23, 30–4, 110, 115 Stensele, xxi, 37 Stockholm, xxi, 6, 20, 31, 43–4 Stockholms-Tidningen (periodical), 20, 43–4 Støren, Johan Nicolai, 85 Suonikylä, xxi, 73–7 Sweden, 3–47, 54–8, 62, 66, 68, 71, 74, 77–9, 82, 90–1, 94–5, 105–6, 108–17 Swedish language, 3, 12, 21–8, 35–45, 47–8, 50, 53–4, 56–7, 64, 68, 95–6, 111, 113–4; in Finland, 12, 50, 53–4, 56–7, 64, 68, 95–6, 111 Talvik, xxi, 94 Tattari, Anni, 74–5 taxation, 7 teacher’s education, 13, 19, 26, 41, 57, 59, 67, 72, 75, 81, 91–2, 106 Thomassen, Bernt, 80–6, 92, 94, 96, 101–2, 107, 114 Tomasson, Torkel, 25, 31 Torgrim, Terese, 43, 47 Troms County, xxi, 9, 86, 89–90, 94, 97 Tromsø, xxi, 18, 90, 91–2; chapter, 90; diocese, 103; teachers’ training course, 18, 91–2 Tuorpon, xxi, 35 Umby (Ubmeje tjeälddie), xxi Ume Sámi, 37, 117n1 upper nomad school, 21, 38 Uppsala University, 24, 119 u s sr , 59, 76–7

2020-12-11 10:23:53



Index 149

Utsjoki, xxi, 3, 50–6, 64–5, 67–70, 76–7, 96, 111 Valle, Agneta, 64 Vartiainen, Hilja, 75–6 Västerbotten, 16, 29, 39, 40–1; county, 16, 29, 39 Viimeinen katekeetta (book), 71 Vittangi, xxi, 40

31978_Kortegangas.indd 149

welfare state, 8 Welsh people, 92, 110 Wexelsen, V.A., 80–2, 97; Wexelsen decree of 1898, 80–2, 97 Wiklund, K.B., 24 Young Women’s Christian Association (y wc a ), 58

2020-12-11 10:23:54

31978_Kortegangas.indd 150

2020-12-11 10:23:54