This article discusses the Swedish nomad school system (nomadskola, 1913–1962), targeting the children of the reindeer herding Sámi, in an environmental history perspective. Earlier research has highlighted demographics (especially social Darwinism), national economy, and reform pedagogy as the ideological foundation of the nomad school system. This article shows that the fixing of a frontier between society and wilderness was at the confluence of all of these ideas. Reindeer as a vehicle for domesticating Arctic “wilderness”, furthering economic goals in peripheries, and modernizing indigenous livelihoods has been noted in the North American and Russian/Soviet contexts, as well as in Scandinavia for the second half of the 20th century. This connection has not been explicitly made in the research concerning the early years of the nomad school system. The article concludes that the Swedish government did not have the expertise to control and economically exploit the “wilderness” of the high Scandes, but the reindeer-herding Sámi did. Swedish educational authorities launched the nomad school system in order to harness this expertise and make the reindeer herding livelihood more suitable to the needs of the Swedish economy.

This chapter explores early 20th-century Sámi criticism toward educational policies targeting the Sámi minority in Norway, Finland, and Sweden. The leading theme is the question of the general and the specific in Sámi education: What were the most important points when calling for Sámi cultural specificity in education? What were the assumed advantages of widening the general model of elementary education to incorporate the Sámi areas? Discussing the important work of such Sámi teachers and educators as Isak Saba, Per Fokstad, Gustav Park, Karin Stenberg, and Josef Guttorm, the article produces a broad narrative of early 20th-century Sámi education, including voices from Norway, Finland, and Sweden, as well as from the Sámi and the majority populations alike. The chapter also situates the ideas of the early 20th-century Sámi educators in the context of current discussions within Sámi education. The results of the chapter point toward a persistent methodological nationalism within Nordic Sámi research as well as a lack of co-operation between the Nordic governments regarding Sámi educational issues and research.

In the making of the modern Nordic states in the first half of the twentieth century, elementary education was paramount in creating a notion of citizenship that was universal and equal for all citizens. Yet these elementary education policies ignored, in most cases, the language, culture, wishes, and needs of minorities such as the indigenous Sámi.

Presenting the Sámi as an active, transnational population in early twentieth-century northern Europe, Otso Kortekangas examines how educational policies affected the Sámi people residing in the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. In this detailed study, Kortekangas explores what the arguments were for the lack of Sámi language in schools, how Sámi teachers have promoted the use of their mother tongue within the school systems, and how the history of the Sámi compares to other indigenous and minority populations globally.

Timely in its focus on educational policies in multiethnic societies, and ambitious in its scope, the book provides essential information for educators, policy-makers, and academics, as well as anyone interested in the history of education, and the relationship between large-scale government policies and indigenous peoples.

This article examines the early publications and correspondence of Karl Nickul, a Finnish geodesist and amateur ethnographer/anthropologist. In his publications and correspondence, Nickul studied and discussed the Skolt Sámi of the village of Suenjel in the Finnish province of Petsamo. Nickul was a polyglot and an internationally-minded pacifist who framed the Suenjel Sámi among other “primitive” peoples worldwide, instead of among the neighbouring Finno-Ugric-speaking peoples in Soviet Karelia just across the Finnish-Soviet border. In the Suenjel Sámi, Nickul saw a chance to preserve an instance of the “original” Sámi way of life, which he viewed as being closely conditioned by nature. Nickul wanted to carry out this preservation for the sake of the Sámi themselves as well as for scholarly purposes. As he sought international recognition for the Suenjel Sámi and parallel cases of cultural preservation, Nickul simultaneously developed a scholarly persona as the foremost expert on this population without following the conventional academic route.