Few know the story of the native people of the Northern Nordic countries, the Sami. As a minority group, they lived separated from the rest of the Nordic populations on the vast and unreachable arctic tundra, otherwise known as Lappland or Sápmi. These areas came to be developed and centralized into the Nordic countries in the late 19th century, and as a result the Sami were subjected to harsh assimilation policies stretching over a century.
To understand what happened and why it happened, one have to look at the time between 1850 and 1950. For Norway, who holds the majority of the Sami population today, it was a result of a nationalistic and Social Darwinistic thinking of the time. To unite the country against Sweden and reclaim sovereignity over the northern areas, Norwegians from southern regions were encouraged to settle and build towns by the coast, and Finns from Northern Finland known as Kven farmed the land. Fishing, mining and the Pomor trade with the Russians gave a boom in the local economy and allowed centralization to happen.
The Sami were in many cases a nomadic people traveling with their reindeers, settling in the tundra or by the coast in a siida, a village consisting of several hunting groups. They did not pay taxes, they did not speak Norwegian, and they were hard to reach. Officials and priests presented them to the public with derogatory and racist remarks, with their “mental state that was on the level with children”.
Such invoked a cultural and political view on the Sami as a group that had to be helped and taught how to become a civilized and contributing member of the society, with the government to guide them. With proven civilized results, each Sami individual was given rights on the level with any Norwegian: to own land, start a business, get a paid job and pay taxes.
Becoming Norwegianized
With such an approach to developing the northernmost region of Finnmark in Norway, the Sami soon found themselves forced to limit or leave their lifestyle. The speeded immigration from the south contributed to vulnerability of food supplies and lost income, while governmental security policies made it difficult to cross borders over to Sweden and Finland to find grazing for their reindeers.
On top of this came the integration policies of Sami families. School was mandatory for every child in Norway, and for the minority children, the school became the most preferred tool for assimilation. Teachers were sent to local schools with a competitive awarding system, and if the school showed great results in the Norwegian language, they would receive more praise and funding. Such schools were organized locally as day-to-day schools from the mid-1800s, and built into bigger boarding schools by the early 1900s which hosted all the local minority children from the age of 7 within a geographical area. For the Sami it became a class divide, where the reindeer owners with the most income could pay wealthy Norwegians to host their children for school attendance — while the poorer Sami groups had to send their children away for most of the year, not knowing what awaited them.
Sami language which the children spoke were first used as a tool to understand Norwegian but was later removed. In the boarding schools, children were not allowed to speak Sami to one another, instead the staff were instructing them on how to speak Norwegian without any knowledge of the Sami culture or language. Stories of longing home to the lavvo, to the family, and to speaking Sami were common for the children living in these conditions. The children often fell between two worlds — in one they were beneath the rest and were treated as such, and in the other, their home was made distant for them. The Sami who made it through school and into society could experience unfair treatment attached to their looks, accent or clothing. Such difficulties made many well-educated Sami aware of their place in the society and advanced in politics as a result. Sami who took higher education formed a cultural Sami enlightenment with journalists, authors, teachers, and politicians. By 1917 the Sami organized their first political meeting with attendants from across all Nordic countries, while others had joined the Norwegian government even earlier to fight for the rights of the Sami people. Despite these meager beginnings, it was an important result of the Norwegianization policy, which started to mark the presence of the Sami people in Norway.
Destruction and rebuilding
However, the majority of the Sami were still not giving up on their way of living — many lived in a lavvo tent or gamme, kept reindeer, or fished for a living by the 1930s. The second world war ruined most of this lifestyle, as the Nazi troops burned down all the infrastructure and towns from late 1944 to May 1945 on their way out. 50 000 km2 were left isolated, and 75 000 people were evacuated, fled, or survived by hiding in caves. The Sami were either among the refugees that ended up in Southern Norway, found shelter at the tundra, or in fishing villages. With the rebuilding of Northern Norway after the war, many Sami people left their previous lifestyle and settled in houses and towns by the coast, and individuals wanted to forget the derogatory attitude towards their group to live a new life. It was mostly reindeer farming that was still seen as a lucrative way of living, and so the divide between those Sami that kept their traditional way and those who left became even bigger.
The Norwegianization was slowly changing with the shift of politics from the 1950s. A Sami committee worked with a proposition to renew the policies on behalf of the government to “propose specific measures of an economic and cultural nature to make it possible for the Sami to skillfully unfold in the society”. This Sami was no longer spoken of as an ethnic minority, but “Sami speaking Norwegians”, and the Sami should stand free individually to preserve and express their traditions and culture. The Sami language came back as a right to be taught in school from 1967 which officially ended the Norwegianization politics. Despite these progressions, the social attitude to the Samis did not improve overnight. Old books, teachers, and generations of assimilation had to slowly be replaced by new ideas. In the 1970’s it was common to see the Sami as an indigenous population and their fight for their rights as a part of an international movement. The controversy of building the Alta-Kautokeino hydroelectric power station and the government’s use of force to arrest local Sami protesters who would lose their homes threw Norway into a political crisis. To mend the broken relationship between the Sami organizations and the government, it was given political and cultural rights to strengthen the Sami population rights in the northern areas. From the 1980s the Sami got their own Parliament and laws within the Norwegian Constitution. King Olav of Norway expressed an apology for the Norwegianization policy when opening the Sami Parliament in 1989, and his son King Harald acknowledged and apologized for the Norwegianization politics on behalf of the state in 1997.
A new way
The purpose of the Norwegian state's extensive Norwegianization policy was without doubt to eradicate language, culture, traditions, and lifestyle connected to the Sami and Kven identities. With a 100-year time frame of assimilation on all areas and aspects of the Sami life, many individuals Sami became distanced from their origins both physically and mentally. Around 1900 it became more and more common for Sami to write themselves as ethnic Norwegian in the national census, as Sami ethnic origin were categorized together with “blind, deaf and insane” until 1920. The boarding schools denied Sami children to speak their language and the teachers did not know it either. Later investigations suggest that both physical and sexual abuse occurred at these institutions, as well as psychological issues amongst the children.
A good example of how Norwegianization formed the local regions of Finnmark became clear as time progressed. Dr. Per Fugelli worked as a regional doctor of Finnmark in the 1970s and 80s and reported openly racism against the Sami in public social life. The Sami were denied entrance first in public transport and had to line behind Norwegians in shops.
Dr. Fugelli also found that 80% were illiterate in the Sami area known as Skoganvarre, which was the reason why few of them sought medical healthcare.
As a result, the Norwegianization created such negative connotations to being Sami, that many grew up not knowing that they had Sami ancestry after the second world war. Scientist Per Nergård mentions “the Sami pain” as existing traumas and wounds as a result of the Norwegianization policies, which haven’t been well-documented despite their presence.
As the rebuilding and modernization of Northern Norway progressed in the latter half of the 20th century, the Sami people melted into the new ways of living and some tried to forget their identities. The Sami Parliament renewed the faith and belief in the Sami political rights in Norway, and since the 1980’s there has been a Sami cultural pride growing amongst the younger generations. Both Sami traditions, clothing and lifestyle became a part of tourism and identity of the northern areas of Norway, and are for many reindeer owners a good side income. Political ties to the government became more efficient, and the key to continuing work to improve and preserve Sami rights and culture have recently culminated into a committee of 2018 that was named “The truth- and reconciliation commission”. Their work is to investigate the Norwegianization policies and injustice done towards Sami, Kven, and Norwegian-Finns, with mapping the historical actions and consequences of the Norwegianization politics and work with further reconciliation. The project is set due in 2022.
As a result, there are still shadows hanging from the past, which presents work that is left to be done. Society has nevertheless come a long way by recognition of the past, and the scars the Norwegianization policies left both in each individual as much as whole regions. That many young Sami today embrace their culture is the result of a long effort to take back and preserve their identity, which has also received a positive boost in the face of society. The future looks bright for the Sami today.