This book provides a comprehensive overview of Sami education in a historical and internationally comparative perspective. Despite the cross-national character of the Sami population, academic literature on Sami education has so far been published within the different nation states in the Sami area, and rarely in English. Exploring indigenous educational history around the world, this collection spans from Asia to Oceania to Sapmi and the Americas. The chapters frame Sami school history within an international context of indigenous and minority education. In doing so, two narrative threads are established: both traditional history of education, and perspectives on the decolonisation of education. This pioneering book will appeal to students and scholars of Sami education, as well as indigenous education around the world.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of Sami education in a historical and internationally comparative perspective. Despite the cross-national character of the Sami population, academic literature on Sami education has so far been published within the different nation states in the Sami area, and rarely in English. Exploring indigenous educational history around the world, this collection spans from Asia to Oceania to Sapmi and the Americas. The chapters frame Sami school history within an international context of indigenous and minority education. In doing so, two narrative threads are established: both traditional history of education, and perspectives on the decolonisation of education. This pioneering book will appeal to students and scholars of Sami education, as well as indigenous education around the world.

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 Sami. Presenting the Sami as an active, transnational population in early twentieth-century northern Europe, Otso Kortekangas examines how educational policies affected the Sami 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 Sami language in schools, how Sami teachers have promoted the use of their mother tongue within the school systems, and how the history of the Sami 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.