The Swedish Missionary Society and Sámi Schooling, c. 1835–1920

Abstract

This open access book offers a thorough examination of the most important ac­tor in schooling children from the Indigenous Sámi during the nineteenth century, namely the Swedish Missionary Society (SMS). In the late 1830s, the SMS created its first schools for Sámi children and youth in small rural villages in the northern inlands of Sweden. The missionary schools enrolled several thousand children in the approximately eighty-year-period they operated, for many decades being the predominant school for the Sámi. The impulse behind the creation of the SMS came from evangelical move­ments such as British Methodism, which helped to initiate the Stock­holm-based society in 1835, and aided the startup of a school in the Swed­ish colony of Saint-Barthélemy in the West Indies. The society was supported by private donations, as well as financial aid and supervision from the Swedish Evangelical-Lutheran state church. It kept in operation between five to ten schools and or­phanages until the so-called ‘nomadic school’ reform in 1913, when the mission­ary schools were either shut down, modified to become Swedish primary schools, or subsumed under the new and expanding state-governed nomadic school sys­tem. By examining school practice aimed at Sámi pupils in Sweden, this book provides valuable insights into the overall organisation and curriculum of the mis­sionary schools, their ideological driving forces, and their relation to global devel­opments and the ongoing formation of the Swedish primary school sys­tem. Such knowledge helps deepen our understanding of the long-term organisation of Sámi education in Sweden, and more broadly within the Nordic countries. Through its analysis, this book seeks to develop the history of missionary educa­tion, as well as research into settler colonial and Indigenous schooling.