Controlling the “Wilderness” Through a Rationalised Reindeer Husbandry: The Establishment of the Sámi Nomad School in Sweden, 1906–1917

Abstract

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 modernising 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.