‘For Their Own Good’: Examining ‘Gentle’ Colonialism and Finnish Exceptionalism Within Narratives of Finland’s Indigenous Residential Schools

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholarship of Indigenous residential school systems is complex, fraught with cultural trauma, and receiving renewed public attention due to numerous global discoveries of mass child graves upon identified boarding school sites. Though Indigenous residential schools operated in several countries, Finland’s scholarly treatment of Sámi students in residential school systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is uniquely situated within the history of Indigenous education. The Sámi population can be found in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Russia, with several of these countries having made official statements regarding treatment of Sámi within government-run schools. However, some historians appear to reject ideas that portray Finland as coloniser or oppressor to the Sámi people through this educational cultural hegemony. Extant scholarship presents conflicting accounts of Sámi experiences within Finnish boarding schools. Using past publications as primary sources, this article utilizes narrative inquiry as a methodology to analyse scholarly studies of Indigenous residential school experiences in Finland, explores concepts and implications of Finnish racial exceptionalism and white innocence and finally, predicts future historiographical trends in a field increasingly moving towards the decolonization of Indigenous cultural memory.