Olmmái-Stállu: deflection, decolonization, and silence in Sámi early childhood scholarship

Abstract

This essay explores the existential difficulties involved in being a non-indigenous scholar of philosophy and early childhood education in an indigenous context. It begins by recalling an encounter with young Sámi children that happened while doing research at an early childhood centre in northern Scandinavia. This is read alongside the poetry of the Sámi writer Nils Aslak Valkeapää, a personal documentary text by Sámi author Elin Anna Labba, and Wittgensteinian philosophy. These texts are read as a philosophical exercise of the imagination through which the scholar‘s words, thoughts, and assumptions are reworked in a decolonising process. This process involves the scholar in a lived philosophy of avoiding deflection of what Cora Diamond has called “difficulties of reality” and considerations of the role of imagination in ethics. In doing so the essay reimagines the notion of hybrid cultures and identities through Wittgenstein‘s invitation to imagine forms of life. The essay concludes by suggesting that by thinking of scholarship in this way hope and meaning can emerge out of the silences in the encounters between the non-indigenous scholars and the indigenous children.