Dr. art. Teemu Ryymin

The 19th and early 20th century colonialism had its internal parallel in Norway, in the state’s twin policy of integration and assimilation in the far North. The aim of the state and church was to integrate the northernmost periphery of Norway more firmly to the national centre, and as a corollary, a policy of assimilation of the indigenous Sami and the migrant Kvens into the Norwegian national community was launched in the 1850s. This policy of Norwegianization was carried out by many means up until the post-second world war era. However, Norwegianization was also opposed, one of the earliest sites of resistance being the missionary circles engaged in the Sami issue, notably the Norsk Finnemission, established in 1888. The main aim of Norsk Finnemission (and numerous other organizations engaged in the Sami question) was to utilize Sami language in their evangelization, thus representing a challenge to the official minority policy of the time. From the late 1890s the organizations also engaged in a wide-ranging social mission among the Sami: Several health and welfare institutions in the Sami-dominated areas in Finnmark, Troms and Nordland were built and run by organizations such as Norsk Finnemission and Kvinnelige Misjons Arbeidere (KMA). This social mission represented in many respects the first serious effort to provide more than the basic health services, such as district medical officers and a few hospitals, to the Sami population in Northern Norway.
          Research on the social aspects of the Sami mission in Northern Norway is scarce (Lye 1999), but the social work in Sami areas has been commented in research concerned with ethnopolitics in Northern Norway. In this context, the social work has been problematic: In so far it has been seen as a part of the colonialist project, it has been understood as a way of “sugaring the pill” of colonization, assimilation and Norwegianization (Otnes 1970). However, this functionalist approach fails to explain the immense popularity of the health institutions among the Sami, and does not fit well with the knowledge we have of the mission workers’ motivations and intentions.
The main questions to be studied in this sub-project are following: How was the social mission represented and argued for in the publications of the missionary organizations? What was actually done – to what extent did the institutions provide the Sami with health and social services? What was the relationship between the social Sami mission and evangelization on one hand, and the overarching state policy of integration and assimilation on the other? The fundamental goal is to take the actors’ intentions and the social and cultural impact of the social mission in the northernmost Norway together into a new interpretation of the social mission among the Sami.
          The main sources will consist of archival material of the Sami missionary organizations such as Norsk Finnemission, Det norsk-lutherske Finnemisjonsforbund and KMA and their publications.