Indigenising Education: Scales, Interfaces and Acts of Citizenship in Sápmi

Abstract

Around 1993, Kåfjord, a small rural municipality in Norway’s far north, replaced monolingual Norwegian road signs with bilingual Sámi-Norwegian signs. These bilingual signs soon became subject to vandalism: the Sámi municipality name – “Gáivuona suohkan” – was painted over and even erased by bullet holes. In 2016, the linguistic landscape changed again. This time bilingual Sámi–Norwegian signs were replaced by trilingual Sámi–Norwegian–Kven signs. Today the full name of the municipality is Gáivuona suohkan–Kåfjord kommune–Kaivuonon komuuni (hereafter Gáivuotna–Kåfjord–Kaivuono). This time all the signs were left untouched. The tensions seem to have gone.