KIRUNA, Sweden - An ambitious project to transform early childhood education for Sami children in Norway, Finland and Sweden, is getting underway, with authorities in Norway currently selecting the first nine preschools to pilot the project.

The five-year project, called SaMOS — Sami manat odda searvelanjain (“Sami children in new education rooms”), was started in 2017 to improve and provide culturally relevant education for Sami children.

Since then, representatives from the Sami parliaments in the three countries have been working together to completely change the way early childhood education is delivered both in terms of content and ways of teaching.

“The main goal of this project is to go back to the beginning and define: What is the Sami way of education?,” says Ol-Johan Sikku, project leader at the Sami Parliament in Norway. “Because no one has answered that yet, that’s what we’re working to define. Because once it is, and we know how Sami children are best taught, it will reinforce everything from culture and traditional knowledge to language.

“And that’s so important because now, no matter what country we’re in, our children are educated in a dominant culture that’s not our own.

The Sami are an Arctic Indigenous people. There is no census just for Sami but their numbers are estimated to be between 100,000 to 150,000. Their traditional homeland stretches across Arctic Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia’s Kola Peninsula — a region they collectively refer to as Sapmi.

Colonial policies in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Russia often involved the education system and church discouraging or actively suppressing Sami languages and culture and forcibly assimilating Sami children into the dominant culture, something that continues to negatively impact Sami languages and education today. (Sami from Russia aren’t currently involved in the SaMOS project because of political barriers to cooperation.)

There are numerous Sami languages and dialects spoken across the Sami homeland but according to UNESCO, all are in danger. Their classifications range from “definitely endangered” for North Sami, the most widely spoken Sami language with most estimations averaging around 25,000 speakers; to “critically endangered” for Pite Sami which is now extinct in Norway but is believed to still have around 30 speakers in Sweden.