The Sami Jokkmokk school-based research projects
The Sami-Inuit youth exchange was developed in the framework of the BOAZU and TUKTU research projects. The ongoing BOAZU project involves the Sami people from Sweden with the purpose of exploring the future of reindeer herding for this culture.
It started in 2017 and is currently centered in Sapmi. The completed TUKTU project involved the Inuit people from Baker Lake in Nunavut, northern Canada, and focused on changing relationships to the land and mining impacts. It was conducted from 2013 to 2017. Both projects were co-designed with the communities involved using participatory research methods.
The aim of the Sami-Inuit exchange is for Sami and Inuit youth to share their perceptions about the future of their cultures.
From 2013, school-based and community workshops have been held with Sami schools in Gallivare, Karesuando and Jokkmokk in Sweden and Inuit schools in Baker Lake in Nunavut. Children from both communities participated in workshops organized in their schools with researchers and teachers. Working together, they created 2 radar charts (Fig. 1 & 2), a Caribou wheel and a Sami wheel, drawings and videos to share their daily lives with the community living on the other side of the Arctic. By exchanging these, Sami and Inuit youth were able to learn about each other’s cultures and explore di_erences and similarities.
– What is it like to be Sami/Inuit? – How important are reindeer/caribou for the community?
– How has the relationship to these animals evolved?
The process of representing their daily lives to share this information with another community gives young Sami and Inuit the possibility to reect on their own culture. It allows them to think about what makes them a part of their community and what they value about their lifestyle, encouraging them to be proud of who they are. They are also able to reect on how they see their future as members of the community. Another important goal of the project was to promote dialogue between the youth and the elders in the community, so that knowledge can be appropriated by the new generation.
The Youth Exchange programme was continued in Jokkmokk, and the Inuit–Sami book produced from this exchange is currently being finalised and printed. Michael Leone, the former superintendent of the Baker Lake primary school, Mikael Pirak, the former Sami school rector and myself are currently co-authoring a paper based on the youth exchange outcomes.
The Sami Jokkmokk school-based research projects
This part of the BOAZU project was able to add an unexpected dimension. In 2019, I was granted the right to work with the grade 4 and 5 classes and to spend 3 weeks together over 4 different visits. We completed a series of 5 short participatory workshops, created 2 evaluation wheels and a poster, and invited Mikael Pirak to France to the Arctic Week conference in Paris and to 3 schools in southern France to further develop and expand the youth exchange programme.
