With the recent uncovering of burial sites, Indigenous boarding schools have increasingly made headlines around the world. There is also a growing awareness of ways in which the schools’ impact has affected Indigenous communities and their lived environments. While boarding schools tried to reprogram Indigenous lives, they aimed to change how Indigenous peoples understood, used, and valued land and all living things on it. Indigenous students were taught that land was property and commodity, and colonial education sought to naturalize the dominion of men over nature and other living beings, notions that went against Indigenous belief systems. Boarding schools, ecological destruction and change/loss of biodiversity, and Indigenous survivance connected in a myriad of ways. And it is these routes and entanglements that this edited volume seeks to examine, across North America and Sápmi.

This edited volume examines the dynamic connections of boarding schools, Indigenous peoples, and the environment by stressing the perspectives of Indigenous survivance. Here survivance connotates complex nodes of active culture work and thinking combining surviving with resisting, the revitalization of Indigenous communities, lifeways, and knowledge. Identifying spaces and practices of survivance among Native American and Sámi communities, the articles look at different manifestations of survivance as forms of entanglement, linking Indigenous peoples to pasts and futures, to the land, and to each other across community, national, and imperial borders. This survivance was manifested through mindsets, feelings, and experiences, in refusals and negotiations, and within discourses and performances. It funneled emotions and provided a source of empowerment in dangerous times. And it related to Indigenous understandings and relations toward the environment and all things in it. The articles ask what survivance meant, how it came about, what shapes it took, and what impacts it carried. They track survivance in its myriads of forms and meanings, in diverse schools and geographical settings across North America and Sápmi. Focusing on two distinctive, yet interrelated settler colonial terrains – Sápmi in northern Europe and North America – we propose that there are many parallels and connections, as well as differences in Sámi and Native American boarding school experiences; in its affective dimensions and connections with the land, impacts on community and colonial discourses. Examining both similarities and differences can be eye-opening and valuable in understanding Indigenous survivance. The schools and their students operated within the intersections of Indigenous and colonial worlds, their emotional and material realities showcasing these convergences and tensions. Students adapted, resisted, connected with one another, and carved their own paths in times of limited choices.

Conceived and edited by Dr. Janne Lahti (Linnaeus University and University of Helsinki) and doctoral student Lindsay Elizabeth Doran (University of Eastern Finland), this volume stems from the research project “Surviving the Unthinkable: Ecological Destruction and Indigenous Survivance in North America and the Nordic Countries, 1600-2022,” https://survivingtheunthinkable.squarespace.com/. The purpose of this international collaborative project is to utilize a historical perspective to examine how Indigenous societies survive and maintain cohesion when faced with changing physical conditions due to colonialism and environmental change.

Articles in this volume can address the different shapes, meanings, and experiences of survivance in the schools and
-loss of biodiversity, ecological destruction, and altered living environments
-food cultures, sharing and sovereignty
-understandings and relations to the land and the environment
-how students moved within the intersections of colonial education and traditional knowledge/training
-comparisons, contradictions, and connections between Indigenous and settler colonial training and mindsets
-memory cultures
-Articles can also address the schools as historic sites, tracking current issues related to preservation, memorialization, and ecological destruction

Please note that individual articles can be comparative in nature or they can focus on some aspect of survivance in North America or Sápmi. They should be previously unpublished. Send your abstracts (one page max) alongside a short cv to the editors at janne.lahti@lnu.se and lindsay.doran@uef.fi by April 15, 2024. We plan to send the proposal to a highly regarded international scholarly press with a strong reputation in colonial/imperial history. First manuscript drafts are expected in early 2025.