Olmmái-Stállu: deflection, decolonization, and silence in Sámi early childhood scholarship

Abstract

This essay explores the existential difficulties involved in being a non-indigenous scholar of philosophy and early childhood education in an indigenous context. It begins by recalling an encounter with young Sámi children that happened while doing research at an early childhood centre in northern Scandinavia. This is read alongside the poetry of the Sámi writer Nils Aslak Valkeapää, a personal documentary text by Sámi author Elin Anna Labba, and Wittgensteinian philosophy. These texts are read as a philosophical exercise of the imagination through which the scholar‘s words, thoughts, and assumptions are reworked in a decolonising process. This process involves the scholar in a lived philosophy of avoiding deflection of what Cora Diamond has called “difficulties of reality” and considerations of the role of imagination in ethics. In doing so the essay reimagines the notion of hybrid cultures and identities through Wittgenstein‘s invitation to imagine forms of life. The essay concludes by suggesting that by thinking of scholarship in this way hope and meaning can emerge out of the silences in the encounters between the non-indigenous scholars and the indigenous children.

KEYWORDS:

• Early Childhood
• Sámi
• Decolonisation
• Philosophy of Education
• Deflection

Introduction

‘You are not Sámi, you won’t understand anyway!’ I am taken aback. This was not the response I expected from a five-year-old Sámi. But the boy is right; I am not Sámi.¹ The Sámi educational scholar Ylva Jannok Nutti and I have been exploring Sámi children’s philosophising in relation to traditional storytelling and the early childhood centre and the teachers that work there bring in Sámi elders and tradition bearers to be part of activities with the children. On this particular occasion the teachers had planned a day in the forest to play, listen to stories told by a traditional story-teller, and cook the reindeer meat the children had helped to prepare earlier.

The children had begun to explore a large rusty oil barrel near a large rock formation close to the fire where the food was being prepared. They speculated why the barrel was there, how it got there, and who put it there. After a while, they concluded that Stállu must have put it there. Stálut are troll-like giant ‘beings that are part human and part mánnelaš or beargalat [demons]’ (Turi 2012, p. 157). Stállu-stories often involve children finding cunning ways to trick Stállu so as to avoid being eaten or caught by him. After agreeing that Stállu had put the barrel there, the children started to speculate where Stállu had gone. Some said that he was sleeping in the barrel. Others said that there was a family of Stállu living in it. After lunch, two children strolled off by themselves towards the barrel, deep in conversation about something. Ylva suggested that I should join them. As I did so the two children seemed quite unconcerned by my presence, ignoring me taking notes. They were talking about Stállu and the barrel again. One of them suggests that it was no ordinary Stállu who put the can there, but ‘Olmmái-stállu’. As they switched between speaking Davvisámigiella (the North Sámi language) and Swedish it became hard for me to follow their exchange, but I knew ‘olmmái’ means something like ‘man’, close to ‘olmmoš’ meaning ‘human’. I was intrigued. I had to ask.

‘What do you mean by “olmmái-stállu”?’ The boy looked at me, clearly annoyed, and exclaimed, ‘You are not Sámi, you won’t understand anyway!’.

I suddenly felt like I was ‘olmmái-stállu’, a giant troll, quite stupid, a metaphor and representative of the majority culture that does not understand Sámi culture. I decided to let the children go on without me.

As the boy made clear to me, it is not only that I do not know Davvisámigiella well enough, but also that I am not Sámi. He made me face reality: my understanding was limited and I knew far too little about Sámi life. I had read many ethnographic studies, collections of stories, poetry and literature, but I had too few chances to participate in the life where these stories are told and out of which the poetry emerged. On other occasions, children had invited me to be a part of their world by explaining to me what they were doing in their play. They explained words to me and showed me things (although, they often answered my questions with the Wittgensteinian sounding, ‘That is just how we say it in Sámi.’). The hospitality and friendliness of the children and of the Sámi more generally forms a space where I feel at home, and thinking with the children has provided me with a strong sense of belonging.

As a philosopher of education with an interest in listening to children’s philosophising, I endeavour to understand my role as a scholar in these encounters. It seems as if the reality that comes into being resists any orientation. In a sense, I am lost. This loss, however, seems to be quite generative. It has become a form of Socratic wonder, a state of being where philosophy can begin. Still, when trying to write about it, when trying think about it, there is a sense in which my words fail me in at least two senses. First, as a speaker of the majority language among children who speak a minority language in the context of an early years education setting that focuses on revitalising their language, the children either adapt to my lack of understanding or, as in the first example, keep me at a distance. Second, my words fail me in the sense that I cannot find a language with which to speak and think fittingly of these encounters. Every attempt seems to miss the mark. It is as if I do not know who I am as a speaker and writer.

Hybrid philosophy, hybrid pedagogy, hybrid community

One may be tempted to think that there are quite simple solutions to this sense of loss. In cultural encounters such as these we may think of ourselves as holding hybrid identities, and when the children and I meet there are more possible identities than simply Sámi and non-Sámi. The borders need not be so sharp. We could find what Homi Bhabha (1996) refers to as hybrid identities, a micro culture within which we can go on together. Indeed, it would not be farfetched to say that hybrid cultures and identities emerge in these Sámi children’s play and stories. There one can meet a reindeer-herding ninja on a snow mobile, a South Pacific island princess singing songs from the Eurovision Song Contest, a hockey player who prefers speaking Sámi, a cross country skier and a Lego builder who love wood carving, or an aspiring duojár (a practitioner of Sámi crafts) who dreams of becoming helicopter pilot and having her own office. The children’s everyday life already seems to involve them in hybrid cultures and identities.

According to the Native American scholar of indigenous pedagogies, Sandy Grande, ‘decolonialization … is neither achievable nor definable, rendering it ephemeral as a goal, but a perpetual process’ (2015, p. 19). Hybridity may help to theorize such decolonizing processes, by signifying ways in which those involved in them can create new spaces for further forms of culture. Nonetheless, using the notion of hybrid culture and identity can itself continue to colonize indigenous cultures by trying to make them fit a theoretical concept. Just as hybrid cultural formations create possibilities, when used as a theoretical explanation and normative ideal the notion can also conceal oppressive discourses, ideologies, philosophies and practices. As Grande notes:

… contrary to whitestream theories that construct “border crossing” as an insurgent “choice” of liberated subjectivities, Indigenous peoples did not “choose” to ignore, resist, transcend, and/or transgress the borders of empire. They were, rather, forced into a struggle for their own survival. Thus, Indigenous resistance to the grammar of empire – mixed-blood/full-blood, legal/illegal, alien/resident, immigrant/citizen, tribal/detribalized – must be examined in terms of the racist, nationalist, and colonialist frameworks from which it emerged (Grande, 2015, p. 234-35).

If the notion of hybridity becomes a part of the grammar of empire it works as a label that covers the struggles of real lives. If we instead let the notion loose, to work freely in the lives of those who wish to use it, being open to be used (or not), rather than attaching it to particular explanations, then it becomes a different notion altogether and a part of the complexity rather than hiding it. The scholar working between academia and indigenous culture, then, is engaging in a form of cultural translation between symbols and lived grammars, rather than in explanation.

Amasa Philip Ndofirepi’s response to Matthew Lippman’s pedagogical programs for Philosophy for Children is an interesting example of using the notion of hybridity as tool for decolonization (2014; Ndofirepi and Cross 2015; Ndofirepi and Musengi 2019). He suggests a ‘hybridization’ of Philosophy for Children that can emerge out of the lived experiences of the teachers and children that are engaged in such programs. Rather than focusing solely on either the African or the Western, or dismissing one in favour of the other, Ndofirepi suggests a pedagogical and philosophical practice that ‘amalgamates the Western and traditional African ways of doing philosophy with children’ (2014, p. 197). Political authorities, majority cultures, colonizing states, and private enterprises frequently attempt to translate a cultural identity, practice, or form of livelihood to fit their own norms, constructions, and systems. When such translations fail, new cultures and identities can emerge from the local cultural milieus of those living beyond the reach of authoritative translation, in spaces where majority and minority, colonized and colonizing, indigenous and non-indigenous confront and provoke the essentializing efforts of authoritative translations. In my reading, hybridization is neither descriptive nor explanatory but rather allows locally lived cultures to teach us how such concepts become a way of creating what Bhabha has called a third space (Ndofirepi 2014, p. 199; Bhabha 1996). If we use notions such as hybridity as philosophical exercises in processes of transformation, then the authority of colonial translations is dissolved.

Existential difficulties and philosophical puzzles

Even if I use the notion of hybridity as part of a philosophical exercise rather than as a concept for theoretical analysis, however, it only takes me so far. My difficulty is not only with how to think about the border drawn by the children, but also how to acknowledge that border and to let them create their hybrid stories and philosophies without the researcher. That is, how to let the non-indigenous researcher’s voice be silent in some contexts and interactions. That silence can be creative; it can even be a form of philosophical pedagogy. Part of decolonizing my own assumptions in working with the Sámi children, therefore, is to acknowledge that sometimes the result of pedagogical translation is silence, not knowing what to say or how to speak or not having something to say in a given situation.

In her essay ‘Difficulties of Reality and Difficulties of Philosophy’ Cora Diamond gives several examples of what she calls difficulties of reality.² One is the experience expressed by the speaker in Ted Hughes’ poem ‘Six Young Men.’ The ‘horrible contradiction’, of young men looking so alive in a photograph while the speaker in the poem knows them all to have since been killed in the war, that ‘impresses itself on the poet-speaker is that of someone who can no longer speak within the game. Language is shouldered out from the game, as the body from its instant and heat’ (Diamond 2008, p. 45). She goes on and speaks of these experiences as when:

… we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability. We take things so. And the things we take so may simply not, to others, present the kind of difficulty, of being hard or impossible or agonizing to get one’s minds around (Diamond 2008, pp. 45-46).

In Diamond’s way of speaking about difficulties of reality I see a third way in which my words are lost, or perhaps become empty of meaning. In the children’s response to my question about the term ‘Olmmái-stállu’, in their unwillingness to explain what they mean by it, our interaction becomes dissonant. We are lost for words without a way to understand one another. To some extent, this is a common experience; in all walks of life we find ourselves in situations where we reach limits in our common interactions, and especially so as non-indigenous persons in indigenous contexts. However, though we may recognise such experiences, as we may recognise what Diamond calls ‘difficulties of reality’, the difficulties are particular to our own encounters with that reality. Paradoxically, though we may learn from others’ similar experiences, they are experiences we do not know how to share. Thus, in a sense, we are alone in such experiences, despite the many communities of which we are part. In this particularity the experience becomes an existential rather than an intellectual challenge.

Diamond shows how certain strands of philosophy deflect from the difficulties of reality. It is not hard to see why. Much philosophy is concerned with conceptualizing difficult problems. Finding the right concepts, the right way of thinking about the problems, is itself the way of solving them (Diamond 2008, pp. 44–46). Finding concepts becomes a particular matter at particular moments when I face what I find difficult in the realities I encounter.

Diamond finds the term ‘deflection’ in Cavell, and looking to his use of the term will help to further elucidate it. In his essay ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’ Cavell suggests that ‘so far as the appeal to what we should ordinarily say is taken to provide an immediate repudiation of scepticism, that appeal is itself repudiated’ (Cavell 2002, p. 238). Cavell understands scepticism broadly. The sceptic is someone who denies our knowledge about everyday experiences of the world: that we know that there are such things as trees, chairs, tables, or money; that we know that we are not dreaming or living in a simulation; that we know that our ways of calculating and reasoning are not the consequence of some evil entity making us believe our calculations work; that we know that there are other minds; that the persons we encounter feel pain, joy, anger, and love and are not just displaying behaviours we assume to be connected to such emotions. Philosophy, to Cavell, often seems to be in the business of either giving straight answers to scepticism, as if it was an intellectual problem needing a solution, or simply repudiating it by appealing to the common sense in our everyday ways of speaking. In both cases it is a matter of finding ‘the correct’ way to think about sceptical ‘difficulties’. In the first case we simply try to show where the sceptical conclusion goes wrong by presenting a theory of knowledge that repudiates it. The second tries to show how the sceptic’s use of language is mistaken by appealing to our ‘ordinary’ use of words such as ‘knowledge’. When I ask my friend if she has seen my keys and she says that she saw them on the table a minute ago, I do not question whether we can know if there is a table there, or whether we can know if the world a minute ago is the same world as now. In this case, or so claims the philosopher who appeals to the ordinary to repudiate scepticism, I would simply be misusing our ordinary concept of ‘knowledge’.

This way of appealing to the ordinary simply deflects the sceptic’s blow to our idea of knowing. To Cavell that is not satisfying. One of the examples he uses is the sceptical doubt of another being in pain when all the signs of pain are there. Such doubts are not only a matter of doubting our knowledge of something being there, but also of doubting that person, mistrusting her expressions. It is, therefore, a failure to respond to her. Appealing to ordinary ways of speaking about knowledge and pain does not really help either. I do not feel the other’s pain the way I see the table and the keys. Our lives with persons in pain and our lives with keys on tables are different. In everyday life, we may not be able to live scepticism of the external world, of tables and keys, and thus our lives do not seem to depend on such doubts; but we do live scepticism of others. It is part of living together. Cavell says of the sceptic that ‘He … ’ (is he a he?),

… begins with a full appreciation of the decisively significant facts that I may be suffering when no one else is, and that no one (else) may know (or care?); and that others may be suffering and I not know, which is equally appalling (2002, p. 247).

Although the sceptic begins with this full appreciation of the facts of suffering and its expressions, they seem to stop there. Rather than pursuing the difficulty, trying to live it, the sceptic seeks to solve it as if were a mere intellectual puzzle and not an existential difficulty concerning their own life. It is in this context that Cavell talks about deflection. Even though the sceptic’s formulation of the problem of the other’s pain (for example, whether the pain of the other is the same as my pain) may itself seem to deflect from the lived problem of encountering the other, Cavell suggests that ‘to apply an inaccurate term of criticism to [the sceptic] (to say to him, that his idea is inherently confused) further deflects the truth to which he is responding’ (2002, p. 260).

I could turn to my own difficulty in the encounter with the Sámi children with a full appreciation that we may not understand each other, that these children may find it pointless to explain something to me. I may try to deflect from this experience by treating it as a problem that can be solved if I just find a better theory, the perfectly fitting set of concepts, or best suited argument for what actions to take. I take Diamond and Cavell to suggest that this is simply a way to avoid how the problem is a problem of life, a particular life, and so, what I want to call, an existential problem.

By introducing the idea of scepticism of other minds (and perhaps of the world in some instances, too) to the difficulties of reality Diamond shows that when we philosophize we may try to deflect from a range of difficulties in our experience of the lives we live. Furthermore, just as the philosopher deflects the difficulties of the sceptic, our ordinary concepts themselves can make us pass by a difficulty as if it were not there. In the case of my own scholarship I recognise this risk in my aim to contribute to processes of decolonization in Sápmi, the region inhabited by the Sámi. I want to respond to the children, but do not know how to. Every word I can think of seems to miss the mark, or rather I do not even know where to start looking for words, what questions to ask. Staying with the difficulties may give the sense of being unhinged, being a stranger to one’s own thoughts.

There are certainly many theories, practices, and ideas about research ethics, about the relationship between a researcher and informant, about the colonial position of the scholar, about the possibilities of decolonialization. If I take my own particular sense of this difficulty seriously, however, I have to be careful not to let these stances develop into assumptions that I know what to do, what is happening, who I am, or who the children are.

According to the Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith this process involves realising how colonized communities face the challenge of decolonizing minds and stories. Decolonizing minds and stories requires listening to stories on the margins of what would count as scholarly knowledge in established scholarly communities within academia. However, it requires not only listening, but also listening in a particular way, that creates further identities, further forms of community, and further forms of life. A philosophical listening that becomes an investigation into the existential conditions of the scholar, the indigenous, and the colonizer. Philosophy and pedagogy can thus emerge through a community of inquiry, to borrow a term from Philosophy for Children, where the scholar/researcher plays a part in the processes of decolonization, but without a position of epistemic or social privilege (Smith 2012, pp. 24, 36). Being part of decolonizing processes will involve acknowledging the difficulties of reality we face and learning to live with them. The scholar thus exercises a form of existential pedagogy of the self – an exercise of living with the acknowledgement that one’s own assumptions, words, and knowledge will not solve the difficulties one encounters.

Søren Kierkegaard’s existentialism can further bring out the decolonization of pedagogy involved in Cavell and Diamond’s acknowledgement of our tendency to deflect from lived difficulties. Kierkegaard emphasized two modes of thinking with a focus on the thinker: the speculative thinker and the existential thinker. According to Kierkegaard, speculative thinkers – sceptics and respondents to scepticism – are involved in trying to find proofs, or solutions, or general answers. Thus, they miss the lived difficulty that inspires the problem of scepticism. Speculative thinkers speculatively engage with objectivity, or what is considered to be the facts of life. The intellectual appeal to this knowledge does not itself determine our relationship to it. Whereas existential thinkers engage in what these conditions, facts, arguments, and the very lives we live mean and what it means to live, ‘Socrates’ infinite merit’, Kierkegaard says, ‘is precisely that of being an existing thinker, not a speculative thinker who forgets what it means to exist’ (Kierkegaard 1980, p. 205). The Socratic claim that wisdom lies in the not-knowing means that we cannot determine the meaning of our lives in advance, before we actually live them, and that we live the difficulties of reality rather than deflecting from them by trying to solve them.

Forms of life, pedagogy, and imagination

If difficulties of reality – if being taken aback by a child’s refusals when at the same time having a sense of hospitality – tempt us to deflect from the lived problem, one may ask what the thinker needs who does want to exist in such difficulties? There is at least one straight answer to that question throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship. Existential thinkers use the imagination differently. Imagining becomes a form of philosophical embodiment of life itself in such thinking, where reading, reflecting, writing, and living become part of the same kind of movement. This form of philosophising, as we shall see, is close to how Sámi culture has developed literary forms that go beyond the limits of western literary genres. Sámi literature, as Sámi literature scholar Harald Gaski says, takes a ‘holistic approach to life and the world’ to the extent that it is often ‘difficult to distinguish between fiction and factual discourse, or between poetry and poetically delivered history’ (Gaski 2020, p. 18).

This kind of holism requires a form of moral imagination. To Diamond, ‘imaginative life enters thought, action, perception, and indeed patterns of action, approaches to life’ (1991, p. 41). We use our imagination, our imaginative responses to actions and judgements of actions, to give them a place, in order for them to make sense, for us to understand them, in our own lives (ibid). In this sense, moral thinking is genre breaking. But Diamond goes on. Imagination is required not only to make sense of particular actions by giving them a place in our lives, but also to imagine our lives. Specifically, Diamond stresses the need to imagine our own childhoods and keep them alive in our lives. In her description of the ethics of storytelling in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol she sees Scrooge’s moral transformation as a call for moral imagination:

We all know that we were once children, but that may be mere abstract knowledge, incapable of entering our adult lives. Or it may be imaginatively available to us; the acceptance of our own past childhood may be imaginatively present and active in us as adults. Without the imaginative presence in us of the child we were, we are as adults incapable, Dickens thought, of enjoyment and hope, and that cripples us morally (Diamond 1991, p. 42).

My temptation to solve the difficulty in responding to the children can thus be understood as lack of imagination, a disconnection from the child in me, a forgetting of the child’s wish to not be interrupted by my adult inquiries. Morality and imagination seem to connect not in a solution to a problem, but in how we imagine our lives.

Diamond returns to the importance of the imagination for living with the difficulties of reality by discussing Cavell’s reading of A Winter’s Tale and Othello (Diamond 2008, p. 64; Cavell 1979, pp. 481–96). Both Leonte’s and Othello’s failures to take seriously Hermione’s and Desdemona’s bodies as alive, as organic, as having lives of their own to lead – desires, passions, a will – turns them both figuratively, and in Hermione’s case literally, to stone. This is a failure of the imagination in two ways. As Diamond puts it, ‘stone as what is imagined and stoniness as what has befallen the imagination’ (2008, p. 65). This involves both a misdirected imagination, trying to imagine a world without the difficulty of living with people of flesh and blood, and a lack of ability to actually imagine them being alive, to imagine life.

I read Diamond to be continuing Wittgenstein’s often neglected emphasis on the imagination in philosophy, for instance, when he says, that ‘to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life’ (Wittgenstein 1953, § 19). As Beth Savickey (2017) points out, although there is an abundance of literature that tries to define what ‘form of life’ might mean in Wittgenstein’s corpus (see e.g. Cavell, 1989; Garver 1994; Stickney 2008), it is not matched by discussion of the role of imagining. In Wittgenstein’s texts there are a lot of blank spaces, particularly when he uses the notion ‘form of life’. The temptation for the reader is to try to fill in those blank spaces by defining the notion in order to be able to use it as a theoretical concept. But the attempt to define the notion ‘form of life’ seems to avoid taking Wittgenstein’s invitation seriously; that is, the invitation to imagine forms of life (Savickey 2017, p. 29).

Paul Smeyers and James Marshall have suggested that ‘form of life’ is the central pedagogical notion of Wittgenstein’s philosophy (Smeyers and Marshall 1995, p. 17). It is pedagogical because it involves ways of describing how children are biologically and culturally formed, that is, how they are initiated into forms of life (see also Smeyers and Burbules 2010). This is a way to approach the notion that the pedagogy of the concept lies in its possibility to analyse or uncover processes of formation and education. ‘Form of life’ becomes an analytical tool. I suggest that if we look at the notion in relation to the style of Wittgenstein’s writings, it is pedagogical in a different sense, not because it describes cultural (or biological) formation, but because its invitation to the philosophical exercise of imagining lives is a way to cultivate our attention to how we speak and think.

Wittgenstein writes in short paragraphs and remarks, often as variations on a set of themes. This creates a form that includes a lot of gaps and spaces that break the line of the story and logic of the argument. I have suggested that this brings a temptation to fill in those gaps, to create a smooth line or logical argument. As Savickey puts it, however: ‘To fill in the blank spaces between remarks is not to provide missing information, but to add imaginatively to the variations already recorded’ (2017, p. 28). Wittgenstein invites us to continue his work by exercising our imagination.

Wittgenstein complained that one of the problems of the philosophy of his contemporaries was a too limited diet (1953, § 593). He did not invent a cure for that, but rather offered forms of pedagogical exercise for philosophers, a way to train our imagination. The philosophers did not need more advanced concepts with which to create theories that could uncover new answers to the problems of epistemology, ontology, ethics, politics, or aesthetics. Thus, the gaps in Wittgenstein’s writing can be read as openings to practice philosophy. We practice philosophy by imagining forms of life in which our ways of speaking and thinking have a particular role, where our concepts are part of life’s quilts (Wittgenstein 1953, PPF i § 2).

In concluding her essay, Diamond writes that ‘the reality to which we were attending seemed to resist our thinking it’, and suggests that the ‘coming apart of thought and reality belongs to flesh and blood’ (Diamond 2008, p. 78). To attempt to solve these difficulties is to deflect from their lived aspect and to fail to imagine a life where reality resists our thinking.

Interspecies forms of life

Of course, writing in short remarks and paragraphs to leave a space for readers to think is not the only way to engage the imagination. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms are another example of a style of writing that imagines a form of life and form of thought, Plato’s dialogues another, and Diamond’s thinking through literature and poetry yet another. These styles of writing create spaces for exercises of the imagination in quite particular contexts. In my engagement with Sámi children I felt a growing need to decolonize my own life in philosophy and pedagogy and to cultivate my philosophical imagination in ways that respond to Sámi history, culture, and life.

I turn now to Eanni, Ennažan (2001) [The earth, my mother] by the Sámi poet, multi-artist, and philosopher, Nils Aslak Valkeapää (1943–2001), also known as Ailohaš, for a poetic expression of forms of life that grow together:

go šattan njeaidit muora

dát mu viellja dát mu oabbá

lossamilain

humahalan muora

go dan eallima

šattan

ferten

oanidit

attásit ándagassii

jeđđen dan

iežan

go jámán

livččii

riekta njuolga vuogas stuora gudni

jus dohkkešin biebmun

šattasin

šaddadivččen

soapmása

soapmásis

din

dis

(Valkeapää 2001, p. 300)

And in English:

when I have to cut down a tree

a brother a sister

I talk to the tree

with a heavy heart

when I have to

make your life

shorter

will you forgive me

I comfort the tree

and myself

when I die

it would be a great honor

if I could

become food

for somebody

to make some of you

sprout

grow

(Valkeapää 2017, p. 300)³

Ailohaš’s poem seems to present a form of life with a natural history, and a future, that is not limited to the human. However, there is another aspect of this poem that does not make it a depiction of a form of life, nor a description. Eanni, Ennažan is a book with many themes, but Ailohaš’s poems are also a part of his yoiks. Yoik is a Sámi form of singing, sometimes without words and sometimes connected to stories. The yoiker always yoiks something. It can carry a narrative and be part of a storytelling performance (Stoor 2007). Sámi poetry often contains these features (Gaski 2020, p. 15). As a yoik the poem is that form of life. Reading the poem as a yoik thus introduces another form of connection between the form of life Ailohaš is expressing and the expression itself. He is yoiking a form of human-tree-life.

On the opposite leaf of the book there is a twin poem where Ailohaš writes out a form of life that involves taking the life of an animal. Mirroring the cutting down of the tree he writes, ‘ealli ealli / vielljamet, oabbámet’ [animal, animal / our brother, our sister]; and at the end of that poem, after a list of a manifold of foods created from the animal, ‘jus miinai / go min vuorro / dohkešeimmet / min viejai’e / oappái’e’ [if we too / when our time comes / were good enough / for our brothers/and sisters] (Valkeapää 2001, p. 301, 2017, p. 301).

In Wittgenstein the notion of form of life is sometimes used to imagine differences between forms of life, for example, how animal life is different from human life, but this may be where Wittgenstein’s imagination of different forms of life is limited. He famously writes:

One can imagine an animal angry, fearful, sad, joyful, startled. But hopeful? And why not?

A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe that his master will come the day after tomorrow? And what can he not do here? – How do I do it? – What answer am I supposed to give to this?

Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of a language. That is to say, the manifestations of hope are modifications of this complicated form of life. (If a concept points to a characteristic of human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do not write.) (Wittgenstein 1953, II § 1)

Wittgenstein asks us to imagine animal forms of life, how they may differ from human forms of life, and how hard it is to imagine animal life-forms that hope. His example points to the grammar of our use of such concepts, wherein it is hard for us to imagine other-than-human life forms speaking with us. As Wittgenstein famously put it, ‘If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it’ (1953, II § 327).

Perhaps Wittgenstein’s own diet was also limited. The imagination of Western philosophy and educational scholarship is not fed with sufficiently nutritious examples. Ailohaš imagines the intertwining between forms of life rather than the differences. The poem, the yoik, is a human-tree-life or a human-animal-life. Reading it as a yoik means to engage in this human-tree-life. The yoik-poem can thus create a space for a further form of life. Which concepts we can imagine making sense in that form of life may be an open question, but for those who live with trees it is perhaps quite clear cut. A way of life in which yoiking the world, persons, and animals is a grammatical phenomenon is perhaps more open to imagining what we could call interspecies forms of life.

It may be tempting to take the point of my reading of Ailohaš’s poem as epistemological. However, Wittgenstein’s invitation to imagine forms of life is a call to imagine ways of living. Ailohaš shows how we can share life with trees and animals, in attunement with them. Living or imagining attunements in forms of life is to imagine a life where epistemological concepts have a role to play, a life where we use concepts in a particular way. Ailohaš and Wittgenstein provide playful exercises of the imagination that train our attention to the many different possible meanings that emerge in our lives. This is an existential task before it is an epistemological one (Nergård 2019; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).

In Eanni, Ennažan interspecies forms of life are brought out in connection to the land in various ways. Áilohaš writes about the forest, the jungle, the tundra, the deserts, the mountains and rivers, and the people who live in these lands, as well as his own relation to both the environments that are part of his own life and those where he is a guest. As Gaski and Lars Nordström note in their introduction to Eanni, Ennažan, in the book Ailohaš visits indigenous peoples from different parts of the world and, although he sees similarities in values and ways of life, it is clear that he consider himself to be a guest among them, without appropriating their cultural expressions (Gaski and Nordström 2017). It is as if he depicts his identity as a guest in the way he writes about the land of other indigenous peoples. In these encounters there is an acknowledgement of different people’s forms of life in a particular land, but a further form of life is emerging in the form of the poem, as the life of the poet moves through the lands. New yoiks are emerging.

Yet, Áilohaš directs harsh criticism to the scholars, who he ironically calls ‘Oahppan Viisis Buorre Fiina Máhtti Diethtti’ [The Learned Wise Good Nice Clever Scientist] (2001, p. 193, 2017, p. 193), who come to the lands of indigenous peoples with their forms of wisdom and knowledge, naming places, animals, plants, or even ‘roskkidit / durddidit / baiket / gaikot / billistit / boldet / nuoskidit / duolvvidit/min/BASSEBÁIKKIID’ [litter/make a mess/shit/destroy/ruin/burn/desecrate/ spoil / our / HOLY PLACES] (2001, pp. 193–94, 2017, pp. 193–94). We can imagine the form of life of the scholar, the scientist, in the lands of indigenous peoples as being ‘nice and clever’, but at the same time, as he puts it, ‘eige oienne iežaset/iežaset meanudemiid/iežaset biktasiid/iežaset láhttema’ [they cannot see themselves/their rampage/their clothes/their own behavior] (2001, p. 195, 2017, p. 195). Thus, for the scholar to start to imagine further examples of forms of life might involve imagining interspecies life forms. A human life form is not only a mark of difference to the life of trees and animals. Such an imagination can also involve imagining one’s own life as rampaging holy places, imagining scientific practices as not only being a search for knowledge, but also as a form of blindness; it can involve littering, destroying, and ruining. I have seen this myself, seen my own blind behaviour being corrected by Sámi colleagues, to not speak too loudly when using Swedish among Sámi children, to not assume to know.

Áilohaš call scientists ‘Olbmot’ [human beings] (2001, p. 193, 195, 2017, p. 193, 195). Perhaps then the difficulty of reality for the scholar engaging with indigenous children is to realise that, often, the children are right; when you are not Sámi your understanding is limited. Perhaps, then, we could imagine the scholar as olmmoš-stállu, a human stállu.

Tragic interconnections and lost attunements

Imagining interspecies forms of life seems to be a matter of living certain connections with trees or animals, imagining a life that bridges differences between species. Hence, the scholar can be fed with further examples to widen the imagination of their own lives in interrelation with the land and the people they work with. However, entering into such interconnection is not only a matter of find new modes of being together, providing new forms of knowledge and thinking, but also it is a matter of sharing pain and a sense of lived tragedies. Otherwise, the new interconnections the scholar enters into risk repeating the rampaging in the name of science and becoming a real ‘olmmái-stállu’.

The memory of governments, in alliance with scholars, rampaging through northern Scandinavia, is alive in Sápmi. That history can help us imagine the tragedies involved when governments and scholars, like Scrooge before his transformation, like moral cripples, enforce policies and decisions without the imaginative presence of what a life in that land means. A form of life that is interconnected with places, the land, the forest, and animals involves particular forms of tragedy. When the machinery of colonization goes through a land, with new roads, mines, dams, categorizations of people and customs, and national borders, even a sparsely populated land like the Scandinavian arctic becomes crowded. This was the lesson learnt by the Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish governments in the early 20^th century. As the claims upon natural resources became crucial, and the need to control their populations grew, the Scandinavian states forced the migration of the many Sámi who lived along trails with large reindeer herds. In her book Herrarna satte oss hit [The lords put us here] Elin Anna Labba tells the stories of the people who were forced to move, their lives lived with the land torn apart. She quotes from a conversation with Sunná Vulle Nihko Heaika.

They yoiked when they met and when they were in the reindeer forest. When they saw a reindeer, they pulled out a yoik. Yoik have sort of been a part of life. It belongs to the way of working … When one gets a special feeling in the heart, then one has to yoik.

But I don’t know if they had yoik in these mountains. Did they even make yoiks here? I never heard of it. To them everything was foreign. For sure, they may have yoiked some mountaintop. Someone may have been honoured with a yoik. But you certainly know, those who have been driven away from their own lands where their ancestors had grown up – everything becomes foreign to them. (Sunná Vulle Nihko Heaika in Labba 2020, p. 68)⁴

Labba portrays the stories of Sunná and his family. The year they moved they yoiked incessantly: ‘Yoiks of sorrow to the land’ (Labba 2020, p. 70). Many yoiks for particular settlements were lost in these forced movements. Labba wonders if they would have continued to yoik if they could have stayed. She wonders if she, as a relative of these families, would have learnt to yoik (p. 70). She then continues her story of the forced migrations. Hear Labba’s own words:

In the stories I listen to from the time of forced migrations, they yoik when they encounter the mountains. They yoik to greet and to say farewell.

They express gratitude for pasture, for the summer, for the wind.

They ask the land for permission.

They have a story and a name for every little stream.

Everyone knows that reindeer herding demands a deep relationship to the land and knowledge about her details. Everyone knows that a nomadic person is not without roots – she is just moving between different homes. (Labba 2020, p. 71)

There are two tragedies of interspecies forms of life in Labba’s text. First, we see how the interconnectedness with the land involves yoiks and stories, how yoiking is a cultural phenomenon based on a certain kind of way of being with the land. We see how stories become impossible to tell, how yoiks disappear, how those forced to move become foreigners, not only in the new lands they move to, but also in their own lives. Ways of thinking and being are slowly dissolved with each step south. Second, we see how Labba herself, in retelling the stories of the families who were forced to move, some of them her own relatives, expresses a sense of loss.

Looking at an old photo of Risten and her three children, Labba brings to life such devastation in our imagination in the first chapter and in the final paragraphs of the book. One of the children in the picture is Labba’s own grandfather. She describes her visits to the coastal settlement in northern Norway that they had to leave. In the final paragraphs she asks what she would have done if she were there and had to leave those lands. Perhaps she would have touched the birches, put her hand in the cold spring, picked up one of the small rugged rocks, thanked the mountains, put her cheek on the grassy beach (Labba 2020, p. 182). She could do it in these visitations. But the questions she asks in her first chapter reverberate throughout her book, as a yoik finding its way to a yoiker. ‘Ailohaš has said that we carry our homes in our hearts. Can you do that if you are forced to move? Can I mourn a place that never been mine?’ (Labba 2020, p. 10). In this land-animal-tree form of life, the break travels through generations and the tragic loss of a life creates a space of silences, where the reverberations of the yoiks of lands, animals, trees, friends and family lose their meaning.

Labba points at a third tragedy, shared by many indigenous peoples who have suffered from colonial nations’ thoughtless rampage: the tragedy of colonial silences and forgetfulness. Again, in the final paragraph: ‘I put down my text now and pass along the threads. In the empty space of Sweden’s history there is still room to weave our own patterns, with the voice of those who have gone before us’ (Labba 2020, p. 182). There are still stories to be told. Because colonisation is about not only what has been done, but also the stories still not told, the thoughts not considered. Hence, deflection is a part of the colonial pattern. Deflection from the difficulty of reality of a colonial culture’s encounter with its own chauvinism.

Still, a radical hope is alive throughout Sámi culture. In his study of the biography of Alaxchíia Ahú, or Plenty Coups chief of the Crow Nation, Jonathan Lear describes cultural silences. At a time when all the conditions for the life the Crow had lived had been destroyed, when the buffalo were killed and they were forced from their traditional lands, Alaxchíia Ahú says: ‘After this nothing happened anymore. There was little singing anywhere’ (Linderman 1962, p. 311 in Lear 2006, p. 2). Lear’s whole book is an attempt to understand what Alaxchíia Ahú meant by ‘After this nothing happened anymore’. Lear suggests that human beings – and we could add trees and animals sharing their lives with humans – ‘inhabit a way of life expressed in a culture’ (2006, p. 6). Life is vulnerable. The conditions for the life of the Crow changed so radically that the very concepts used to understand what they do, their own words and customs, lost their meaning. As in Labba’s account, the culture falls silent. Lear does not say so, but Alaxchíia Ahú seems to explain what he means when he says, ‘There was little singing anywhere’. Yoiks are silenced.

Stories like Labba’s and poems like Ailohaš’s are told in response to these silences. Through them we can imagine the tragedies of interspecies forms of life. Through them, perhaps, we can imagine hybrid forms of life where the Sámi’s stories help us to reimagine the colonial forms of thought and practice, where a different way of living with difficulties of our histories emerges. This is the radical hope expressed in Lear’s study. Alaxchíia Ahú imagines a different future for his people through his childhood dreams where his people’s wishes are expressed. By creating a narrative around these dreams, he imagines a cultural space where his people can respond to their challenges. He could thus embrace the Crow concept of courage that was lost when the life of the warrior and buffalo hunter could not be lived (Lear 2006, p. 117). Alaxchíia Ahú’s dreams, Ailohaš’s poetry and yoiks, Labba’s stories of forced migrations, speak to the colonizer by breaking the silences, finding words in the silences, imagining lives in the silences.

Soabadit: attuning and atoning

I can see two thoughts, perhaps even two lives, taking form. One is the life of scholarship as a life of translation. The other is the life of reception. The first is a life of seeking ways to convey understanding. The second involves the scholar’s whole life transforming through the humble reception of the cultures he or she encounters. It involves a kind of active waiting to see what happens to oneself in the encounters with others. This life faces the difficulties of ‘going native’, cultural appropriation, misunderstandings, and subjective reactions (fear, attraction, curiosity, pity, and so on). It is also a very slow process. The poetry of Ailohaš has been a life changing encounter for me, but it has been so through other equally life changing encounters with Sámi yoikers, musicians, authors, storytellers, and elders, not to mention the Sámi scholars and teachers I consider my friends. An existential hybrid is emerging. A scholar that is not Sámi, but not entirely non-Sámi either. A scholar that is not so unlike Ailohaš’s muorra (tree) or his ealli (animal).

Thinking of scholarly work as emerging hybridization means that reading philosophers and theorists alongside the fates in Labba’s accounts or the yoik poetry of Ailohaš is not a search for theories to analyse findings in my work with Sámi children. The role of the scholar is rather different than someone who produces knowledge by using theoretical tools on ethnographic material. In critiquing Frazer and responding to the manifold of fire festivals in Europe that Frazer analyses, Wittgenstein writes:

What is most striking are not merely the similarities but also the differences between all these rites. There is a manifold of faces with common features that keep surfacing here and there. And what one would like to do is draw lines that connect the components in common. What would still be lacking then is a part of our contemplation, and it is the one that connects this picture with our own feelings and thoughts. This part gives such contemplation its depth. (Wittgenstein 2018, p. 58)

Although Wittgenstein describes his methods in philosophy as looking for similarities and differences rather than fixating on theoretical concepts (Wittgenstein 1953, §66-70). Seeing the varieties in the fire festivals and other rituals is not enough. When all is said and done in our descriptive work, our contemplation is still missing, the contemplation that connects the rituals’ variety, the manifolds of human life, ‘with our own feelings and thoughts’.

Scholars in indigenous contexts (and elsewhere), are facing a difficulty that runs through questions of identity, culture, ethnicity, and the philosophy of pedagogical practice. That of reading hybridity in forms of life rather than just in identity or culture (although, for sure, these are part of our forms of life, make hybridity hard and the refusal of hybridity even harder). There are ways of living together that come before we can make sense of cultures and identities. Wittgenstein talks about attunement in forms of life (1953, § 240–42), rather than in opinions or ideas.⁵ The German word he uses is ‘übereinstimmung’. In acknowledging that someone is suffering he also writes: ‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’ (Wittgenstein 1953, PPF § 22). Wittgenstein uses the word ‘Einstellung’ for which the English translation given is ‘attitude’. This signals that in seeing someone’s suffering, I respond to someone as suffering, as having a soul, which gives meaning to our interaction through the way we are attuned, how we are standing, ‘stellung’, towards others. The grammar of ‘meaning’ shows itself in our attunement. So, if hybridity in forms of life is forms of attuned interactions and attitudes rather than opinions and beliefs, then what we explore through looking at how we create meaning together is a form of lived grammar that emerges in our entangled interactions (Gaita 2017, pp. 46–49).

In the spirit of the way in which Joks and Østmo (2020) show how forest and wilderness can be decolonized through the Sámi verbing of nouns, one can verb attunement and hybridity. ‘Übereinstimmung’ as ‘agreement’ and or ‘attunement’ as nouns may not be particularly fitting for speaking about attunement in Sámi. One would rather use the verbs ‘Soabadit’ or ‘Stemmet’ for what we are doing; we are agreeing, attuning. ‘Stemmet’ is likely close to the German ‘Stimmung’ as it is close to stämma in Swedish or stemme in Norwegian, which also can mean ‘voice’. ‘Soabadit’ on the other hand can mean either to agree and unite, or to reconcile, or atone. One could also use ‘Soahpat’, which means to ‘agree’ or ‘to fit something’ or ‘that something fits’, as in ‘gahpir soabai sutjne’ [The hat fits her/him]. Forms of life become an act of fitting voices together, harmonizing, or coming together, of doing attunement, as well as of dissonance, of not being able to Soahpat.

The Wittgenstein aphorism, ‘Meine Einstellung zu ihm is eini Einstellung zur Seele. Ich habe nicht die Meinung, dass er eine Seele hat’ [‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’], does not easily translate into any language. To translate the English ‘attitude’ for ‘Einstellung’ does not bring out the connection between attuning and the adjusting that it also connotes. Attempting to translate these two sentences into North Sámi complicates Wittgenstein’s view further. It makes his distinction between having an attitude towards something and having an opinion about something less clear. Here is my version of Wittgenstein’s words in Sámi:

Mu guoddu sutnje lea guoddu sillui. In oaivvil ahte sus lea siellu.

‘Guoddu’ means ‘holding’ or ‘posture’. It is related to ‘Guoddi’, meaning ‘carrier’, and ‘guoddit’, meaning ‘to carry’ or ‘reach’ and also sometimes ‘giving birth to a calf or a lamb’. In this wording we are holding the other and have a posture towards the other as if the other has and is a soul. ‘Oaivvil’, in the second sentence, means a view or a meaning, as in having a view on an issue. In this translation we are holders of souls, not viewers of souls. The active part of Wittgenstein’s ‘attitude’ or ‘Einstellung’ is amplified in the connotation of caring in North Sámi. Attunement in forms of life is translated into a lived form of care, a birthing of souls. We hold someone as being in pain, or being a soul, in our posture towards them. Our stories and poetry, and our whole lives, the way we do things with language as well as with all that make up our forms of life, shape our seeing the world and others in this way.

Áilohaš’s words of gratitude to the tree make up his stance or viewpoint towards the tree and thus a tree-human attunement. When Sunná in Labba’s book speaks of the uncertainty and silences of the yoiks in the land they were forced to move to, we see how the break with a land where one has lived also breaks the form of life one has with that land, and so, the soul of the land and of oneself can be lost.

When reading the notion of hybridity through Wittgenstein, and reading him through the Sámi poetry, stories, colonial history, and language, a new philosophy emerges, one in which connecting ‘[philosophical and ethnographic pictures] with our own feelings and thoughts’ also means connecting with the land. We are close to a pedagogy of the land, where a decolonized scholar becomes a land-based learner and existential thinker together with the people with whom the scholar works (Simpson 2014, p. 13). Without a land to stand on it is hard to have an attitude towards anything through which we can hold souls and through which our souls may be transformed.

Conclusion: playing at decolonizing philosophy

I have been trying to think of the scholar who meets indigenous children as facing colonial structures and living with their difficulties. In hoping to take the notion of hybridity seriously, in thinking with the difficulties of where hybrid lives emerge, moving between languages, meaning, and knowledge traditions, philosophy and pedagogy are transformed. Ideas break down and new thoughts grow out of their rubble.

While working on this text I have been struggling to learn to speak and read North Sámi and, in that effort, further meanings of ‘olmmái-stállu’ have emerged. In fact, ‘olmmái’ in some dialects means ‘friend’. A friendly stállu, or a stállu friend, could that be what the children were talking about? Or did they actually play with the several meanings that olmmái can suggest? Is that why they did not think I would understand? I did not know Sámi well enough, and still do not, to see all the possible interconnections of meanings they were playing with. My understanding needed time, and still needs time. My understanding needed time of living with their refusal to speak, to realize that to them there was not enough ground for agreement to begin to explain. These things should not need explanation; if you understand, you understand. We are seeing different forms of silence than the silenced yoiks of the forced migrations in Labba’s account. The children are choosing to be silent. But in that silence an educational philosophy has been emerging – of waiting for another moment, of holding back asking, questioning, inquiring, stating, until the moment is there, if it ever comes.

The drama of the olmmái-stállu becomes a guide for decolonizing thought. Something like Diamond’s saying that ‘part of the business of thinking is to guide thinking’ (2019, p. 303). In fact, that is something philosophy has always done, and why philosophy can be considered as form of pedagogy in the business of directing itself, reforming itself, bringing itself along as yet untrodden paths. In that sense, my decolonizing effort lies in the acknowledgement that in this text I am not myself primarily the philosopher, nor even the pedagogue. Rather, the children guide me to uncertainty by confronting me: ‘You are not Sámi, you won’t understand anyway!’

Perhaps, then, the scholar can be olmmái in several senses, a human stállu, a man-stállu and a friendly stállu, who lives with the difficulty of having to face the possibility of being one or the other. Decolonizing this scholarship means to acknowledge children’s silence, refusal to explain, refusal to speak, and learn to live with those silences and the hope that remains in them.⁶

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vetenskapsrådet [2019-03794].

Notes

1. The Sámi are an indigenous people in northern Scandinavia.

2. Diamond’s essay has been published in several places; first in 2003 in Partial Answers, then in Crary and Shie (2006). The version I am referring to here was published in a collection of responses to her essay by Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe with the title Philosophy and Animal Life (2008).

3. I have tried to keep the original layout of the page in Eanni, Ennažan, as how the words are spread on the page are important for the poem. I am gratefully indebted to the generosity of the Lássagammi Foundation, the trustees of Valkeapää’s work, for granting permission to republish the poem here.

4. All quotes from Labba (2020) are my own translations.

5. In the English translation ‘agreement’ is used for ‘übereinstimmung’. Cavell (1979, p. 32) suggests that ‘attunement’ is closer to Wittgenstein’s German.

6. The work on this paper was financed by Södertörn University the pilot project ‘Sami children’s narrative philosophy’. Finalizing the paper was done with support from the Swedish Research Council within the on-going project ‘Sami manna jurddavazzin – Sami Children as Thought Herders’. Both projects adhere by the ethical guidelines of the Swedish Research Council.