Kapitlet skildrar ett växande samspel i forskningsprojektet Samiska barn som tankevandrare. Det är en övergripande framställning om projektet där ett gemensamt lärande sker genom vad barn, pedagoger och forskare beskrivit som ett äventyr i mötet mellan det traditionella, det praktiska och det fantasifulla, samt de behov som villkorar den samiska förskolans vardag som en form av levt berättande. Kapitlet ger exempel från ett antal av de aktiviteter som genomförts inom forskningsprojektet – som att hämta skohö på sensommaren, gå på älgjakt under hösten, vara med på sarvslakt, att duddjot eller slöjda med inspiration från mörker­tids­tradi­tioner under vintern, ripsnarning under vårvintern och besök till ett par kallkällor på försommaren. Beskrivningarna av aktiviteterna visar hur samiska pedagoger genom ett medvetet arbete med berättelser skapar rum för samiska traditionella kunskaper i förskolan. Kapitlet visar hur filo­sofisk och pedagogisk reflektionen inte bara skedde i enskilda indi­vi­ders tänkande utan också genom en samklang i mellanrummet mellan barn, pedagoger, forskare, platser, material, berättelser och traditionella samiska kunskaper.

This article discusses the pedagogical role of the imagination and forms of life in Sámi early childhood education. Following Nergård’s development of Wittgenstein’s notion “form of life” as an imaginative, pedagogical, and anthropological concept, the article will explore how Sámi children both use and transform forms of life in Sámi early childhood centers. The article explores scenes from a day spent outdoors with early childhood educators and children. The aim is to show how young Sámi children philosophize and articulate their world, and how listening to the children can be a decolonizing practice that challenges colonial assumptions in pedagogy, philosophy and society. The empirical data was collected through a pilot project and the subsequent project Sámi Children as Thought Herders. The data material contains photos, short films, sound records, and notes collected through ethnographic fieldwork conceived as Critical Utopian Action Research, which takes into account the social learning of all participants, here specifically the children, the educators and the researchers. Thus, these are spaces for a joint critique that resists colonially structured practices. The main findings are that, during outdoor activities, educators and children imaginatively perform, play and encounter outdoor spaces and aspects of Sámi forms of life. This is explored on the basis of scenes where young children imaginatively engaged with the forest environment. The educators’ storytelling and the storytelling tradition continued into the children’s own storytelling. The children created stories about a Stállo who lives in a rusty oil barrel they found in the forest, making traditional stories and forms of life come alive and transforming them. In reflecting upon these scenes, we argue for the pedagogical, performative, and philosophical importance of engaging with the ways that children’s imaginative play interacts with place.

In Sápmi, there are many stories and traditions tied to skábma, or the dark time of midwinter. Skábma is considered a sacred time and space. Some of the stories and traditions, which stem from Sámi Indigenous religion and are related to various invisible beings, are still passed on through oral traditions and storytelling. This article explores what it can mean for children, educators and researchers to creatively engage with lesser-known Indigenous religious traditions, stories told by older generations and current traditions, in ways that give further life to them. The research aim is twofold: the article studies both how co-research within an Indigenous context is conducted, and how educators and children in a Sámi Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) centre managed activities and searched for and created new stories based on skábma traditions. The research question is: In what ways can strengthening storytelling in the ECEC setting function as a contribution to Sámi decolonisation processes? The research materials were collected through ethnographic fieldwork. The fieldwork was methodologically framed as critical utopian action research that considers the social learning of the children, educators and researchers that participated in the activities. Accordingly, this article shows how educators and children at an ECEC centre in Sápmi conducted activities to search for and create new skábma stories based on Indigenous traditions. The researchers were invited to learn about stories and traditions in which their attentiveness to the present was connected to valuing the past and taking responsibility for a sustainable future. The latter was achieved via storytelling by the educators, a duodji (Sámi craft) activity and children’s playtime. The article concludes by discussing how the search for and creation of traditions, such as sharing food with ancestors, involve decolonising processes.

Being out on the land, experiencing oneself on the land and engaging with the surroundings, including the land and water, are central parts of Sámi life. In this article, we explore experiences and tell our story from our visits to two cold springs with a group of children and educators from a Sámi early childhood centre. We discuss how educators and children, by engaging with traditional stories and cultural values of gratitude and respect contribute to decolonising pedagogical practices. The explorations and stories in this article are based on our ethnographic fieldwork. To put it more precisely, we present a story following the Indigenous methodologies of storying that account for experiences of the days when we engaged in adventures because of the invitations of the educators who told traditional stories beside the cold springs. The present was entwined with the past and previous generations in their storytelling. Living such an adventure created spaces for shared learning and decolonised pedagogical practices. The values of gratitude, respect, and a sustainable lifestyle were lived through the stories told and what children and educators did while being on the land and fetching water. The central Sámi values include the need to work in harmony with the land and water.

The varied landscape of Sápmi – ranging from forests, coasts, mountains, tundra, and mires – and the livelihoods of those who live there have developed Sámi forms pedagogy, child-rearing, and education. This special issue explores the philosophies of Sámi education. The issue adopts a broad notion of education that involves formal and informal educational settings, kindergartens, schools and universities. Likewise, philosophy is understood widely as involving ethics, ontologies, epistemologies, and existential questions in theoretical investigations. Consequently, the aim is to take back education and philosophy that emerges from local indigenous practices, and various relations to land.

The article delves into how young Sámi children interact with stories and utilize them to interpret their surroundings and ponder existential questions. It begins with a scene from a Sámi early childhood center where children participate in setting snares for willow grouse, an activity deeply rooted in storytelling and cultural knowledge. Amidst this, a child expresses a desire to communicate with the grouse, reflecting the Sámi tradition of listening to birds for warnings and messages. This highlights a distinct form of literacy – comprehending the world through narratives and connections with the land. Referencing anthropologist Tim Ingold, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Sámi poet Ailo Gaup, the text explores how meaning transcends language, emerging from embodied practices and relationships with the environment. By examining Sámi storytelling traditions, literature, and philosophy, the article underscores the significance of embracing both meaningful and nonsensical elements of life to reflect on what literacy, and the relationship between language and Land, can be, especially in Sámi early childhood education.

This article follows a story played out by children at a Sami early childhood centre in north Sweden. It does so by reflecting on the children's story as a form of Critical Indigenous Philosophy. In particular it explores what it could mean for a child to be a philosopher in a Sami context by developing the concept of jurddavazzi, or thought herder, in conversation with Wittgenstein's method of 'leading', and Cavell's of 'shepherding', 'words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use'. The children's play story - involving themes of death, struggles with natural surroundings, and interconnectivity through seeing life in nature - is read in relation to questions about traditional stories raised in the poetry of the Sami poet, artist and philosopher, Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa, or aillohas. The article ends by discussing how the children's invitation to follow their story can be seen as a decolonizing pedagogical gesture of the child that requires a particular kind of philosophical listening by the teacher or adult. The article is in its style an attempt to demonstrate a form of philosophical storytelling the children are engaged in.

In this chapter I will think of these scenes—the translation of the sticks, lives in seasons of Sápmi and the difficulties of a life with words—to explore how philosophy is exercised by Sámi children and how such philosophising can be translated into further contexts. These scenes will be considered in relation to how children play at traditional Sámi activities and the philosophising lives present in such play. In doing this, I will also explore what it means to be a scholar philosophising from the experience of encountering Sámi children’s thoughts and lives. I will consider how such philosophical thinking is a form of translation and how philosophising with children can be thought of as being in a process of translation.

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 Sami children that happened while doing research at an early childhood centre in northern Scandinavia. This is read alongside the poetry of the Sami writer Nils Aslak Valkeapaa, a personal documentary text by Sami 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.