Public libraries in language assimilation policies: The Swedish Tornedalian example

Introduction

The current Swedish Library Act states that work directed towards national minorities is a prioritized area for public libraries (National Library of Sweden, 2020; SFS 2013: 801, §5). Minority cultures should be made visible through a variety of library practices, and libraries must keep literature in minority languages to contribute to their varied needs of (re)vitalization. Sweden today has five national minorities, one of which – the Sámi people – is categorized as indigenous. The others are the Romani, Jewish, Swedish Finn and Tornedalian minorities, with Sámi, Romani Chib, Yiddish, Finnish and Meänkieli protected by the Minority Language Act, which came into effect in 2009 in line with the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (Council of Europe, 1992; SFS 2009: 724).

This article reports from a project funded by the National Library of Sweden in connection to a truth and reconciliation committee concerning the treatment of the Tornedalian minority by the Swedish state during the 20th century. ¹ The main question is whether libraries have played an active role in the nationalist oppression of Tornedalians and the concurrent language assimilation policies. Studies on the role of libraries in such nationalization processes are rare and, in the Nordic countries, the subject has previously only been analysed by Grenersen (2016) regarding similar processes in Norway. This main question leads to a further question concerning the implementation of contemporary library practices with and towards the Tornedalians today, as cultural visibility and indigenous librarianship are subject to increased interest as new professional practices emerge (Edwards and Edwards, 2010; Gosart, 2021).

I commence this article by introducing a theoretical framework concerning the specific kind of nationalism that emerged in the late 19th century and played a significant role in the language and minority policies in Sweden during the first half of the 20th century. Following this is a section presenting the Tornedalian minority and their specific language, Meänkieli, and the spread of public libraries in the remote Arctic areas of the Scandinavian countries where the Tornedalians are situated. The third section presents documentation bearing witness to language assimilation polices in libraries – processes that are analysed and put in a wider context. The article ends with a discussion about the responsibility of libraries in today’s international indigenous library environment.

Swedish nationalism and a new librarianship

During the 19th century, a new form of official nationalism developed in most countries in Europe, causing the major dynasties that had divided the continent among themselves to dissolve and adapt to emerging popular national identities and vernacular linguistic standards. This development also created a new connection between language, nation and collective identity. Anderson (2016: 84) defines this as a ‘lexicographic revolution’, where national languages were seen as ‘the personal property of quite specific groups – their daily speakers and readers – and moreover…these groups, imagined communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in a fraternity of equals’. This ‘lexicographic revolution’ was of direct relevance for library development as it was, even though it took unique shapes in different countries, generally connected to the development of popular school systems. In Sweden, this was manifested through the passing of a Public School Act in 1842, introducing six years of mandatory schooling and with the importance of access to school library services specifically stated (Torstensson, 2012: 96–97; Tynell, 1931: 41–48). School libraries usually took the form of parish libraries run by, or governed by, the local branch of the Lutheran State Church in collaboration with local schools, placing them in the service of official ideological and moral preferences, which were channelled through these institutions.

Even though Sweden was never subjugated under any of the major dynastic houses of central Europe, its emerging official nationalism was connected to macro events in the late Napoleonic era. The most important event for the Tornedalian minority was the loss of what is now Finland to the Russian Empire in 1809, dividing the Arctic area between the Norwegian coast and the Russian Kola Peninsula with a new border along the Torne River. Of relevance here is also the dissolution of the State Union between Norway and Sweden in 1905, the very year when public libraries received their first state subsidies in Sweden. The events of 1809 and 1905 both created debates about what it meant to be ‘Swedish’ in ways that forced revisions in both official and popular self-perceptions (Barton, 2003: 118–158). By 1900, a romantic national sentiment was imbued with the notion of racial distinction – a fact that manifested through the idea of a Swedish or Nordic ‘race’ connected to German Aryan ideals as something very different from the Sámi and Tornedalian peoples living in the far north, grouped together as ‘Lapps’. Both peoples were, up until as late as the 1950s, exposed to racist practices such as phrenological assessments, forced migration and the prohibition of speaking their own languages (SOU 2022: 32). Racist and derogatory perceptions live on today in popular sentiments as well as in governmental practice, primarily directed against the Sámi. The conflicts that arise from such tensions usually take the form of a struggle for the minority’s right to ethnic identity and integrity according to the overall sociological pattern discussed by Honneth (1995) in his book The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Honneth depicts a structure of social conflict that takes its departure from the necessity of social and cultural recognition for underprivileged groups such as ethnic (and other) minorities to attain recognition and respect on equal terms with the majority population. One reason for the often prolonged character of ethnic and minority-related conflicts is that the oppressor (state, majority society) reads these conflicts as legislative and administrative, while the oppressed (minority) reads them as moral. Resolutions and strategies based on such very different prerequisites rarely coincide, and conflicts can only be resolved if either one party (the minority) succumbs to the other (the majority) or both parties establish reciprocal social admittance and recognition (Honneth, 1995: 160–170).

The question here is whether public libraries help in defining the admittance and recognition of minorities or whether they contribute to the reproduction of these deep-seated patterns of conflict and established power structures. In relation to the Swedish–Sámi conflict, I have previously suggested the latter, albeit with opportunities to contribute to the former (Hansson, 2019). The Sámi people have never succumbed to the power of Swedish officials, but instead continue to fight for full cultural and economic recognition. The obstacles to emancipatory library practice are due to a lack of interest on the part of local authorities to work proactively with libraries as a tool for minority recognition and minority language revitalization. However, there is also a lack of Sámi-speaking librarians who can take part in the revitalization of local Sámi language varieties and work immediately with the minority on their own terms.

For Tornedalians, the situation has been somewhat different as they have tended to be less visible as a minority than the Sámi, and generally more receptive to assimilation efforts from the Swedish state and public administration. Today, the Tornedalian minority is the least known of the national minorities among the majority society (Institutet för språk och folkminnen, 2021). Cultivating a long and rich history as resident peasants, hunters and fishermen, Tornedalians have traditionally expressed their cultural identity through handicrafts, their daily practices, Laestadian Lutheranism and the arcane version of Finnish that is today defined as a proper language: Meänkieli. Their identity is therefore primarily local, regional and linguistic, and we know that libraries can play a role in such environments. Vårheim (2014, 2017) has shown, with the help of social capital theory, that public libraries in northern rural Norway have the potential to have a strong impact on local identity and self-esteem if they correspond with the needs of the local community. Consequently, public libraries can be expected to elevate the social and cultural identity and status of minorities in areas with not only multiple language use, but also cultures based on knowledge perceptions and epistemologies that are different from those recognized by the majority society (De Sousa Santos, 2008; Grenersen et al., 2016).

Tornedalians: language and identity

The Tornedalian minority in Sweden was acknowledged as such relatively late, primarily through efforts to revitalize Meänkieli, from the 1970s onwards. As the border between Finland and Sweden was created in 1809, the Arctic area of the Scandinavian peninsula and the peoples living there – the Sámi, Kvens and Tornedalians – had their territories divided across traditional cultural and geographical lines. It was after the establishment of the new border that a more pronounced visibility of the Tornedalian minority on the Swedish side began to emerge. On the Finnish side, Tornedalian Finnish, as Meänkieli is also called, was (and is) seen as a Finnish dialect, subordinate to the normative standard Finnish used in the southern parts of the country.

The Tornedalians reside mainly within a territorial corridor on both sides of the Torne River, stretching from the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia, by the border twin towns of Haparanda on the Swedish side and Torne on the Finnish, northwards to the Arctic northern coast of Norway. In the mid 18th century, groups of Tornedalians moved north to the Norwegian Arctic Sea coast, developing the Kven minority and maintaining their traditional north Finnish customs and a specific variety of Meänkieli. A third group of Tornedalians are referred to as Lantalaiset. Lantalaiset are Meänkieli-speaking people who come from the area immediately west of the actual Torne Valley, in the Swedish area of Malmfälten (the Ore Fields), including the townships of Kiruna and Gällivare.

The question of whether to classify Meänkieli as a language or a Finnish dialect has been controversial and was not finally decided on until the Tornedalians were defined as a national minority in Sweden (Hyltenstam, 2016). The oldest written and published epic poem in Meänkieli is Keksin runo by Antti Mikkelinpoika Keksi (1622–1705), describing in verse the severe flooding of the Torne River in 1677 (Keksi, 2022). Today, this poem counts as a significant work in the establishment of a historical continuity in the cultural identity of the Tornedalians.

During the period in focus of this study, Meänkieli was yet to be recognized as a language, and much of the repressive action taken in the assimilation processes of the 19th and early 20th centuries was directed against the use of (Tornedalian) Finnish. From 1888, an amendment to the Public School Act of 1842 was implemented through new so-called ‘state schools’. In these, all teaching, and indeed all conversation among the children, was to be in Swedish. Tornedalian Finnish was banned and quickly came to represent something obsolete and, in the political environment of the late 1800s torn between traditional rural values and new industrial development, suspicious. The ban on Meänkieli lasted until 1957, when Finnish was no longer seen as a linguistic threat. The ban had contributed to an effective assimilation process, leaving younger generations in a linguistic limbo, with untaught Meänkieli spoken by the elderly generations in home environments and ‘foreign’ Swedish spoken in all other contexts to the detriment of the minority’s self-perception (Hyltenstam and Salö, 2022).

Over the last couple of decades, Tornedalians have actively worked to regain their cultural and linguistic identity and integrity, not least through the National Association of Swedish Tornedalians, founded in 1981. ² Through this organization, experiences of oppression have been formulated as moral experiences, much in line with those of the Sámi, and there have been occasional claims raised to define Tornedalians as an indigenous people. This has as of today not happened, but since the National Minority Act of 2000 and the National Minority Language Act of 2009 came into effect, Tornedalians have cultural and linguistic protection, as the Kven people in Norway have had since 1996.

Tornedalian libraries and language assimilation

The first Swedish state subsidies for public libraries came into effect in 1905, followed by an extended subsidy programme in 1912 in which parish libraries and national popular education organizations, primarily within the labour and sobriety movements, were granted funding for the acquisition of books from a specific national union catalogue published by the newly instated Library Consultant Office, located within the National School Authority in Stockholm (Torstensson, 2012: 108–128). Since the communal reform in 1862, Sweden still has a decentralized model of governance with a high degree of municipal self-government with the right to taxation. Public libraries have always been a municipal concern, with one exception: the public library of the Torne Valley. The library infrastructure that was established in the Torne Valley and the Meänkieli-speaking areas of the eastern Norrbotten region was run directly by the state. Why was this?

In the late 19th century, the people of the Torne Valley paid no heed to the official border between Sweden and Finland, instead moving freely across their land as they had done for centuries. As nationalist political development urged the need for uniformity on each side of the border, the region was, on the Swedish side, seen as both filled with potential for the emerging industrial mining industry and a threat to national integrity, as few inhabitants spoke Swedish. Due to the lack of libraries with books and journals in Finnish, Tornedalians regularly used the considerably better equipped libraries on the Finnish side. To deal with this perceived problem, the Torne Valley Folk High School was established in Matarengi (today Övertorneå) in 1899, on the western shore of the Torne River, to spread Swedish culture and language across the Meänkieli-speaking region. The school also took responsibility for the dissemination of Swedish literature to remote Tornedalian villages through the implementation of rudimentary mobile library practices. Being a geographically wide and scarcely populated region with undeveloped communications, both Sámi and Tornedalian children with a long way to travel to school or with parents working away, in most cases west in the Ore Fields, were put in so-called ‘working houses’, a kind of combined boarding school and working camp, often with harsh conditions. Swedish was the mandatory language for the children, and the working houses held small libraries that could also be used by the local community, with literature only in Swedish (Mattsson Barsk, 2022). In any language assimilation or indeed revitalization policies, a focus on children is of key importance as they will easily adopt a new language and make it part of their identity.

The Swedish public library system was organized and improved by the Library Consultant Office in the 1910s and 1920s. Development was centralized in character, often leaving remote and scarcely populated areas in the northern regions and municipalities behind. Among these, the Torne Valley villages and municipalities were some of the least developed, partly because of the widespread use of Meänkieli as the everyday language. To support language assimilation policies implemented by the state schools, the Folk High School and the working houses, the Library Consultant Office decided not to let the local municipalities take responsibility for the establishment and management of public libraries, but to take charge of the process of establishing a regional library infrastructure as a matter of national importance. This led to the founding of the Torne Valley Library in 1928.

Asking for the commitment of the Library Consultant Office, petitions were submitted in 1928 suggesting the establishment of a new public library infrastructure in the Torne Valley region. The most significant of these was signed by G. Malm, County Governor of the Norrbotten region, dated 1 February 1928 (Till Konungen, 1928). The petition was sent to the government, describing the problem in the Torne Valley region as follows:

The popular education initiatives in Norrbotten’s Finnish areas have been subject to incessant attention from the state. It is quite natural that the great distances, the scarcely populated areas and other similar circumstances in these regions place obstacles for the development of popular education initiatives on a par with similar initiatives in other parts of the country, and in addition to this comes the specific difficulty brought about by the Finnish language. It has therefore proven necessary for the state to intervene and provide aid and support for the popular education work in these areas. (Till Konungen, 1928: 1)

What we see in these documents is an explicit reference to ongoing language assimilation policies and how to fit libraries in and make them a tool for these policies. While the petition states that the Finnish language is the major obstacle for the popular educational efforts that public libraries across Sweden were successful parts of, the succeeding statute explicitly directs the Torne Valley Library to work only with Swedish literature, even though Swedish in this region was at this time, for all sense and purposes of everyday life, a foreign language. It is important to note that, in the petition, the wish for support is not one for increased local influence, but one that instead subjects the Torne Valley Library to the immediate influence of national governmental policies in line with those in schools, working houses and the Folk High School in Matarengi, which has been defined as a beacon of Swedishness in the Meänkieli-speaking area.

The state’s engagement in the Torne Valley Library served the region well in terms of language assimilation efforts. The system of branch libraries and mobile units, first in the form of circulating libraries and from 1950 book buses, encouraged the local population in the remote villages to gradually take part in Swedish written culture, which was the very idea behind the attempt to eliminate Meänkieli as a living language. The library system in the Torne Valley area soon developed as something separate from that of the rest of the Norrbotten region, which was, after a reform of library infrastructure in 1930, run by the regional library in the coastal town of Luleå. This general regional structure was however deemed insufficient to deal with the remote Meänkieli-speaking villages of the northernmost Finnish border region. Thus, a separate library infrastructure was constructed to deal with the ‘specific difficulty brought about by the Finnish language’. It is worth reminding ourselves again of the actual ban on speaking Meänkieli in any public situation or context.

In order to modernize the distribution of literature to local libraries, schools and individual users, a mobile system of book buses was established through the administration of the regional library in Luleå. Three buses were used, covering a total distance of 8000 kilometres over an annual period of 19 weeks (Luleå stadsbibliotek, 1950). One of the three buses covered the Torne Valley area exclusively, with two visits to each municipality between September and April. The book buses meant a shift in the status of the Torne Valley libraries, as they now became part of the general activities of the regional library for the whole of the Norrbotten region. This also meant that the pressure on active language assimilation efforts decreased and was replaced by general library practices that were undefined in terms of language focus. Through the book buses, the Torne Valley libraries became part of the national library system on the same conditions as other municipalities in the region. This, however, did not mean that the language oppression had ended, or the libraries’ part in it. Finnish literature was still prohibited, and the regulation from 1929 was still in effect. It was not until 1957 that the formal oppression of Meänkieli ended, leading to a revised regulation statute. In the new opening paragraph, the central sentence cited above was changed to the following: ‘The Torne Valley Public Library has as its main objective to make literature available to the population of the Torne area (municipalities of Nedertorneå, Karl Gustav, Hietaniemi, Övertorneå, Korpilombolo, Tärendö, Pajala, Junosuando, Karesuando) for study and reading entertainment’ (Bestämmelser angående Tornedalens bibliotek, 1957).

The linguistic and cultural oppression of minorities tends to ignite at least sparks of resistance among those subjected to assimilation processes. This was so, also, in this case. The demand for Finnish literature persisted among library users in the Torne Valley municipalities, and the nationalist unification campaign by the Swedish state was met with scepticism. Barsk (1999: 171) points out that formal requests for Finnish literature were made in 1937, but as the library’s whole idea was to contribute to language assimilation by means of literature provision in Swedish, the board of the Torne Valley Library was reluctant to meet them. Ten years later, in 1947, the board allowed for a strictly limited number of high-quality titles in Finnish to be distributed as part of the overall mobile library stock. Small collections of Finnish literature were at this point already circulating from the regional library in Luleå, which, while serving the whole of the Norrbotten region, was not bound by the specific regulation that applied for the Torne Valley Library. This made it possible for individual initiatives by local librarians in municipalities throughout the Torne Valley area to circumvent the restrictions made on Finnish-language literature. That the regional library had the opportunity to provide this literature is interesting as it points to the fact that Finnish literature was not perceived as a threat per se by the national library authorities, but only within the Meänkieli-speaking municipalities of the Torne Valley, located as they are in a corridor on the border with Finland. The political implications of this, as seen in established library regulations and practice, should not be underestimated.

The developments described thus far are now part of a 20th-century narrative on the overall establishment of national coherence and identity, and the current library ideals of today are different. So, how can we characterize the relationship between Tornedalians and their public libraries since the ban on Meänkieli was lifted and new conditions for the cultural identity of the Tornedalian minority have developed?

Indigenous librarianship and Tornedalians today

With the implementation of new minority and minority-language legislation, efforts to revitalize Meänkieli and strengthen the status of the Tornedalian minority in the remote north-eastern regions of Sweden have developed in several ways. The current Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Tornedalians, Kvens and Lantalaiset should be seen as part of such efforts. Long-term language assimilation processes affect subjugated minorities and indigenous peoples in profound ways. A universal experience, emphasized by the Swedish linguist Leena Huss (2022), is a gradually increasing sense of shame and a feeling that the mother tongue is perceived as culturally inferior to the majority language imposed on the minority. This leads to the older generation denying their children and grandchildren the opportunity to learn their own language, as the majority language is perceived as a way to gain social respect and prosperity. Such a generational gap is seen in the Tornedalian minority as well. Today, as revitalization efforts are becoming increasingly important to a younger generation sensing a cultural absence manifested through a lack of knowledge of the language of their ancestors, libraries have both a practical and a moral obligation to contribute. As the question of revitalization has been raised in relation to the Sámi, a lack of knowledge of Sámi language varieties among young Sámi has been seen as a major obstacle to developing library practices together with this group (Hansson, 2019; Sikku, 2018). The same patterns and needs have been identified in the Tornedalian minority and have, during the past couple of years, been the object of increased interest and efforts on the part of the library community.

Revitalization efforts need not only to identify how a minority language has been used as a marker of historical continuity and identity; it is equally necessary to identify new ways in which languages such as Meänkieli are finding new speakers, relating to their contemporary ways of building collective and individual identities. Social media, podcasts and theatrical initiatives are examples of the ways in which Meänkieli and other minority languages are distributed and subjected to renewed interest among the younger generation, situating themselves both geographically and culturally with contemporary tools. Herein lie opportunities for libraries to develop services for minorities. A problem that has been acknowledged internationally is a need for librarians who are able to speak the relevant minority language and thereby able to present meaningful programmes as well as select and develop consciousness about literature in the relevant language (Oxborrow et al., 2017). Another way to address revitalization processes in libraries is to make literature, both historical and contemporary, available in new reading formats. One such initiative is Bläddra, a digital application provided by the National Library of Sweden, where literature in Meänkieli for both children and adults is available in electronic book formats, which can be downloaded to both Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. Through the establishment of the National Resource Library for Meänkieli in 2022, located in Övertorneå, Swedish public libraries have been provided with a significant set of resources to increase awareness of the Tornedalian minority.

Conclusion: from assimilation to integrity

This article started out by addressing one main question: Did public libraries in Sweden play an active role in national language assimilation policies in the far north of the country during the 20th century? The answer to this question is yes. By singling out the libraries in the Torne Valley and keeping them under state control during a time when the public library system in Sweden was being developed as a concern for individual municipalities, they were indeed used as vehicles for assimilation policies that were based on both romantic national sentiments and institutionalized racism. In this way, the public library sector did contribute actively to the specific form of language assimilation policies that has been identified by scholars such as Anderson (2016) as a ‘lexicographic revolution’. It is important to recognize this and it is important for the Swedish library sector, and indeed libraries in other countries as well, to learn from this and recognize the moral aspects of these actions. It is still necessary to be vigilant concerning the mechanisms that help reproduce the social and cultural oppression of minority groups and indigenous peoples. Today, as awareness grows and social attitudes change towards tolerance, not least regarding the value of linguistic diversity, libraries may reclaim the initiative and contribute not only to the revision of established practices, but also to the development of new practices that aim to contribute to emancipatory processes that may increase public presence and resilience among minority groups and the languages they speak.