Answering the charge?

Abstract

From 1850 to 1980 the Norwegian state pursued a policy of Norwegianization of the Sami, where schools played an important part in the attempt to turn Sami children into Norwegian citizens. Pupils lived in boarding schools where all teaching was in Norwegian and it was forbidden to speak Sami, both in and out of the classroom. This article examines metaphors in three types of material: Norwegian textbooks; Sami literature in these textbooks; and Sami testimony literature. The aim is to find out how the Norwegian state used its power to stigmatize Sami identity through metaphors in textbooks, and how Sami writers show their resistance to Norwegianization through metaphors in Sami literary texts and Sami testimony literature. The analysis also examines whether metaphors are signalled or not, in order to see if they are open to negotiation or taken as self-evident, and if signalling can be related to genre. One central finding is that the Norwegian texts contain more condescending and less signalled metaphors than the Sami ones. Another is that signalling might be related to genre: there are more signalled metaphors in the reflective narratives of witness testimonies than in the other genres that are examined. The theoretical foundations of the analyses are discourse-based metaphor analysis in a post-colonial perspective.