title: Struggles of being and becoming: a dialogical narrative analysis of the life stories of Sami elderly.
abstract: The Sami are an indigenous people living in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Historically, national states have made strong efforts to assimilate the Sami people into the majority populations, and the Sami have experienced stigmatization and discrimination. However, after World War II, there has been a revitalization process among the Sami that was pioneered by the Sami Movement and gradually adopted in broader spheres of Norwegian society. The lifespans of the current cohort of elderly Sami unfold throughout a historical period in which contrasting public narratives about the Sami have dominated. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between elderly Sami's individual life stories and contrasting public narratives about the Sami. Nineteen elderly Sami individuals in Norway were interviewed. This article is a dialogical narrative analysis of the life stories of four elderly Sami. The article illuminates how individual life stories are framed and shaped by public narratives and how identifying is an ongoing process also in late life. A dialogical relationship between individual life stories and public narratives implies that individual stories have the capacity to shape and revise dominant public narratives. To do so, the number of stories that are allowed to act must be increased. A commitment in dialogic narrative research on minority elderly is to make available individual stories from the margins of the public narratives to reduce narrative silences and to prevent the reproduction of established "truths".
authors.affiliation: Centre for Care Research, Department of Health and Care Sciences, University of Tromsø, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway. bodil.hansen.blix@uit.no
authors.forename: Bodil Hansen
authors.initials: BH
authors.lastname: Blix
authors.forename: Torunn
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hamran
authors.forename: Hans Ketil
authors.initials: HK
authors.lastname: Normann
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged / Q000523:psychology*; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D005006:Ethnicity; D005260:Female; D005387:Finland; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D008297:Male; D008913:Minority Groups; D033262:Narration; D009664:Norway; D012426:Russia; D013548:Sweden
keywords: Elderly; Life stories; Narrative gerontology; Narrative identity; Public narratives; Sami