Generating and Popularising Historical Knowledge in a Reconciliation Process: The Case of the Church of Sweden and the Sami

This chapter takes an on-going reconciliation process in Sweden, the case of the Church of Sweden and its historical relations to the indigenous Sami people, as a point of departure for analysing official white paper projects and truth commissions from the perspective of generating and disseminating historical knowledge. What happens with historical knowledge when historical problems are formulated, researched, and published within a reconciliation process driven by an ideological agenda? How can such a process be analysed from a theoretical point of view? This chapter argues that the examined process follows a general pattern that can be divided into at least three distinguishable phases. Each phase is marked by distinctly different characteristics with regards to the (scientific) shape of historical knowledge, the main agents and audiences involved in the process, and the specific media that history is filtered through. All phases also display different characteristics concerning their educational scopes. Through this analysis, the authors aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of how historical knowledge is generated within official historical justice processes and how it is transformed through processes of educationalisation, recontextualisation, and remediation.