Chapter 4 Skates and Skis ‘Arctic Childhoods’ and Mobilized Differences—The Mattering of Skis and Skates in ‘Nation-ed Environments’ Zsuzsa Millei, Riikka Korkiamäki and Mervi Kaukko Preset Breathtaking and snow-covered landscapes, Northern Lights, nearly two hundred thousand lakes and more than a thousand kilometres of shoreline. To save energy on their everyday journey, people living in the area of Finland invented skating 5000 years ago (MessageToEagle.com 2016) 1 and travel over snow on skis for 6000 years. Nature dressed in white, frozen sheets of ice, cool air on face, skates, skis, poles, helmets and wool socks are part of the winter in Finland and children’s everyday lives and mobilities. ‘Early winter snowfall is … a sign – a promise – of many things cultural as well as natural’ (Rautio and Jokinen 2016, p. 36). Cold weather and winter sports in schools embrace children arriving to live in Finland from warm climates. In this chapter, we explore how skis and skates and children participate in the socio-material and cultural world of Finland. Studies that explore children’s experiences who have recently arrived in Finland frequently interpret those within the frame offered by their official identification as migrants or refugees. This singular view disregards children’s self-identification and the multiple and fluid ways in which identities are constructed, negotiated and claimed in different situations. The two research projects from which we extract children’s experiences in this chapter have also, initially, identified research participants based on their official status in Finland as migrants. In this paper, 1 http://www.messagetoeagle.com/ice-skates-were-used-in-finland-5000-years-ago/, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18447880. Z. Millei (B ) · R. Korkiamäki · M. Kaukko Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: Zsuzsa.Millei@staff.uta.fi M. Kaukko Monash University, Melbourne, Australia © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 P. Rautio and E. Stenvall (eds.), Social, Material and Political Constructs of Arctic Childhoods, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3161-9_4 49