This article investigates Sámi elementary education in early twentieth-century Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The main focus lies on cultural contexts that frame and limit language use. The key analytical concepts are "useful citizen" and "useful citizenship". Through these concepts the article probes the ways in which governmental educational authorities and Sámi teachers talked about education and citizenship. Studying these concepts and the cultural contexts behind them sheds light on the formation phase of Nordic citizenship. Full-scale citizenship was not offered to all individuals inside the nation state. Where it was, it had certain conditions that excluded cultural elements of minority populations. Sámi teachers defined citizenship mainly within the Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish nation states. However, some tendencies towards a more cross-national notion of Sámi identity can be discerned.