With the recent uncovering of burial sites, Indigenous boarding schools have increasingly made headlines around the world. There is also a growing awareness of ways in which the schools’ impact has affected Indigenous communities and their lived environments. While boarding schools tried to reprogram Indigenous lives, they aimed to change how Indigenous peoples understood, used, and valued land and all living things on it. Indigenous students were taught that land was property and commodity, and colonial education sought to naturalize the dominion of men over nature and other living beings, notions that went against Indigenous belief systems. Boarding schools, ecological destruction and change/loss of biodiversity, and Indigenous survivance connected in a myriad of ways. And it is these routes and entanglements that this panel seeks to examine, across North America and Sápmi. We examine the dynamic connections of boarding schools, Indigenous peoples, and the environment by stressing the perspectives of Indigenous survivance. Here, survivance connotates complex nodes of active culture work and thinking combining surviving with resisting, the revitalization of Indigenous communities, lifeways, and knowledge. Focusing on two distinctive, yet interrelated settler colonial terrains – Sápmi in northern Europe and North America – we propose that there are many parallels and connections, as well as differences in Sámi and Native American boarding school experiences; in its affective dimensions and connections with the land, impacts on community and colonial discourses. Examining both similarities and differences can be eye-opening and valuable in understanding Indigenous survivance. The schools and their students operated within the intersections of Indigenous and colonial worlds, their emotional and material realities showcasing these convergences and tensions. Students adapted, resisted, connected with one another, and carved their own paths in times of limited choices.