"Truth and reconciliation commissions test the Nordic ideal"

 As a follow-up to my last post about the Swedish Truth Commission, the Barents Observer has published an excellent article by Laurel Colless, "Truth and reconciliation commissions test the Nordic ideal." The article highlights a roundtable held recently in Copenhagen among members of the truth and reconciliation commissions from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. They included researchers and members of the different historical minority groups in the Nordic countries--though, in the case of Greenland and Denmark, the Greenlanders are the majority in their country. 

Members of Finnish TRC

The article is worth reading for its succinct exploration of what comes next for the Nordic countries in terms of recognition and implementation of necessary changes. As the journalist Colless notes: "Now, with reports on Sámi relations delivered in Norway and Finland and the final report of the Swedish Truth Commission for the Sámi People expected in October, attention is turning to how the investigations were carried out, the challenges encountered and perhaps the most difficult question of all: whether the findings will lead to meaningful change." 

One aspect I found interesting is how the Nordic states are grappling with how to accept a difficult history that has been self-evident to groups such as the Sami and the Inuit for many decades. For minority groups there has never been a Nordic ideal, at least one that they could be part of. 

The issue of how to speak of these difficult and complicated histories in ways that are both narrative and document-based is also challenging. Colless writes, quoting several participants:

"At the core of the discussion was a recognition of the challenge related to documenting and describing these past injustices. As Andersen observed, “Part of the role of the commissions has been seeking to find a shared language in which to understand and speak about injustices committed in the Nordic states.”

"But even as the commissions work towards a shared language, they are not necessarily working towards a single version of the truth. Much of the work rests on gathering lived experiences, including personal testimonies that don’t always align neatly with official records or even from one to another, making it difficult to reconcile.

"As Swedish commissioner Krister Stoor put it, this raises a fundamental question: “How can you build the truth on narratives or stories? Whose truth is it? It is the people who are telling their stories, and it is their truth.”

"This tension runs through many of the processes, with truth commissions on one level, seeking to verify events, but also tasked with giving space to memory and emotion. “These individual accounts cannot simply be dismissed,” said Norwegian commissioner Ketil Zachariassen. “This is what happened for them, and that’s important to have in mind.”

"For commissions, in practice, this means acknowledging that different experiences of the same government policies can coexist. For example, children taken from their homes and placed in school homes – often far from their families and unable to understand the language of the classroom – experienced these policies in different ways. In their testimonials, some recall this as an opportunity that led to education or employment. Others remember only pain and loss.

"'There are different voices and different experiences, and we need to acknowledge that,' Arvidsson said. 'But even when experiences differ, we can still understand them as part of a broader assimilation policy and its long-term consequences.'

 

 

 

Truth Commission for the Sámi People

 

Today, in the northern university city of Umeå/ Ubmeje, Sweden, the Truth Commission for the Sami People made public its report on the history and consequences of state policies over the past centuries on the Sámi population living within the borders of Sweden. The Commission was inspired by Canada’s truth and reconciliation commission, specifically focused on the painful legacy of the residential schools, which aimed to suppress the languages and culture of Indigenous populations. Two other Nordic countries have also interviewed Sámi people and published their own reports, Norway in 2024 and Finland in 2025.

Now Sweden joins them, though there is no mention of reconciliation in the title of the report: The land, the water, the thoughts: Consequences for the Sami of Swedish policies (Marken, vattnet, tankarna. Konsekvenser för samer av statens politik). 

 

Presentation of the Truth Commission for the Sámi People 

According to the website, the research has been going for around five years and includes the results of two hundred interviews with Sámi people. The website states that “A narrative volume will be written based on the interviews, the written testimonies and thoughts that emerged during conversation meetings.” This narrative volume is not complete yet, but the first two volumes, almost 1200 pages in Swedish, have been made available as pdfs as of March 4. The comprehensive anthology includes dozens of contributions by Sámi researchers, activists, and writers and by Swedish scholars who publish widely in the field. The topics of the articles include colonialist history and resistance; natural resources and industrialization; state discrimination against the Sámi; language suppression and boarding schools; reindeer husbandry; health; ethnography and museums. Unlike the Norwegian version of its Truth and Reconciliation report, there is as yet no English summary.

The ambitious scope of the documentation process has meant that the Truth Commission project has been extended through most of 2026. But today, a ceremony took place in Umeå/Ubmeje along with a panel discussion by the editors of the two volumes and some of the contributors.

 Krister Stoor, scholar and joiker in Umeå/ Ubmeje

 

The attitude and practices of the Swedish state toward its Sámi population has not gone unnoticed by the United Nations, which in 2025 called on Sweden to do better in two separate human rights reports. As the Saami Council noted, “both the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) highlight persistent shortcomings and call for concrete action, echoing concerns raised by the Saami Council in its submissions to both bodies.”

NORLA and Are Tjihkkom, Sámi Translator and Publisher

 

Are Tjihkkom, Sámi Translator and Publisher  

Back in the late seventies, relatively few people outside Norway knew much about Norwegian authors other than Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun, and Henrik Ibsen. The Norwegian Authors Union decided to create an organization with support from the state’s Ministry of Culture to support the translation of Norwegian literature to other languages. This was NORLA, Norwegian Literature Abroad, and for some years it was a one-woman band with a small office in Oslo. Kristin Brudevoll, the director from 1978 to 2006, turned NORLA into a powerhouse for exporting and publicizing Norwegian literature. Now with a large staff and a central office, NORLA awards grants to publishers to subsidize translations, assists myriad translators develop the skills and contacts for successful careers, and arranges conferences and festivals that promote Norwegian authors in translation.

From the time the publishing house I co-founded, Seal Press in Seattle, began its imprint, Women in Translation, in the early 1980s with titles such as An Everyday Story: Norwegian Women’s Fiction and Tove Ditlevsen’s Early Spring, I’ve worked with NORLA as a translator and editor. I’ve continued to do so through my current publishers, the University of Minnesota Press. I was introduced to the novel, Clearing Out, by Helene Uri through NORLA’s newsletter, Books from Norway, and later went on to translate it. NORLA was also a major funder for the big project of translating Sámi Folktales from the Near and Far Worlds. Because of NORLA, Norwegian books have been translated to around seventy world languages. Every month NORLA posts an interview with a “Translator of the Month,” who could be from Indonesia, Spain, Bulgaria, or Japan.

In December 2025, NORLA’s choice for “Translator of the Month” was Are Tjihkkom, who lives in Drag, Norway. He translates fiction from English, Spanish, Norwegian, and other languages into the minority language of Lule Sámi/ julevsámegiella, which is spoken and read in Nordland county in Norway, especially in Hamarøy Municipality, where it’s one of the official languages. Lule Sámi is also spoken around the Lule River in Sweden, most notably in Jokkmokk/ Jåhkåmåhkke. Along with Jokkmokk, Drag, home to the cultural and educational center, Árran, is a center for the revival of the Lule Sámi language.

Are Tjihkkom is a linguist with a recent bachelor’s degree from the University of Oslo.  At twenty-three he has been translating for a number of years, starting in high school when he began with Alice in Wonderland. He’s translated work by everyone from Virginia Woolf to Gabriel Garcia Márquez. In 2020 he set up his own publishing company, Tjihkkom Almmudahka, and has released a number of books, including Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

In his interview for NORLA, Tjihkkom explained his focus on translations into Lule Sámi:

I grew up with very little Sámi literature. There were only a handful of books available that everyone in my generation (and the generation before me) has read, and new releases were few and far between. I’ve heard people talk about the ‘Sámi agony’ of being required to read certain books regardless of whether you like them or not, just in order to be able to read something in Sámi. That’s less true nowadays than it once was, but there is no reliable producer of literature in Lule Sámi, meaning that books are still in chronically short supply. The need to translate books stemmed from the fact that there is no system that enables translation as predictable and steady work, so I took it upon myself, following in the footsteps of many language workers and translators before me.

For a fascinating exploration of his process in translating a language that was long mainly oral and only standardized in its current form in the 1980s, with “a huge number of words and expressions [that]lack good, well-established equivalents” see the full interview with this gifted linguist in English.