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).
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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.
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| 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 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.”
