For more than a century, Norway forcibly suppressed the language and culture of Indigenous people and other minority groups, including removing children from their parents, in a system of “Norwegianization” whose devastation continues to be felt.
This week, the country’s Parliament issued a formal apology to the Sami, Kven and Forest Finn peoples, and outlined 17 resolutions to address the discrimination they still face, including protecting minority languages and ensuring that children are taught those languages.
The move, which Parliament approved on Tuesday, was welcomed by Silje Karine Muotka, a Sami leader, who described the moment as “a day with many emotions.” But she also said it needed to be followed up with concrete and significant action.
“Going forward, we expect an active policy of reconciliation,” she said in a written statement. “The decision from today ensures long-term follow-up, and it has both financial and legal repercussions. But unfortunately, no settlement is made with ongoing injustice and conflicts over land and water.”
Norway has some legislation on the Samis’ right to grazing land, but the Sami have long been at odds with the government over land use in relation to their culture and way of life.
The apology and resolutions stem from a report by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published last year, that outlines how Norway could begin to reckon with its oppressive past. King Harald V has previously apologized to the Sami people, but this is the first time that the Kvens and Forest Finns have received such a public acknowledgment of the harm they endured.
“The assimilation policy that was historically pursued continues to be both the root of personal hardship for the individuals and groups that were subject to this policy, and a source of conflict today,” Svein Harberg, a Conservative Party lawmaker, said in a written response to a reporter’s questions after the apology was read out in Parliament.
Only one group of lawmakers, from the right-wing Progress Party, voted against the resolutions, saying that they would lead to conflict among communities. The party’s leader, Bard Hoksrud, said during a debate in May, “It is fundamentally wrong to give special privileges to some groups at the expense of others.” He added, “We believe history should remain history.”
The Sami are an Indigenous group, now numbering roughly 100,000, who have for hundreds of years inhabited Europe’s northernmost regions, across Finland, Russia, Sweden and Norway, which is home to the largest Sami population. The Kvens and Forest Finns are much smaller groups who migrated to modern-day Norway about 500 years ago.
All three have faced centuries of discrimination that became the foundation of laws in the second half of the 19th century.
The Norwegianization assimilation policies used education and religion to erase the groups’ language and culture, and controlled where they lived.
They lost access to grazing land and fishing, and were not allowed to settle in regions that the government set aside for “suitable populations.” The practices also removed Sami children from their families and placed them into Norwegian foster homes and state-run boarding schools.
Christian mission churches were used to smother cultural beliefs, and scientists submitted Sami, Kvens and Forest Finns to humiliating anthropological tests and exhumed their burial sites to study the remains’ ethnic characteristics.
Although Norway formally ended the legislated prejudice in the 1960s, its consequences have endured. Today, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found, members of these groups have less access to health care, despite Norway’s generous social benefits. Their languages are critically endangered, and bullying, hate speech and harassment of them by other members of Norwegian society persist.
In a 2021 survey conducted as part of an Arctic University of Norway project that studied the efficacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 60 percent of Norway residents said they thought most people knew little to nothing about how the assimilation policies affected the Sami. That figure rose to 88 percent when it came to how the practices affected Forest Finns and Kvens.
It also found that, even among respondents who said they knew about the injustices endured by the affected peoples, negative stereotypes of those peoples endured.
Eva Josefsen, a political scientist at the Arctic University, who led the project and is Sami, described the parliamentary apology and resolutions as a powerful statement, but said in an interview that its lack of clarity on land rights was a notable weak point.
“There’s a general implementation gap between legal rights and what is actually delivered,” she said.
Norway’s Parliament already has a working relationship with the Sami Parliament, an independent elected assembly established in 1989, and Mr. Harberg, the Conservative lawmaker, said the formal apology could bring greater focus to the Kvens and Forest Finns.
Smaller minorities feel “invisible” in Norway, said Varhild Bakke Berntzen, a board member of Young Forest Finns, an organization that works to revive the group’s culture and language, including through the building of a museum.
“A lot of damage has happened, and our generation today suffers the consequences of this,” she said. “It is a wound that can never heal properly, but we expect to see the government do their utmost to make up for this. The real work is yet to be done.”
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