After nearly 70 years of lying in a museum, the skeletal remains of some 25 Sami were returned to their original burial place in Lycksele today. The remains were first dug up and transported to Umeå university in the 1950’s, and the Sami have been trying to get their people back since 2007. More Sami remains are still in the collections of 11 museums around the country, and efforts are being made to work out how the remains can be repatriated.
The Sami people, acknowledged as the north’s original inhabitants, are spread out over Norway, Finland and Sweden. How they have been treated in Sweden is probably the most shameful period of discrimination in Sweden’s history, a discrimination that many consider to be continuing, even if the most egregious discriminatory practices (read: name changes, language suppression, segregation and general separate-and-unequal practices on all societal fronts) have largely disappeared.