On September 30, 2026, the Truth Commission for the Sami People handed over its final report at its ceremonial closing in Staare/Östersund, Sweden. This was the last of the Nordic truth commissions for the Indigenous Sami people to conclude its work, following the Norwegian report delivered in 2023 and the Finnish report presented in 2025.
The ceremony was carried out in Swedish and some of the five different varieties of the Sami language, via an app’ for live interpretation. Several hundreds of people attended in person in the aula of the Staare/Östersund campus of the University of Mid-Sweden. Throughout the three hours of the ceremony, between 300 and 500 people watched the live broadcasting [still available online]. The comment section proved a lively place for participants to express their own stories as well as support to others, either in Swedish, in Sami, or in emoji. Hearts and clapping hands flooded the comment section with each moving speech, flanked by messages expressing gratitude and personal experiences underscoring for example the need for language revitalization. It also came to function as a forum for translation questions, with attendees helping each other out. With the closing of the live stream, participants expressed hope and desire for implementation of the recommendations.
All the Nordic truth commissions have been influenced by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which delivered its report in 2015. In his welcome speech at the handover ceremony, Jerker Bexelius, leader of the Gaaltije museum in Staare/Östersund, pointed out that it coincided with Canada’s national day for truth and reconciliation.
Need for an official apology
The commission, mandated by the Swedish government in 2021, began its work in June 2022, and has had three different chairs. At the ceremony, Lena Nyberg, who took over in April 2025, urged for an independent mechanism to monitor implementation of the truth commission’s calls to action and proposals. Furthermore, she called for increased autonomy of the Swedish Sami Parliament, a range of initiatives to increase the general public’s knowledge about Sami culture, history and rights, and measures to combat racism and discrimination against Sami. Nyberg also emphasised the need for an official apology — similar to the one already given by the Norwegian Parliament — and the urgent need for a special apology to elderly Sami who had been placed in so-called nomad schools or other boarding school facilities as children.
Different commissioners presented further findings and calls to action, highlighting the loss of language and culture, acts of resistance, the consequences of state and majority-population ignorance, and the Sami relationship to land use and ownership. These presentations were interspersed with readings of testimonies based on the personal narratives collected by the commission; circa 270 interviews as well as 40 written narratives and some focus group interviews with children and youth. Excerpts from these stories are presented in a separate part of the final report which was handed out to members of the audience.
There are 71 calls to action in total. Echoing the results of the Norwegian and Finnish Commissions, many of the calls to action in the Swedish report emphasise the need to adhere to existing legislation, and to strengthen Sámi rights in terms of language, culture, and land use. The recommendations point to neighbouring countries as benchmarks for Swedish Sami policies (e.g., in terms of strengthening the regulatory support for Sami language rights to meet the level in Norway and Finland). Yet, unlike these reports, the Swedish one does not directly point to the importance of increased cooperation between the Sami in the different Nordic countries.
A National Centre for Redress and Reconciliation?
The report underscores that discrimination is not a finished historical issue, but that past injustices continue to have consequences that affect the Sami living today. For instance, Swedish legislation from the turn of the century 1900 categorizing Sami according to livelihood, particularly prioritizing the reindeer herders of the mountain areas, continue to generate intra-group divisions among the Sami in Sweden. Another issue highlighted in the report is the ignorance of the general population in Sweden regarding Sami issues. The calls to action propose dissemination of knowledge both in formal education and in the public sphere, e.g., through the establishment of a National Centre for Redress and Reconciliation.
Since the Truth Commission was formally a governmental committee, the final report was handed over to the minister of Culture, Parisa Liljestrand. Since no new government had yet been formed following the Swedish elections on September 13, Liljestrand represented a transition government and hence could not say much about how the recommendations will be handled moving forward. However, governmental committee reports are normally circulated for comments by public agencies, universities and other stakeholders during a formalized consultative procedure. An important difference in relation to other government committees is that the Swedish Truth Commission’s final report was not only handed over to a representative of the government, but also to Marianne Gråik, chair of the board of the Swedish Sami Parliament, which has been highly involved in the preparatory phase. It was emphasised that the Sami Parliament should also be consulted in the follow-up process.
Furthermore, the report was handed over to three representatives of the youth organization Sáminuorra, which – following earlier initiatives in the late 1990s – had officially demanded a truth commission already in 2008. Their forceful, forward-looking reception speech, underscoring the importance of immediate action and the need for sufficient resources to implement the recommendations, brought the public to a standing ovation.
The Gaaltije museum opened in the evening after the handover and offered the possibility to visit the exhibition Art & Truth Telling which presents artworks by Avant Joik, Niklas Blindh, Mats Jonsson, Per Elof Nilsson Ricklund, Lisa Nyberg, Birgitta Ricklund, Risfjells Sameslöjd and Johanna Minde, and remains open until 30 November 2026. Among these artworks that explore the role of art in expressing individual and collective truths, the museum functioned as gathering place for discussions and reflections about the experiences of the day.
Malin Arvidsson is a Senior Lecturer in Human Rights Studies at the Department of History, Lund University. She is involved in the project TRiNC: Truth & Reconciliation in the Nordic Countries led by Astrid Nonbo Andersen at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS).
Amalie Drage Habbestad is a doctoral research fellow at Center for Sami Studies at The Arctic University of Norway. Her research project focuses on Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in the Nordic Countries.
Otso Kortekangas is an Associate Professor at the University of Helsinki and a researcher at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland. He is involved in the project TRiNC: Truth & Reconciliation in the Nordic Countries led by Astrid Nonbo Andersen at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). His academic interests include educational history, environmental history, and Arctic and Sámi history.
Rebecca Larsson Zinger is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Human Rights Studies at Lund University. As part of her degree, she is fulfilling an internship with Malin Arvidsson, regarding memory studies and the role of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in addressing historical injustices.
