Sweden’s Native People Wait for the Return of Ancient Bones

Human remains have ended up in many different places. Sweden’s Uppsala University houses a large store.

TRADITIONAL CULTURE SHOW: Ulf Bergdahl from the Sami village of Saarivuoma shows his talent with the lasso on a stuffed reindeer at the Skansen Open Air museum during the Sami National day celebrations in Stockholm, Sweden. Fredrik Sandberg/AFP/Getty Images

GOTHENBURG, Sweden—In the early 20th century, human remains from all over the world were collected in the name of “racial biology,” which was in fashion at the time.

Uppsala University, Sweden’s oldest university, housed Sweden’s foremost center for this kind of research. Now, the university wants to make amends for its past transgressions.

Human remains have ended up in many different places in the name of research. In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was passed in the United States in order to help native people recover these remains.

In Sweden, remains from the native people of Hawaii were found in the collections of the museum Historiska Muséet. These were returned to Hawaii through the organization Hui Malama in November 2009.

Sweden has no similar law, but it has its own native people, the Sami (also spelled Saami). Two investigations have been made to find out how much Sami remains are still stored in the drawers of Swedish government collections, but the Sami know that other nongovernment institutions hold remains as well.

The Sami Parliament writes on their homepage that Sami remains in government collections “symbolize the very core of colonialism and the atrocities committed against the Sami people.”