At a glance:

• No national laws or policies for repatriation
• There is currently no meaningful or established way to engage with Norwegian institutions on repatriation, but there are ways to search and find collections, and some museums that are keen to return ancestors

Jump to:

1. Overview
2. Terminology to be familiar with
3. How to find ancestors and belongings
4. Making a claim

Overview

The Norwegian Heritage Sector is managed and governed by national laws and legislation, but repatriation has been somewhat overlooked. There are currently no laws or policy on repatriation in the country. However, that is slowly changing as the Norwegian National Committee for Research Ethics on Human Remains are currently (as of August 2023) hosting an open consultation asking for feedback on repatriation.

Many museums in Norway are now not keen to hold human remains in their collections, but there are currently no guidelines on how to approach repatriation. There is much more hesitancy around the return of belongings, but there is also a new generation of museum professionals coming through who are keen to do more repatriation so this may change in the future.

Norway is inexperienced in terms of international repatriation, but Norwegian museums do have some experience with repatriation. Around 40,000 Sami people live in Norway. The Sami are the Indigenous peoples that live across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Sami ancestors in museums are distinct from other human remains held in Norwegian collections. Repatriation requests for Sami ancestors may be issued by any Sami individual, with requests and decisions being managed by the Sami Parliament.

Many Norwegian museum professionals are hopeful that there will be more focus on international repatriation soon. There are hopeful signs, as in November 2024 the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo returned a number of ancestors and belongings to Rapa Nui.

Terminology to be familiar with

The term ethnographic is used to refer to anything that is not from a Norwegian territory. Currently, there is no distinction made between ancestors and cultural items in ethnographic collections – they are all referred to as ethnographic material. For this reason, belongings have the same protection as ancestors in terms of care and the processes required to remove them from collections in order to return them home.

How to find ancestors and belongings

The five university museums in Norway focus on archaeology and have responsibility for managing archaeological and ethnographic collections. All five may have human remains and/or cultural items. Although all items are catalogued, they may not necessarily be present on the collections databases. You can search the university museum databases using UniMus but it is solely in Norwegian so this can be challenging. DigitaltMuseum is another national resource that gives access to a larger number of museums, but navigating the search results can be difficult.

One of the main universities where ethnographic collections are held in Norway is the University of Oslo. They have two sites where ancestors and belongings may be held:

• Museum of Cultural History – the largest Norwegian university museum
• Schreiner Collection – holds 8000 catalogue numbers of ancestors, including 34 from North America for example

If you’re looking for ancestors and cultural belongings, send a request to both the Museum of Cultural History and the Schreiner Collection – either for something specific or for an inventory list. Teams at the museums would then search museum catalogues for any relevant ancestors or belongings – but be aware that there have been delays in the past due to staff shortages.

Making a claim

There is little guidance to give around making a claim from a Norwegian museum, as there is so little precedence for it. Many museum teams in Norway may not be familiar with undertaking international repatriation and have little to no funds to be able to do so. Claims will likely take an extremely long time to be processed.

Institutional, embassy, and/or government backing are extremely important when working with Norway, so if you are able to obtain this prior to making a claim it could make a difference. This diplomatic support will support the museum to understand that this is an authentic claim.