ABSTRACT
The process of returning Sámi artefacts from Norwegian capital museums to regional Sámi museums was officially concluded after six years, in 2019. At this point, ownership of half of the national Sámi collections was divided between six Sámi museums. For the participants in Bååstede (meaning ‘return’ in Southern Sámi), the process of sharing Sámi heritage, of making new regional and national collections, revealed multiple forms of value. Sharing involved meetings where museum representatives with different expertise both separately and together curated new collections according to several criteria, including provenience, the materiality of objects, their many histories, forms of uniqueness and or of representativity. I argue that although the return of half a collection may not have the same symbolic effect, the making of new collections provided an opportunity to ‘share small stories’ of these objects, an exercise that Sámi scholars attribute a decolonizing and reconciliatory potential. Between 2013 and 2019, the museum representatives involved in Bååstede, met to negotiate respectively, the overall framework of the return, the sharing of objects, the replication of valued objects, and efforts to translate the digital catalogue to Sámi. Stories are described as ‘small’, possibly to emphasize that they do not have to be foundational or even coherent. Second, to recognize that they are situated in multiple forms of expertise. Story telling, in this understanding, as sharing, revealing the objects’ participation in multiple histories, may enable new knowledge production, of a more egalitarian kind, and what could be more than moments of destabilizing existing museum hierarchies.
