As King Harald of Norway declared at the opening of Sámediggi (The Sámi Parliament) in 1997: “Den norske stat er grunnlagt på territoriet til to folk—nordmenn og samer” (Kongen 1997) [The state of Norway was founded on the territory of two peoples—Norwegians and the Sámi]. During the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, however, the Indigenous Sámi languages and culture were actively repressed by the Norwegian government. This was similar to how Indigenous people have been treated in the United States (Evjen and Beck 2015) and numerous countries around the world. In the 1850s, Norway adopted the Norwegianization policy (fornorskingspolitikken), an assimilation policy directed at both the Sámi and the Kvens, a minority population of Finnish descent. According to this policy, only citizens who could speak and write in Norwegian were allowed to buy land, and in schools, the use of other...
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