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Sámi "pulk" from Finnmark
The Collection
Norsk Folkemuseum acquired its first Sami object shortly after the museum was founded in 1894, but it was not until the years after the Second World War that Sami culture was clearly defined as part of the museum’s work. In 1951 a Sami Department was established and the Sami collection in the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Oslo was transferred to Norsk Folkemuseum.
Since 2012 the museum has worked on the repatriation project Bååstede, the Southern Sámi word for “return”, that sees the homecoming of approximately half of the collection to the six regional Sámi museums on Norwegian side of Sápmi. Learn more about Bååstede here: https://norskfolkemuseum.no/baastede
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Sámi woman with two children, ca. 1900. Borgensamlingen/Norsk Folkemuseum
The Image Collection
The Museum has a collection of some 4500 Sami photos. Some of these are unique documentations made by the museum staff during fieldwork in Sámi areas. Others are historical pictures collected from various sources. At digitaltmuseum.no you will find photos in the Sami collection.
The Library
The Sami Collection has a library of some 2000 volumes. You may contact the library or search the library catalogue.
The Audio Tape Collection
The museum has a collection of about 100 digitized audio tapes containing linguistic material, joik (Sami folk-song) and other material. Most of this was recorded in the 1950s and 1960s by Dr. Asbjørn Nesheim, the first curator of the Sámi Collection, and is today of great interest to linguists and other scholars.