OSLO — On a winter-wonderland Wednesday in Oslo, as ice skaters held hands and rosy-cheeked toddlers lined up for rides on a merry-go-round and Ferris wheel, hundreds of bullet-ridden reindeer skulls were strung up yards away in a macabre curtain outside the Stortinget, Norway’s Parliament.

The reindeer heads had been installed as a protest in a Supreme Court case brought by Jovsset Ante Sara, 25, an indigenous Sami herder who is challenging the Norwegian government’s reindeer reduction policy. Mr. Sara has won two court victories, but each time the government has appealed.

“It’s a shame and a pity that you have to drag along 400 heads around the world to get the word out there about our reality, to find a voice,” said Marat Anne Sara, Mr. Sara’s older sister and the artist and activist behind the grisly curtain of skulls, which she describes as artwork and hung up on Tuesday and Wednesday. “We have to fight so hard to get a place in people’s consciousness.”

Norway’s Sami minority is best known for its traditional practice of reindeer husbandry. The country’s laws require Mr. Sara, as with other reindeer herders across Norway’s High North, to kill a percentage of his herd of 116 as part of the government’s reindeer-reduction policy.