The skulls of 25 Sami people are to be reburied in the northern Swedish graveyard from which they were exhumed in the 1950s, in a ceremony acknowledging historic injustices suffered by the country’s indigenous community.

The so-called repatriation ceremony, on Sweden’s indigenous people’s day, on 9 August, will involve the return of the remains to an ancient Sami burial ground, in Lycksele, from the Swedish history museum in Stockholm, where they were taken for research.

“This whole ceremony is about reconciling what has happened, restoring the destiny of these people, returning them to their place of rest, and helping all those relatives affected,” Adriana Aurelius, the event’s organiser, told local media.

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The remains of indigenous Sami people, whose homeland covers large parts of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia, were routinely collected in Sweden through barter, excavations and grave robberies throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Many were used to test controversial scientific theories about the biological differences between races, including at Sweden’s notorious state institute for racial biology, in Uppsala, which carried out government-sponsored research into eugenics and forcibly sterilised thousands of Sami women.

Despite a request in 2007 from the Sami parliament that all remains be returned, 11 Swedish state museums, universities and institutes are known to still retain some Sami bones and skulls in their collections, Mikael Jakobsson, the chair of the Sami parliament’s ethics council, told TT news agency.

“Understanding of the issue has begun to improve, but so far it seems the museums have generally preferred to keep them,” Jakobsson said. “They have been seen as objects, not as the people they once were.”

The issue is particularly sensitive in the Sami community, partly because of beliefs about the dead but also because it echoes centuries of discrimination, repression and human rights violations, including forced conversion to Christianity and segregated schooling.

Campaigners say a national government policy is urgently needed to deal with the issue, which cannot be left to the responsibility of individual museums or funded by Sami communities. “The repatriation issue has been handled far more effectively in North America and in Australia,” Jakobsson said.

Sweden’s national heritage office is due to present a report on the issue next year, with recommendations for museums working with human remains. The government also established a truth and reconciliation commission this year to look at broader historic and ongoing abuses against the Sami people.

“We are politically prepared to address this issue now,” said Helene Öberg, of the culture ministry. “There is international criticism of how Sweden has worked with the repatriation question. We now intend to make good on our responsibility.”

Friday’s ceremony, which involves the Swedish church, the Lycksele municipality, the local state museum and the Sami association, is the largest such repatriation operation, according to the national public radio station SR.

Katherine Hauptman, the Swedish history museum’s director, told SR the museum had “clearly failed”, adding that when the skulls were discovered in storage they were sent to the Västerbottens museum, in north-east Sweden, for return to Lycksele. The museum would apologise at the ceremony for how the remains had been treated, she said.