Earlier this month, Norwegians got a bitter taste of their own history. For 37 hours on the public TV broadcaster, artists and politicians read aloud from the final report of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It provided a detailed history of Norway’s century-long policy of “Norwegianization,” or forced assimilation, that targeted the Indigenous Sámi people and other linguistic minorities into the 1960s. And it proposed ways the government could right those wrongs by boosting support for the cultures it once actively suppressed.

The subject matter was dark: forced relocations, racial abuse, languages and heritage lost. But when the final report, five years in the making, was presented to the Storting—or parliament—on June 1, the mood outside the chamber was oddly celebratory.

“The job is done today,” Dagfinn Hoybraten, chair of the commission, said to me. “It’s like a huge marathon. You prepare for it, you fight hard through the whole run, and you’re relieved when it’s done. I’m very pleased with the result.”

Yet for members of Norway’s minority groups, the marathon has only just started. Though many minority leaders voiced cautious optimism about the report, several worried in private that its recommendations lack the teeth to shame a foot-dragging government into addressing ongoing violations of minority rights.

Now that the torch has passed from the commission to a Norwegian parliament committee, which will review its findings, minority advocates must begin lobbying anew for real responses—despite faith in the Norwegian state within their communities being at an all-time low.

“Will [the report] benefit anything?” asked Aslat Holmberg, president of the Saami Council, which represents Sámi across Norway, Sweden, and Finland. “Or will it just be a way for the state to wash its hands from wrongdoings, while continuing violating Sámi people’s rights?”

It was enough, in the words of Storting President Masud Gharahkhani, to leave some Norwegians “surprised and shaken.” But these findings did not come as news to many of the minority leaders in attendance. “There are a lot of rights that we have at the moment that are not being met,” said Runar Myrnes Balto, a member of the Sámi Parliament’s governing council.

In many places in Norway, minority language education is still hard to access. Development continually threatens traditional lands and waters. And many Sámi are forced by gentrification, a lack of job opportunities, and other circumstances to leave their homes for cities, where a connection to their culture is harder to find. “I think a very clear message [from the report] is that Norwegianization needs to end, before we even come to the question of whether we can reconcile,” Balto said.

A clear example of Norwegianization in action, Sámi activists say, is the country’s largest wind energy project, Fosen Vind, a complex of onshore wind farms. In 2021, the Norwegian Supreme Court ruled that parts of Fosen had been constructed illegally on Sámi reindeer herding territory, endangering the traditional livelihoods of Sámi herders. Yet while protests in February extracted recognition from ministers that the plant had a “substantive negative impact” on the community, the government has not yet made any moves to restore the land, despite a legal obligation to do so.

Fosen looms large in conversations about reconciliation with Sámi people. Yet the commission’s report offered only a generic criticism of the government’s handling of the wind farm. Though it points to numerous harms caused by industrial developments, its recommended remedy amounts to an “overall review of the land-use situation … in light of Norway’s obligations under international law.” A day after the report’s release, Sámi activists blockaded Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store’s office to protest 600 days of government inaction since the ruling.

Fosen is just one issue for which the report’s recommendations read a little vague. Many simply call on the Norwegian government to conduct periodic reviews or honor past commitments, such as equal access to minority language education, that it is currently ignoring.

Speaking to Foreign Policy shortly after the report’s release, Hoybraten defended the lack of specificity on Fosen, telling me that addressing the situation in detail “wouldn’t be wise—because [that] would hijack ongoing processes [around Fosen] out of the hands of those responsible currently.”

But experts say those currently responsible—the Norwegian government—aren’t doing enough to address both Fosen and other failures to live up to commitments on minority rights. Before the commission was even formally initiated, government ministers balked at the possibility that any inquiry would “create expectations about the implementation of measures.” In the end, the government succeeded in removing any discussion of the state’s role in assimilation policies from the commission’s mandate, said Eva Josefsen, a political scientist at UiT Arctic University of Norway who is leading a research project into the commission’s work. “They only talk about the majority population and the minority population,” she said. “The state was not a player at all.”

Though the final report does lay some blame on the state, its recommendations lack the force they would have under a court-ordered process. Norway’s commission is only a parliamentary inquiry; parliament must still accept and act on its recommendations. Given that Norway’s government is already ignoring a Supreme Court decision, there is significant doubt over whether it will move forward on its recommendations.

There were also questions early on about whether the commission’s mandate—to study Norwegianization’s impact on all minority communities alike—ignored important differences between communities. The commission’s findings group the Indigenous Sámi together with the descendants of colonial-era Finnish settlers, the Kven and Forest Finns. The report acknowledges that Kven were among the earliest colonizers of Sámi lands, pushing north with the support of the Norwegian crown as early as the 1700s.

Hoybraten defended the choice to include these groups alongside the Indigenous Sámi, noting that “all were subject to assimilation.” For a century, as Norway warred with Russia, the government viewed Finns and Kvens as suspected traitors and subjected them to forced relocation alongside their Sámi neighbors. The Kven have long lived in close contact in Norway’s northernmost territories. Today, Kven language education is even harder to find in many places than Sámi language schools.

But the Kven, too, had reservations about joining a larger process. “The Kven [were] very poorly represented in the commission’s work,” said Kai Petter Johansen, the leader of the Norwegian Kven Association. Sámi members dominated commission membership, he said, holding key roles and most seats, and Kven organizations like his received little communication during the process.

“This five-year process could have been very important,” he said, “to start a dialogue both between the Kven and the majority, of course—but also between the Kven and the other minority groups, the Sámi and the Forest Finns.”

That dialogue only became more urgent as the commission’s work highlighted legal differences between the Sámi community and other national minorities. Under international laws that Norway has ratified, including the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, Indigenous groups such as the Sámi are entitled to special protections and certain rights to lands and resources essential to their way of life.

But the concept of special rights for Indigenous peoples has ignited tensions among minority groups. Before the report was even issued, Rune Bjerkli, a leader with the Kven Finn Association, one of the participants in the reconciliation process, authored a lengthy rebuke of its work, titled “Disappointment,” which outlined his group’s complaints about what he views as the unequal treatment of Sámi and other national minorities. “They are saying Sámi are original people, ur-people, that need more protection than anybody else,” Bjerkli told Foreign Policy. “When you are living in the same area … it creates a problem.”

Part of the commission’s work, Hoybraten said, was to create a “strong, unified knowledge” of the history of Norwegianization—one shared among all Norwegians, which can be used to build consensus for further reconciliation efforts. But if anything, the process may have revealed how far apart even the minority groups’ own interpretations of history are—to say nothing of the majority Norwegian population, which critics say were barely involved in the process.

Elin Skaar, a researcher with Josefsen’s project, found in April that less than 3 percent of 2,000 Norwegians surveyed believed reconciliation would involve them personally. Only 10 respondents mentioned the Norwegian state or authorities as responsible parties in reconciliation efforts. Though the Fosen protests increased the profile of minority issues in Norway, there is still a profound sense that the society that produced Norwegianization has largely ignored its impact.

Since Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its work in 2008, many Sámi politicians have pushed for a similar process in their own countries. But “there could have been other models for reconciliation,” said Helga West, a Sámi researcher who is authoring a comparative study on truth commissions in the Nordic countries.

West noted that one key difference between northern Europe and other places where they have been tried—South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, alongside Canada—is the depth of research and documentation that already exists on the history of forced assimilation. “The Sámi are very aware of what has happened in their own communities,” she said.

West acknowledged that the public hearings and ceremonies that accompany truth commissions’ work can be cathartic for those who suffered discrimination and raise awareness among the public about past and ongoing abuses. But, she said, “what they will actually bring to the Sámi communities—that’s another story.”

As always, that task will likely fall to minority organizers themselves, who must now raise awareness of the commission’s findings and hold the Norwegian government to account—in other words, finish the work the commission left undone.