Museums Beyond the Nation-State? Nationalism, Representation, and Indigenous Governance

The assumption that the world should be divided into nations governed by clearly bounded states is a relatively recent historical construction. The proliferation of museums occurred in parallel with the consolidation of nation-states, reflecting a shared political logic. Museums emerged as key institutions for collecting, classifying, and representing cultural heritage in ways that supported national narratives, naturalized territorial borders, and legitimized state sovereignty. Through exhibitions and collections, museums contributed to representations of homogeneous nations with long historical continuity. Although historical scholarship and museum practice have in recent decades distanced themselves from grand national narratives and embraced pluralism, museums remain structurally embedded in the nation-state and continue to bear the imprint of their nationalist origins. At a moment when politically motivated efforts to control historical knowledge and the construction of national narratives in museums are once again intensifying, examining museums through a nationalist framework is particularly timely. This paper examines the political implications of this entanglement through the case of Sámi museums in Northern Fennoscandia. It demonstrates how nationally confined museum structures shape representations of Sámi history and condition the politics of recognition. The paper further analyzes politicized disputes over Sámi cultural heritage located outside the present-day Sámi area, including archaeological materials and historical Sámi objects. In Finland, Sámi claims to manage Sámi cultural heritage have been contested by non-Sámi actors who invoke historical ancestry to assert competing claims of ownership. These conflicts reveal how museums function as arenas of political struggle over recognition, belonging, and responsibility, particularly in the context of ongoing disputes over the definition of Sámi identity. The Sámi case is especially revealing because Sámi people, their society and lands are inherently transnational, while museums operate within nationally bounded governance systems. The first Sámi museums were established after the Second World War, and by the 1970s a small network of Sámi museums already existed. Sámi actors sought to develop these institutions into a transnational Sámi museum network that would transcend state borders and reflect Sámi understandings of internal differentiation within Sápmi. This initiative, however, was never realized. Instead, Sámi museums developed primarily along national lines and became increasingly embedded within majority-led museum frameworks. While this process contributed to the institutional consolidation and public funding of individual Sámi museums, it simultaneously produced fragmented governance models, divergent responsibilities, and uneven access to resources from a transnational Sámi perspective. Further the state-centric spatial logics marginalize cross-border histories and weaken Sámi presence in regions outside the officially designated Sámi Homeland. We ask: what happens when Indigenous heritage institutions are structurally governed in the framework of nation-states whose borders they predate and exceed? By analyzing Sámi museums as politically situated institutions, this paper interrogates the possibilities and limitations of museums for a transnational Indigenous Peoples. It contributes to political science debates on nationalism, Indigenous governance, and cultural institutions, and offers a critical perspective on how museums mediate struggles over restitution, recognition, historical justice, and self-determination.