Johan Turi wanted the Swedish king to understand what colonisation was doing to his people. In 1910, he published Muitalus sámiid birra — the first book written about Sami life by a Sami person in his own language. The king almost certainly never read it. But the book became a landmark, and now, 115 years later, its pages are on public display for the first time in a century, timed to coincide with the handover of a Truth Commission report examining exactly the abuses Turi documented. The exhibition at Kiruna's Kin Museum of Contemporary Art places Turi's writings, drawings, paintings and Duodji alongside contemporary artists Outi Pieski and Johanna Minde. The title — On the Ugly and the Beautiful — comes from Turi's own belief that everything, positive and negative, deserves to be shown. It is a pointed framing for a moment that is supposed to be about reconciliation but sits uncomfortably alongside intensifying industrial pressure on Sami land. Turi was born in the Norwegian part of Sápmi in 1854 and moved to Kiruna as the imposition of national borders disrupted traditional reindeer herding routes. His book, published in Sami and Danish before being translated into Swedish seven years later, was explicitly intended as advocacy — a document that would make Swedish society understand the costs of settlement, mining and the railway on Indigenous life. Museum director Maria Lind describes it as covering 'Sami life, small and big — external and inner life.' The structural parallel between Turi's era and today is the exhibition's sharpest edge. Industry — now in the form of rare earth mineral extraction and wind energy — continues to encroach on reindeer herding territory. Anti-Sami rhetoric is rising, including from political leaders. The climate crisis, absent in Turi's time, is now an accelerating threat to Arctic ecosystems and the livelihoods tied to them. As artist Pieski put it: 'It's very sad that we are kind of in the same spot still now, 100 years later.' The Truth Commission report, presented at Mid Sweden University in Staare, is meant to form the basis for reparation and reconciliation discussions. Similar processes have been conducted in Norway and Finland. But truth commissions are instruments of acknowledgement, not enforcement. The report lands in a political environment where the extractive pressures on Sami land are growing, not shrinking, and where the political will to constrain industry in favour of Indigenous rights remains untested. Pieski's own contribution to the exhibition — research with Eeva-Kristiina Nylander on the ládjogahpir, a traditional hat worn by Sami women — has helped bring the garment back into use as what Pieski calls 'a new symbol for decolonial feminism.' It is a small but concrete example of cultural reclamation succeeding where political protection has stalled. The core tension is structural: Sweden is simultaneously performing reconciliation through a truth commission and accelerating the very industrial extraction that generated the need for reconciliation in the first place. Turi's century-old advocacy is displayed as cultural heritage while the material conditions he protested persist. As Pieski noted, 'No nation can exist without their own spoken or written histories. Ignoring it is a very simple colonial tool.'
