Sámi Museum Siida

Sámi Museum Siida in Inari, Finland, presents exhibitions on Sámi culture and Arctic nature, featuring an open-air museum with historic Sámi buildings.

Planning your visit

Siida is the Sámi museum, run by the Sámi themselves rather than about them, and that distinction runs through the whole institution. It sits in Inari, the centre of Finnish Sámi life, and covers the culture on its own terms: reindeer herding, fishing, the seasonal round, language, the eight seasons of the Sámi year, duodji craft, and the joik singing tradition.

The historical material is direct about assimilation policy, residential schooling, land dispossession and the suppression of the language, alongside the contemporary revival and the politics of Indigenous rights in the Nordic states.

The nature exhibition covers the Arctic environment through the same seasonal structure, and the two are integrated rather than separate — the argument being that Sámi culture cannot be understood apart from the land it developed in.

An open-air section holds relocated historic buildings, storehouses on posts, and turf structures.

Siida also led the repatriation of Sámi artefacts from the National Museum of Finland, which returned its collection in 2021.

Bookable options include cultural day tours combining the museum with Lake Inari cruises, and trips from Saariselkä. Current availability is listed below.