1 Museum & Society, 22 (2) Negotiating Indigenous participation and heritage at a multicultural museum event in Norway Ole Kolbjørn Kjørven*, Joke Dewilde**, Thor-André Skrefsrud*** Abstract This article investigates how Indigenous participation and heritage are negotiated at a multicultural festival at the Norwegian Railway Museum. While such events respond to the call for meeting places fostering social inclusion and belonging, researchers within museology and festival research warn against promoting superficial and biased understandings of Indigeneity. Based on fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with festival organizers and Greenlandic contributors, we found that Indigenous participation was negotiated along two lines. First, the organizers and the Greenlanders shared enthusiasm for the festival’s inclusive vision, yet they experienced different levels of ownership. The organizers were in charge; one Greenlandic contributor took on an active role while others became more silent consultants. Second, the negotiations revealed contrasting perceptions of Indigeneity, ranging from the organizers’ traditional understanding to the Greenlanders’ ambivalence toward the term. We argue that for multicultural museum and festival events to succeed in being inclusive, they must adopt critical and reflective approaches to ownership, as well as more complex understandings of Indigenous participation and heritage. Keywords: negotiation, Indigenous, participation, heritage, museum, multicultural festival Introduction Since 2008 the Norwegian Railway Museum has hosted the annual multicultural festival Stoppested Verden. The two-day festival is the largest of its kind in Norway, drawing more than 11,000 visitors each June to Hamar, a medium-sized town in the south-east of Norway. The location is an open-air park by the shores of Lake Mjøsa that features vintage locomotives and carriages. At the festival visitors can see and experience cultural expressions as if traveling around the world. Visitors that participate in workshops can make Thai-inspired flowers with recycled paper, craft sand sculptures alongside artists from Albania, have their faces painted by a Greenlandic mask dancer, and learn the traditional Inuit method of bending wooden ribs used in constructing kayaks. The website describes the festival as aiming to “develop awareness and understanding of our multicultural society”, to “build bridges across cultures and create a meeting point for people of different backgrounds and groups”, and to take “preventive measure[s] against xenophobia and racism”. As such, the festival takes a stand on current social and political concerns relating to inclusion, which resonates with debates in museology and festival research. Within the museum studies field – particularly new museology and critical museology (Vergo 1989; Shelton 2013; Bettum et al. 2018) – researchers question the “value, meaning, control, interpretation, authority and authenticity” (Stam 1993: 267) of museums’ approaches to minority group perspectives and participation. These questions have become particularly prominent in discussions about Indigenous participation and representation (Kalsås 2015). Within these discussions, centuries-long histories of dehumanizing policies and practices are addressed; so too are ongoing struggles for the recognition of Indigenous rights (Eidheim et al. 2012) and “native empowerment” (Ronan 2014: 132). Thus, these questions show a need to change existing perspectives, to “incorporate decolonizing and Indigenizing principles” (Phillips 2022: 112). Museum & Society, July 2024. 22(2) 1-14 © 2024, Ole Kolbjørn Kjørven, Joke Dewilde, Thor-André Skrefsrud. ISSN 1479-8360