Vita Huset — "the White House" — is the cultural and community centre for Karesuando, housing exhibitions on the Sami and Tornedalian peoples who have inhabited this corner of the Arctic for centuries. The Tornedalians are a distinct ethnic group with their own language (Meänkieli, recognised by Sweden as a minority language in 2000), whose culture has long overlapped with that of the Sami in this border region.
The exhibitions cover traditional livelihoods — reindeer herding, fishing, hunting — as well as the cultural history of the Laestadian movement, and the peculiar position of Tornedalian communities whose territory was split by the Swedish-Finnish border in 1809. It is a good place to understand why this remote corner of Sweden feels so different from the rest of the country.