The suppression of Sami religion in Norway was organised, documented and comparatively late. Thomas von Westen, appointed to lead the Seminarium Lapponicum from 1716, travelled the northern districts collecting the drums of the noaidi and recording what he was told about their use. Sacred sites were destroyed, offerings at sieidi stones were forbidden, and the drums were shipped south. Many were burned. Others were catalogued and entered European collections, which is why the surviving instruments are held mostly in museums outside Sapmi and why a good deal of what is known about the practice comes from the records of the men who ended it.
Two things follow from that, and they pull against each other. The mission archive is a genuine source, the fullest one there is for pre Christian Sami cosmology, and it is also a hostile witness that recorded the practice in order to identify and eradicate it. Reading it requires holding both facts at once.
Suppression of Sami language and religion continued through the Norwegianisation policy that ran into the second half of the twentieth century. Norway established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine it, and the commission delivered its report to the Storting in 2023. Alongside that, Sami institutions have pressed for the return of drums and other material from national collections, and repatriations have been made to Sami museums in the north.
Reclamation is real but it is not restoration. Nobody claims an unbroken line of noaidi practice. What exists is a living Sami relationship with sieidi places, joik as a form that was itself condemned as sinful and is now central to Sami public culture, and a body of scholarship written increasingly by Sami researchers rather than about them.