Sami

Sami religion recognised spirits of place and marked them at sieidi, particular stones, rock formations or wooden posts that received offerings connected with hunting, fishing and herding. The bear held a special position, hunted under strict protocol and buried with its bones arranged so that it could return, a practice attested archaeologically across Sapmi.

The specialist was the noaidi, and the instrument of the office was the drum, its head painted with a diagram of the world across which a marker was read. Hakan Rydving's study of religious change among the Lule Sami in the decades around 1700 works from the Swedish court records of the campaign against that practice, and those records are detailed because they are prosecutions. Drums were confiscated and burned in large numbers, noaidi were tried, and in at least one case a man was executed. Roughly seventy drums survive, almost all of them in museums outside Sami control, and their return is now an active question.

Rydving's central point is that conversion was not a single event but a long period of two religions held at once, in which people attended church and kept the older observances, and the church records read as they do because they document a struggle rather than a completed replacement.

The Sami homeland runs across the north of Norway, Sweden and Finland and into the Kola peninsula in Russia, and the border closures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cut herding routes that had crossed it for centuries. State policy in each country then pursued assimilation. In Norway the policy known as Norwegianisation ran from the middle of the nineteenth century into the second half of the twentieth, through boarding schools, the exclusion of Sami from the classroom, and restrictions on land purchase by Sami speakers.

Laestadianism, a Lutheran revival movement begun in the 1840s by Lars Levi Laestadius, who was himself of Sami descent, spread widely through Sami communities and remains strong. It is a Christian movement and it is also, in its history, a Sami one.

The Norwegian parliament's Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported in 2023 on Norwegianisation and its consequences, and comparable processes have run in Sweden and Finland. Sami parliaments now exist in all three Nordic states. The older religion is not simply gone. Offerings at sieidi continue, drums are made again, and Sami artists and joik singers work with material that was banned within living memory. The atlas describes this as a living tradition that was interrupted rather than as a reconstruction.