The Sami

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In the storerooms of the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, and in Copenhagen, and in a scatter of other northern collections, lie some seventy or eighty oval drums of bentwood and reindeer hide, their faces marked in reddish alder-bark dye with suns and reindeer and stick-limbed figures. They are nearly the whole of what survives of a thing that was once everywhere across the top of Europe, and they survive because they were taken — confiscated from the people who made them, in a campaign that meant to burn every one. The drums in the cases are the relics of a religion. The people who made them are not relics at all. They are still here.

The Sami are the indigenous people of the European far north — of Sapmi, the land that does not match any state border, running across the northern reaches of Norway, Sweden, and Finland and eastward onto the Kola Peninsula of Russia. They number, by the standard reference estimate, on the order of eighty thousand, though no census is exact and the criteria differ from country to country: the largest population by far is in Norway, with the rest divided among Sweden, Finland, and a much smaller community, perhaps fifteen hundred, on the Russian side. For centuries outsiders called them Lapps, or Laplanders, and the old scholarship is written under that name; the word is now generally set aside as an exonym the Sami did not choose and do not want, in favor of their own name for themselves. This entry uses Sami throughout, and reaches back to the older religion as a living people’s heritage rather than a closed chapter.

Genealogy: a people of the tundra, the forest, and the coast

The Sami languages form a branch of the Uralic family — kin, at a great distance, to Finnish, to Estonian, and to the languages of the Mari and the other Finno-Ugric peoples of the forest and the Volga, and wholly unrelated to the Germanic Norwegian and Swedish spoken around them. There is not one Sami language but a cluster: depending on how the lines are drawn, nine, ten, or eleven distinct tongues, several of them now spoken by only a handful of elders and one or two already silent. Northern Sami is by far the most widely spoken, the language of Finnmark and Troms and the adjacent districts of Sweden and Finland; the smaller languages — Lule, Pite, Ume, Southern, Inari, Skolt, Kildin, Ter — thin out toward the edges, and the easternmost survive on the Kola Peninsula with only a few hundred speakers between them. The diversity is itself a record of a people spread thin over an immense and difficult country.

That country shaped the older life. The Sami were long known to the south as a hunting and fishing people, and the deepest layer of their economy was the wild reindeer — hunted in the great drives, the herds funneled between lines of stone cairns and pitfall traps. Over the late medieval and early modern centuries, in a shift whose timing and causes are still debated among historians, much of the inland Sami world moved from hunting the wild reindeer to herding the tame: the long migrations between winter and summer pasture, the calf-marking, the seasonal round that became the best-known image of Sami life. But it was never the whole of it. The coastal Sami of the Norwegian fjords lived by the sea and its fish; the forest Sami of the interior combined small herds with hunting and freshwater fishing; the reindeer-herding mountain Sami were one people among several ways of being Sami. Today perhaps a tenth of Sami have some tie to herding, and far fewer live by it full-time; the rest are teachers, fishers, civil servants, artists, and everything else, in the towns of the north and far beyond them.

Teaching: the noaidi, the drum, and the sacred land

The old Sami religion — the layer that the missions tried to destroy and that scholars have since worked to reconstruct from hostile and fragmentary records — was a shamanic and animist tradition in which the world was densely inhabited. It was a world of spirits and powers; the land had its presences, the animals their owners, and the dead were not far off but stood, as one strand of the tradition has it, as the other half of the same family, the living and the departed two parts of a single whole. Reconstructing this religion is genuinely difficult, and honesty requires saying so: almost nothing of it was written by the Sami themselves before the modern era, and the fullest early descriptions come from the very churchmen who were trying to abolish it. What follows is drawn from those sources read against the grain, from the surviving drums, and from later ethnography, with the seams left visible.

At the center of the tradition stood the noaidi, the shaman — the figure who could cross between the worlds. Where an ordinary person lived in the middle world, the noaidi could send a part of the self downward into saivo, the realm beneath, on behalf of the community: to heal the sick by recovering a stolen or strayed soul, to find the cause of a misfortune, to divine the movements of the game and the weather, and to treat with the powers that governed the hunt and the herd. The journey was made in trance, and the noaidi did not travel alone; the tradition speaks of helping spirits in animal form — a bird, a fish, a reindeer-bull — who carried or guided the traveling soul. This is described here at the distance of the record and in the worshipers’ own understanding, not as a procedure; the early accounts that present it as a technique to be performed are exactly the accounts that meant to condemn it.

A Sami noaidi with the drum, engraved for Johannes Schefferus’s Lapponia (1673), one of the earliest printed depictions of the practice — and a hostile outsider’s report, to be read critically. Johannes Schefferus, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The chief instrument of the noaidi was the drum. In Northern Sami it is the goavddis, also the meavrresgarri; the Lule and Southern Sami call it goabdes and gievrie. It was made in two main forms — a shallow frame of bent wood, or a bowl hollowed from a single burl — and headed with untanned reindeer hide. On that hide the owner painted, in a paste of alder bark, a picture of the cosmos. The arrangements vary from drum to drum and region to region: on many Southern Sami drums a rhombic sun-figure sits at the center with the other powers ranged around it, the heliocentric pattern; on Northern drums the face is more often divided into bands for the upper, middle, and lower worlds. Across them recur the figures of the sacred world — the gods, the realms of the living and the dead, wild and tame reindeer, the hunt, and in the later drums, tellingly, churches and houses, the new powers pressing in from the south. The drum was at once a map of the spirit-world and an instrument of divination: a small pointer of brass, horn, or bone — the vuorbi — was laid on the head, and as the noaidi struck the drum with a T- or Y-shaped hammer the pointer moved across the painted figures, and where it came to rest was read. The same drumming, sustained, could carry the noaidi into trance.

The drum was painted with deities, and the names of some are known. The sun is Beaivi, the deity whose name is simply the word for the sun itself, the giver of light and warmth and growth to a land that loses the sun for weeks together in the dark of the year; the tradition holds that at the winter solstice offerings were made for the sun’s return and her strength in climbing back up the sky, and the sun-figure is the natural center of the painted cosmos. Alongside the sky-powers stand the mother-goddesses, the Akka — a group of female deities of birth and the household and the fate of children, among them Maderakka and her daughters Sarakka, Juksakka, and Uksakka, who in the reconstructed system govern conception, birth, and the threshold of the dwelling. The reconstruction of this pantheon is itself contested: the names and divisions come largely from the missionary record and from a few drums, and how systematic the “system” really was, as against a looser and more local field of powers, is a fair scholarly question rather than a settled fact.

The sacred was not only in the sky and the drum but in the land. Across Sapmi stood — and in places still stand — the sieidi, or in other spellings the seita: sacred places, and not only stones, though a striking stone is the type that survives best. A sieidi might be a boulder of unusual shape, an outcrop, a cleft in a cliff, a spring, a small island, any feature of the country that held a presence and to which the people who fished or herded or hunted there brought offerings — fat, fish, antler, the share of the catch — for a good take from the water or the safety of the herd. The holy island of Ukonsaari on Lake Inari and the seita-stone of Taatsi by its lake in Finnish Lapland are two such places that have come down to the present, the latter still treated as a site of living heritage. The offering at a sieidi is described here, again, at the distance of the record and the worshipers’ own account, not given as an operative rite.

And there was, and is, the joik — the personal song. The joik is not a song about a person or a place so much as a song of one: a short, circling, wordless-or-nearly-wordless vocal form that is understood to render its subject directly, to be the reindeer, the mountain, the absent friend, rather than to describe them. The missions condemned the joik along with the drum, and it was driven underground for generations; it survived, and it is one of the strongest living threads of Sami culture today, carried into new music and new contexts while keeping its old function as the most intimate of arts.

A Sami drum from Lapland, held in the Nordic Museum, Stockholm — one of the seventy or eighty that survive, the great majority of them taken from their owners in the conversion campaigns. Photograph by Daderot, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Reception: the burnings, the science, and the return

From the seventeenth century the old religion became the object of a sustained and often violent campaign to extinguish it. The drum, above all, was identified as the instrument of devilry. Already in 1609 the Danish king Christian IV — Norway then under the Danish crown — issued a proclamation that treated Sami drumming as witchcraft, a capital matter; in the Finnmark witch-trials between roughly 1596 and 1692 something like 137 people were accused of sorcery, many of them Sami, and around ninety executed or dead in custody. In the Swedish realm the noaidi Lars Nilsson of Arjeplog was burned in 1693, his drum and carved figures destroyed with him, for trying to use the old means to save a dying child. This was not, on its own terms, the suppression of a crime; it was the destruction of a faith, prosecuted under the law of another.

The most systematic assault came with the Pietist missions of the early eighteenth century. The Norwegian missionary Thomas von Westen, from 1716, built a Seminarium Lapponicum to train Sami catechists and pressed the campaign against the drums hard: he is said to have gathered around a hundred of them, of which some seventy were later lost in the Copenhagen fire of 1728. Surviving mission and court records give a glimpse of the scale by their own boasting — drums taken in twos and eights and twenty-sixes at a single district over a few decades, and missionaries who counted the hundreds they had burned. It is precisely this campaign that produced the fullest early descriptions of the religion: works like Johannes Schefferus’s Lapponia of 1673 and the later missionary manuscripts are at once the richest sources for what was destroyed and documents of its destruction, hostile witnesses whose every page must be read against its purpose. That is the standing difficulty of Sami religious history — that so much of what is known was written down in order to abolish it.

The breaking of the old ways did not end with the burnings. Through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century the Nordic states pursued policies of assimilation — in Norway the long program known as Norwegianization — that bore down on language, dress, livelihood, and belief. Compulsory schooling, introduced in Norway in 1889, pressed the Sami language and the old life steadily out; residential and boarding schools took children from their homes and their tongue, in a pattern familiar from indigenous histories across the world, and the wounds of that system are still being reckoned with by truth commissions in all three Nordic countries in the present decade. Into the same period, and overlapping the schools, came a strand of science that wronged the Sami badly: the race-biology of the early twentieth century, which in Sweden was given its own state institution — the State Institute for Racial Biology, founded at Uppsala in 1922 under Herman Lundborg — measured and photographed Sami people, sometimes by force and unclothed, cataloged their skulls and noses, and gathered their remains, all in the service of a thesis of Nordic superiority that the modern discipline has wholly repudiated. The repatriation and reburial of Sami remains taken in that era is unfinished business that the Sami Parliament has pressed since 2007, and individual returns continue.

Through all of it the Sami endured, and the older religion endured in fragments — in the joik, in the sieidi that were still visited, in memory and in practice that the missions never fully reached. The dominant religious form among many Sami today is itself a movement born in the north: Laestadianism, the austere Lutheran revival that took root in Sami country in the nineteenth century and remains widespread, a Christianity inflected by the people who took it up. And alongside it has come a broad recovery of Sami identity on Sami terms. There are now Sami parliaments in all three Nordic states — Finland’s from 1973, Norway’s from 1989, Sweden’s from 1993 — with a measure of self-government over Sami affairs; the languages are taught and broadcast and written; the joik is everywhere in the new northern music; and there is, in places, a conscious revitalization of the old spiritual heritage, the sieidi and the cosmos of the drum reclaimed not as curiosities but as inheritance.

The drums in the museum cases are part of that reclamation now. Several have been returned to Sami institutions, and the question of the rest is open and active. The Sami are one of the great shamanic peoples of the circumpolar north — kin in form, across the top of the world, to the drum-and-trance traditions of Siberia, and distinct within their own Uralic neighborhood from the runo-singing world of the Karelians to their south and the grove-worship of the Mari far to the east. Their land is not a southern poet’s Pohjola, the dark Northland of the Finnish epic, but a real country with its own people in it. What was nearly burned out of the world is being read again, by scholars and by the descendants of those who painted the drums, and the people who made them are speaking for themselves.

→ Related: The Karelians · The Mari · Beaivi · Ukonsaari · Taatsi · Astuvansalmi · Varikallio · Ukko · Vainamoinen · Ilmarinen · Tapio · Pohjola