Sámi

The Sámi call themselves Sámit, “the Sámis”, or Sápmelaš, “of Sámi kin”, and their land Sápmi; specialists hold that the word Sámi was borrowed from the Proto-Baltic *žēmē, “land”. Outsiders called them Finns and later Lapps, names some Sámi regard as offensive or inappropriate. Their languages belong to the Uralic family, whose western branches are believed to have spread from a homeland along the Volga. Groups moving north-west in the 2nd millennium BCE reached the regions around Karelia and Lake Ladoga, and those who settled in the Finnish Lakeland around 1600–1500 BCE later “became” the Sámi. The Sámi arrived in Sápmi sometime during the Bronze Age or early Iron Age.

The Sámi language first developed south of Lake Onega and Lake Ladoga. As it spread into Finland its speakers met peoples speaking older, now extinct languages, which left traces in Sámi. The linguist Ante Aikio dates the Sámi proto-language to about 2,000–2,500 years ago, in southern Finland or Karelia, spreading from there to northern Fennoscandia. Settlements and rock carvings from about 10,000 BCE in Lapland and Finnmark, once called the Komsa culture, have not been shown to be Sámi, and older theories linking Stone Age cultures to them have been dismissed.

Genetic studies find mostly western Eurasian ancestry with a significant Siberian share of about 20–25%. A study by Lamnidis and colleagues in 2018 dated the arrival of this Siberian ancestry in north-eastern Europe to around 2000 BCE, and a male lineage making up about a fifth of Sámi men came from Siberia about 3,500 years ago. The Sámi are genetically unrelated to the people of the Pitted Ware culture. How far south they once lived is debated: Yngvar Nielsen argued in 1889 that the Sámi in Norway reached no further south than Lierne before about 1500, while recent finds in southern Norway point to a medieval Sámi presence there.

Up to around 1500 most Sámi were fishermen and trappers, moving with the seasons and the migrations of wild reindeer. They lived and worked in siidat, groups of several families who shared the management of their land and, later, their herds. Around 1500, heavy hunting to pay taxes to Norway, Sweden and Russia made the wild reindeer fewer. Most Sámi then settled along fjords, coasts and inland rivers, combining fishing and trapping with cattle, sheep and goats, while a minority tamed reindeer and became the reindeer nomads whom outsiders came to see as typical, though they make up only about a tenth of the Sámi.

Sámi of the north are often described by their way of life: the Mountain or Reindeer Sámi, the Sea Sámi, who combined fishing with small-scale farming, the Forest Sámi, who fished inland lakes and kept small herds, and today the City Sámi, probably the largest group. Sea Sámi fishers knew their grounds by naming spots after the coast and the seafloor and by reading tides and seasons, knowledge passed down the generations. For travel they used the lavvu, a conical tent, and the pulk, a boat-shaped sled drawn by reindeer or skiers.

Medieval Scandinavian sources praised Sámi archers and their strong bows, which a Norwegian “could not string”. In the Northern Sámi tradition a boy became a man when he could string the bow, the juoksa, and from then he also paid taxes. Dress told others who a person was: the colours, patterns and jewellery of the gákti show where the wearer comes from, whether they are married and sometimes their family. Today the Sámi number an estimated 80,000–135,000, roughly half of them in Norway, most of them urban.

The traditional Sámi religion was polytheist, animist and shamanic, and varied across the wide lands of Sápmi. All significant natural things, animals, plants and rocks, were held to have a soul. The noaidi, the Sámi shaman, communicated with the supernatural through drums, joik, the fadno flute, chants, sacred objects and fly agaric. Offerings were made at natural sacred places: mountains, springs, sacred hills called álda and sáivu, and the sieidi, stones in natural or human-built formations. Sámi cosmology divided the universe into an upper world of the gods, linked with the south, warmth and white; a middle world of humans, linked with red; and an underworld of the north, cold and black.

Sámi religion shares some elements with Norse mythology, possibly from early contact with Viking traders, and contemporary ethnographers counted Sámi among the last worshippers of Thor in the 18th century. Roman Catholic missionaries brought Christianity as early as the 13th century, and pressure grew after the Protestant Reformation. Many Sámi kept their own religion at home while going to church on Sunday. Accused of witchcraft, Sámi faced witch trials and burnings in the 17th century. In Norway the missionary Thomas von Westen led a campaign around 1720 that burned drums and destroyed sacred sites; of an estimated thousands of drums, about 70 survive, scattered in museums.

From around 1840 the Swedish Sámi pastor Lars Levi Laestadius led a pietist revival that preached complete abstinence from alcohol, using images from Sámi life; Laestadianism is still strong in Sámi-speaking areas. Most Sámi today belong to the Lutheran churches of Norway, Sweden and Finland, and some, among them Skolt Sámi and Sámi in Russia, are Orthodox. Some seek to revive the old religion, and in 2012 the Shamanic Association of Tromsø was approved as a religious community.

Duodji, Sámi handicraft, grew from the life of self-supporting nomads and holds that an object should first of all serve a purpose. Traditionally men worked wood, bone and antler into knives with carved antler handles, drums and guksi, cups made from burls, while women made gákti clothing from leather and wove baskets from birch and spruce roots. Gákti, once made of reindeer leather and sinew and now more often of wool, cotton or silk, carries appliquéd geometric shapes, ribbonwork, tin embroidery or beading according to region, and is worn both at ceremonies and at work.

The best-known Sámi music is joik, a chant traditionally sung without instruments, often improvised on syllables and dedicated to an animal, a person or an occasion. The only traditional instruments sometimes heard with it were the fadno, a flute made from angelica stems, and hand drums. The painted drums of the noaidi carried symbols of the cosmos. Rock carvings at Alta show skiers 4,000–5,000 years ago. The rules of only three Sámi board games survive, because missionaries and Laestadians thought games sinful: sáhkku, a racing game; tablut, a strategy game of the tafl family in which a “Swedish king” tries to escape the “Muscovites”; and Dablot Prejjesne.

Written Sámi literature followed. Olaus Sirma (1655–1719) is the first Sámi poet known by name, and Johan Turi’s Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sámi, 1910) was the first secular book in a Sámi language. Isak Saba’s poem “Sámi soga lávlla” became the Sámi anthem. Today novels and poetry appear every year, the Beaivváš theatre in Kautokeino tours all of Sápmi, and contemporary Sámi visual art has its own galleries.

The Sámi traded hides and furs for salt, metal blades and coins, which they wore as ornaments, and in Finland they traded squirrel furs with Finns and Swedes. Along the north Norwegian coast the Iron Age brought expanding Norse settlement and taxation by Norse chieftains; the nature of that relationship is debated, and the Sámi may have allied with the chieftains for protection against enemies from the White Sea. Folk tales of the stalo, a cruel warrior people, were read by Laestadius as memories of Viking contacts. In southern Finland Finnish and Swedish colonisation led to the assimilation of a distinct Sámi population by the 14th century.

From the 15th century Denmark–Norway, Sweden and Russia all claimed the right to tax the Sámi, so that Mountain Sámi following their herds might pay up to three states. Gustav I of Sweden claimed all Sámi as Swedish subjects. Between 1635 and 1659 the Swedish crown forced Swedish conscripts and Sámi cart drivers to work at the Nasa silver mine, and many fled the area. The Strömstad Treaty of 1751 between Sweden and Norway had an annex, the Lapp Codicil, sometimes called the “Sámi Magna Carta”, regulating how Sámi used the land across the border.

New borders cut through Sápmi: Russia took Finland in 1809, and the border treaty of 1826 stopped herders who had wintered in Finland and summered on the Norwegian coast from crossing. The Swedish–Norwegian border stayed open to herders until 1940, when the German occupation of Norway closed it. Some Sámi emigrated to Alaska in 1898 and to Newfoundland in 1907–1908 at the request of the American government, to teach reindeer herding, and an estimated 30,000 people in North America are Sámi or of Sámi descent.

From the 1860s Norway turned to Norwegianisation: from around 1900 Sámi could not be used in public school or in church, and anyone buying or leasing state land in Finnmark had to prove knowledge of Norwegian. Sweden’s Swedification policies ran from the 1800s to the 1970s, and from 1913 to 1920 a state race-biology institute collected research material from living Sámi and from their graves. Children were taken to boarding schools, in Russia from the age of one or two, and Soviet collectivisation moved most Kola Sámi to Lovozero. In 1944–1945 the German army’s scorched-earth policy laid waste to northern Finland and northern Norway, destroying homes and visible traces of Sámi culture. In 1986 the Chernobyl fallout poisoned the lichen, and 73,000 reindeer were killed in Sweden alone.

The revival came after the war. Sámi news began on Norwegian radio in 1946, and the Alta controversy of 1979 made Sámi rights a national issue. The Sámi flag, designed by Astrid Båhl, was adopted in 1986, and 6 February became Sámi National Day. Sámi Parliaments were founded in Finland (1973), Norway (1989) and Sweden (1993); Russia recognises none. Norway’s Finnmark Act of 2005 gave the Sámi Parliament a share in managing most of Finnmark’s land. Sweden apologised in 1998, and the Church of Sweden in 2021; truth commissions were set up in Norway in 2018 and Sweden in 2020. Skulls taken for racial research have been reburied since 1997.

All Sámi languages are endangered, and most Sámi now speak the majority languages. Mining, wind farms, logging, dams and military ranges still press on reindeer land; in 2024 a UN committee ruled that Finland had violated Sámi rights over mining on their land. The Laponian Area in Sweden became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996 and since 2010 has been managed by an association with a Sámi majority.