Sámi

The Sámi are the Indigenous people of Sápmi, a homeland that stretches across the far north of Norway, Sweden and Finland and Russia's Kola Peninsula. They speak a group of related Uralic languages, are best known abroad for reindeer herding, and today have elected parliaments in three Nordic countries. Older outsider names such as Lapps and Laplanders are now regarded by some Sámi as offensive.

Scholars link the Sámi to western Uralic-speaking groups who moved north-west from the Volga region during the second millennium BCE. The Sámi language is thought to have developed near Lakes Onega and Ladoga and spread into Finland and the north, absorbing traces of older, now-lost languages. Sámi people appear to have arrived in Sápmi in the second or first millennium BCE, and from the Bronze Age they were living along the Finnmark and Kola coasts. The Roman writer Tacitus, around 98 CE, gives what is probably the first written mention, calling them Fenni; Norse sagas later called them Finns.

For centuries the Sámi lived mostly in the inland north while Norse settlers held southern Scandinavia and gradually spread along the Norwegian coast. Sámi presence once reached much further south than today: a 2022 study found Sámi settlement across the whole of mainland Finland until at least the fourteenth century. The Black Death, which reached northern Norway in December 1349, hit coastal Norwegians far harder than the Sámi of the interior, and in its aftermath many Sámi took up vacant coastal farms. This deepened a division between the Sea Sámi, who fished and farmed, and the Mountain Sámi, who followed reindeer herds and by around 1500 were living what is now thought of as the classic Sámi way of life.

Herding was organised through the siida, a cooperating group of families and their herds. Mountain Sámi crossing borders on seasonal migrations could be taxed by Norway, Sweden and Russia at once.

Traditional Sámi religion saw spirit throughout the natural world. The noaidi, a ritual specialist, used drums and chanting to reach other worlds, and offerings were made at sacred stones and hills called sieidi. Catholic missions arrived by the thirteenth century, and pressure grew after the Reformation. Around 1720 a Norwegian campaign destroyed drums and holy places; only about 70 drums are known to survive. In the nineteenth century the revivalist preacher Lars Levi Laestadius, himself of Sámi background, began a strict Lutheran movement that remains strong in Sámi areas.

From the nineteenth century the Norwegian and Swedish states pressed northward and adopted policies of forced assimilation, known in Norway as Norwegianisation. Schools promoted the national languages and restricted Sámi, and children were often sent to boarding schools. In Norway the pressure was strongest from about 1900 to 1940, when buying state land in Finnmark required knowing Norwegian and using a Norwegian name. Sweden followed similar policies, and Sámi in the Soviet Kola Peninsula were moved into collective farms, many to Lovozero.

Protests against the Alta hydroelectric dam in 1979 put Sámi rights on the Norwegian political agenda. A Sámi flag and anthem were adopted in 1986. Finland created a Sámi parliament in 1973, Norway in 1989 and Sweden in 1993; Russia recognises none, though Sámi there formed their own unofficial body. Norway's constitution now commits the state to protect Sámi language and culture, and the 2005 Finnmark Act placed about 95 per cent of the county's land under the Finnmark Estate, half of whose board is chosen by the Sámi parliament. In 2021 the Church of Sweden formally apologised to the Sámi.

The Sámi are estimated at around 80,000 people, the largest share of them in Norway. All Sámi languages are endangered to some degree, and revitalisation efforts continue.

Our maps show the Sámi, under labels including Saami, Samis and Sámi, from -1500 through 1530; the outline is approximate and shifts as neighbours change. In 1500 they sit north of the Kalmar Union and the Grand Principality of Moscow, and by 1530 beside Denmark–Norway. See also Norway, Finland and Russia.