Samene — the people who were here first

The Norway the family descends from and is traveling to see is the southern, coastal, Norse-descended, Lutheran country. That Norway is real, and it is most of what the trip will touch. But it is not the whole country, and it never was. For as long as there have been people on this land — by the best evidence, many thousands of years, very probably longer than the Norse — the north has belonged to another people, with another language, another religion, and another way of living on the same ground. They are the Sami, and their story does not fit the tidy arc of Norse-kingdom-becomes-Christian-nation. It runs alongside that arc, underneath it, and often against it.

Sápmi

The Sami homeland is called Sápmi, and it does not respect the borders drawn on modern maps. It stretches across the northern reaches of four countries — Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia — a single cultural region divided by lines the Sami did not draw. The Sami languages belong to the Uralic family, related to Finnish and distant from Norwegian; there is not one Sami language but several, some of them now severely endangered. The traditional economy was built on the land directly: reindeer herding above all, but also fishing, hunting, and trapping, an economy of movement and of close reading of a hard northern landscape.

The Norse and the Sami were neighbors on overlapping ground for thousands of years — the Norse holding the coast and the southern farmland, the Sami the interior, the highlands, and the far north. The medieval Norse sources know them, under the old name Finnar; the Viking-age chieftain Ohthere, describing his country to the English king Alfred around 890, mentions the tribute his Sami neighbors paid him in furs and walrus rope. For most of that long coexistence the relationship was trade and tribute, not conquest. What changed it was religion, and then the state.

The drum and the noaidi

Before the missionaries, the Sami had a religion entirely their own — and entirely unlike Norse paganism. It was animist: the land itself was alive and inhabited, and certain places in it — particular stones, springs, mountains, rock formations — were sieidi, sacred sites where offerings were left and a relationship with the powers of the land was kept up. The Sami religious world was a negotiation with a living landscape, conducted at specific holy places, across the whole of Sápmi.

At the center of Sami religious practice stood the noaidi — the ritual specialist, healer, and seer — and the noaidi’s central instrument was the drum. The Sami drum, the goavddis, was an extraordinary object: a frame or bowl of wood headed with stretched reindeer hide, and the hide painted, in red, with a cosmological map — the upper world, the middle world, the world of the dead, and the figures that moved among them, the sun, the gods, the reindeer, the ancestors. The noaidi drummed to enter trance, and in trance traveled between the layers of that painted world — to heal, to find what was lost, to see what was distant. The drum was not decoration and not an instrument of music. It was the technology of an entire religion, and every drum was a particular map of the cosmos.

This matters for what came next, because it tells you what was destroyed. To burn a Sami drum was not to confiscate a curio. It was to burn a sacred text.

The mission

The Christianization of the Sami came late, and it came as state policy. Norway’s south had been Christian for centuries while Sami religious practice continued in the north largely undisturbed. That changed decisively in the early eighteenth century, when the Danish-Norwegian crown turned its attention — and its missionaries — to Sápmi.

The central figure is Thomas von Westen (1682–1727), a Trondheim clergyman remembered, depending on who is doing the remembering, as either the devoted “Apostle to the Sami” or as the architect of a cultural catastrophe. He is genuinely both. From 1716 von Westen led the Sami mission, traveling north into Finnmark, and by the standards of his moment he was unusually serious about it — he worked to learn the language, pressed for catechisms and schooling in Sami rather than only in Danish. He also drove a campaign that confiscated and burned Sami drums by the hundreds, identified and destroyed sieidi sites, and operated a system, backed by state money, that paid Sami informers to reveal where the old religion was still practiced. The sincerity and the destruction were not in tension in his own mind. They were the same project.

The harder edge of the encounter shows in the courts. In the same broad period, Sami religious specialists were caught up in the witch trials that the early-modern Danish-Norwegian state ran with particular ferocity in the far north — the Finnmark trials, which executed a startling number of people, Sami and Norwegian, for sorcery. The clearest single case is the noaidi Anders Poulsen, brought before the court at Vadsø in 1692 and accused of witchcraft. At his trial he did something remarkable: he produced his drum and explained, plainly, what it was for — easing the pain of women in childbirth, finding stolen goods, driving off harm. He never heard a verdict. He was killed in custody, by a jailer, before the court finished. His drum was shipped to Copenhagen, into a royal collection, and it was not returned to the Sami until 2022 — three hundred and thirty years later.

Norwegianization

The eighteenth-century mission attacked the religion. The policy that followed, across roughly a century from the mid-1800s into the 1960s, attacked the whole culture, and it had a name: fornorsking — Norwegianization. It was deliberate, official, and sustained. The Sami language was banned as a language of instruction in schools and, in places, banned in the schoolyard. Sami children were placed in Norwegian-language boarding schools, away from their families and their language. Sami land rights were eroded, traditional dress and joik discouraged, Sami names pressed toward Norwegian forms. The goal, stated without much disguise, was to dissolve the Sami into the Norwegian majority — to make the difference disappear within a generation or two.

It did not entirely work, but it did enormous damage, and the damage is not safely in the past. There are Sami alive now who were punished as children for speaking their own language, families in which the language skipped a generation because a parent judged it safer not to pass it on. A culture can survive a policy like that, and Sami culture did. It does not survive it unmarked.

Through all of it, Christianity among the Sami took its own particular shape. The dominant form became Læstadianism, the revival movement founded by the Swedish-Sami Lutheran pastor Lars Levi Læstadius in the mid-nineteenth century — austere, intensely emotional, lay-led, and deeply woven into Sami community life. Læstadian Christianity is not the old drum religion; but it is not the Norwegian state church either. It is a Christianity the Sami made their own.

The recovery

The turn came late in the twentieth century, and it is still underway. From the 1980s onward, Sami language rights were restored in law and in schooling. In 1989 Norway opened the Sámediggi — the Sami Parliament — giving the Sami a formal elected body of their own within the Norwegian state. The Norwegian state has issued apologies for the Norwegianization policy, and in 2023 a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission delivered a long report documenting, officially and in detail, what was done to the Sami and to the Kven and Forest Finn minorities.

The cultural recovery has been the more moving half of it. The joik — the traditional Sami song-form, unlike any other vocal music in Europe, suppressed for generations in the schools — is now central to Sami identity and Sami art. Drum-makers have taken up the craft again, in some cases relearning it from the confiscated drums sitting in Scandinavian and German museums, studying their own sacred objects through museum glass to rebuild what the mission burned. The old religion is not coming back as it was; too much was lost, and the world it belonged to is gone. But it is being reclaimed as inheritance, openly and with pride, by people who were taught for a century to be ashamed of it.

Why this belongs in a heritage trip that never goes there

The trip does not reach Sápmi. There is no Tromsø on the itinerary, no Karasjok, no Kautokeino; the route runs through the southern and central country, the family’s own country. So why carry the Sami into the picture at all?

Because a heritage trip is, at heart, an attempt to understand a place truthfully, and the southern Lutheran Norse Norway the family descends from is a true story but not the whole truth. Norway is not now and never was a single people on a single land with a single faith. Underneath and to the north of the country in the photographs is an older country, with a people who were here first, who were nearly erased by the state the family’s ancestors lived under, and who are still here — governing themselves, singing the joik, painting the drums again. To know Norway is to know that it contains them. The family will not stand in Sápmi on this trip. It is still worth standing, for the length of one read, in the knowledge of it.