The Sámi

Sápmi today

Sápmi crosses four states, and the Sámi hold parliaments in three

The Sámi are the Indigenous people of Sápmi, the region reaching across the north of Norway, Sweden, and Finland and into the Kola Peninsula of Russia. They are a contemporary people with their own elected bodies. Norway's Sámi Parliament opened on 9 October 1989, Sweden's followed in 1993, and Finland's grew out of a Sámi Delegation established in 1973.

Sámi institutions hold the authority over Sámi knowledge. The Sámi Museum Siida in Inari, RiddoDuottarMuseat in Kárášjohka, and Saemien Sijte in Snåsa keep the collections and lead the research on Sámi material culture.

The Commission to Investigate the Norwegianisation Policy and Injustice against the Sámi and Kvens delivered its report to the Storting's Presidium on 1 June 2023, chaired by Dagfinn Høybråten with eleven other members. Assimilation policy ran into the 1960s and reached language, schooling, and worship.

Who wrote the sources

Nearly every early source was written by someone working to end the practice

The written record of Sámi religion and healing before 1900 comes from missionaries, clergy, and courts. Schefferus assembled Lapponia in 1673 from clerical reports he did not gather himself. The missionary Thomas von Westen produced drawings of drums with explanations of their symbols in 1723, the year the Freavnantjahke drum was seized from the South Sámi area.

A missionary describing a rite he intends to abolish is not a neutral observer, and a defendant describing his drum to a court that can execute him is not speaking freely. Willumsen shows Poulsen bending his answers toward Christian framing throughout 1692.

The same practices recur across that hostile corpus: sustained drumming, joik, the reading of a person's condition before acting, and treatment aimed at the situation of a whole life. That consistency is what these documents can be read for, rather than the conclusions they draw.

The noaidi

The noaidi read the situation before treating the person

The noaidi was the healer, diviner, and ritual specialist who acted for the community when ordinary means failed. In the surviving accounts the noaidi worked with drum and joik together, entered an altered state, and was understood to travel to the source of the trouble and return with what the sick person needed.

Illness in that account is relational. A person falls out of right relation with kin, land, herd, or the dead, and the work is to locate the break and repair it. Poulsen's own testimony in 1692 fits the pattern. He said he learned the drum craft to know how people far away were faring and to help people in distress.

The deepest layers of the practice never entered the record, because the people writing it down were not entitled to them. What survives is an outline, and the outline is consistent: read the state first, act second, treat the person inside a set of relations.

The drum

The drum was a rhythm instrument first and a map second

The instrument is named differently across the Sámi languages. Northern Sámi has goavddis and meavrresgárri for the bowl drum, and Southern Sámi has gievrie for the frame drum. The bowl type is hollowed from a single piece of wood. The frame type stretches hide over bent wood braced by a crossbar that doubles as the handle.

Reindeer supplied most of it. Hide for the head, sinew for the binding, bone for the hammer. The figures were painted in red made from chewed alder bark. Poulsen's drum carried five rows, and he named the figures to the court: Ilmaris for storm, Diermis for thunder, Peive for the sun, and a wild reindeer called Gvodde.

Two uses are documented and they are not equal. The primary use was sustained beating that shifted the state of the person playing it. Divination came second, worked by a ring or pointer that moved across the figures as the head was struck.

The confiscations

The drums were taken, and the taking is dated

The confiscation campaign ran from the late seventeenth century into the eighteenth, and it was organized rather than incidental. Poulsen lost his drum on 7 December 1691. The Freavnantjahke drum was taken from the South Sámi area in 1723 and sent to the Danish king in Copenhagen.

The Vadsø court found that worship of false gods was not listed in the statutes as punishable when no loss of life, health, or property was alleged. It deferred to Copenhagen and held Poulsen. He was killed before any answer arrived.

Roughly 50,000 Sámi objects are still held in museum collections across Europe, gathered from the seventeenth century onward and including material taken from graves into the twentieth. Behind each surviving drum stands a person made to give it up.

Joik

A joik presents its subject instead of describing it

The joik is the Sámi vocal art, called luohti in Northern Sámi, vuolle in Lule Sámi, and vuelie in Southern Sámi. A performer does not joik about a person or an animal. The performer joiks that person or that animal, giving it a musical form in performance.

A personal joik works as a musical name. It is given from one person to another, often from a parent or grandparent to a child, and a group can greet someone by beginning their joik as they enter the room. Joiking your own joik counts as bragging. The melody belongs to the subject rather than to the singer.

Researchers at UiT The Arctic University of Norway interviewed thirteen people aged 24 to 77 across Finnmark, Troms, Nordland, and Trøndelag about joik and health. Participants described processing grief by joiking a dead relative's joik for hours, and joiking anger so that everyone present would know it. The authors read joik as ongoing musical self regulation.

The guvhllár

Healers called guvhllár still read over the sick in northern Norway

The drum was taken and the healing by words continued, folded into Christianity. In northern Norway the healer is a reader, guvhllár in Sámi. Researchers at UiT interviewed fifteen healers and one focus group of five family members across two coastal Sámi municipalities and published the study in 2018.

Reading is the recitation of a prayer based on the Bible to relieve a symptom, often followed by blowing three times. The verses themselves are guarded knowledge inside those families. All fifteen healers came from families of healers, and the knowledge passes to a younger relative judged to have the ability.

The healers write the patient's Christian name, date of birth, and medical diagnosis into the prayer, and for an operation they add the date of surgery, the address, and the name of the hospital. Some verses are used for stopping bleeding. For internal illness the prayer is read over water that the patient then drinks.

Plants and hands

Angelica, cupping, and the hands in Turi's account

Johan Turi published Muitalus sámiid birra in 1910, the first secular book written in a Sámi language, produced with the Danish ethnographer Emilie Demant Hatt. It is the counterweight to the mission archive, because it describes Sámi medicine from inside and without a prosecutor holding the pen.

DuBois and Lang's tabulation of Turi's 137 materials and species puts physical acts at 22 percent, second only to animal remedies at 31 percent. Backache is treated by massaging the area and pulling and stretching the skin. Headache and pain are treated by cupping with animal horns. Turi records rubbing and massage. He records no spinal manipulation.

The plant record shows the same precision. Angelica archangelica carries stage specific names in Northern Sámi, fádnu for the young vegetative plant and boska for the flowering one. Rautio and colleagues found in 2016 that the Sámi dispersed angelica seed to favored areas and harvested so as not to deplete the stands. Their field experiment showed that repeatedly harvesting infertile plants prolongs a plant's life span.

Two systems, one patient

Sámi healing and hospital medicine run in parallel

Jing Liu-Helmersson and Anne Ouma at Umeå University published a scoping review in 2021. They screened 240 abstracts from 15 databases and reviewed 19 studies, 17 of them from Norway. Reading a prayer and laying on of hands are the two methods reported most often. Blowing, curing, cupping, moxibustion, joik, and drum work also appear.

Patients take the diagnosis from the physician and the restoration from the healer, and the healer writes that diagnosis into the prayer. The review reports that Sámi traditional medicine sits outside Swedish health services, and that Sámi communities want it brought in.

Repatriation

The drums are coming home, and the dates are recent

On 26 August 2021 the Finnish government approved the return of about 2,200 objects from the National Museum of Finland to the Sámi Museum Siida. The lorries reached Inari on 1 September 2021, and the exhibition Mäccmõš, maccâm, máhccan opened on 31 October. The working group followed the principle nothing about us without us.

In January 2022 the Danish Ministry of Culture approved the transfer of ownership of Anders Poulsen's drum to RiddoDuottarMuseat in Kárášjohka, where it had sat on loan since 1979. The museum records it as the first time an object of Sámi cultural heritage held abroad was returned outright to Sápmi.

In November 2023 the Meininger Museen in Thüringen returned the Freavnantjahke drum to Saemien Sijte in Snåsa, three hundred years after it was seized. RiddoDuottarMuseat's traveling exhibition RUOKTOT presents five drums, two returned and three still abroad, to Sámi audiences relearning their own confiscated iconography.

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