Sámi

The Sámi are the indigenous people of Sápmi, stretching from Norway and Sweden across northern Finland to the Kola Peninsula; their languages form a branch of the Uralic family. Hunting, fishing and later semi-nomadic reindeer herding sustained them. They once lived farther south, trading squirrel furs in Finland until the local Sámi were assimilated by the fourteenth century.

When the Black Death reached northern Norway in 1349 it killed most Norwegian farmers but largely spared the isolated Sámi. They took over abandoned fjord farms and divided into Sea Sámi and migratory Mountain Sámi, some of whom paid taxes to all three crowns of Norway, Sweden and Russia.

After the Reformation rune drums were burned and Sámi faced witch trials in the seventeenth century, though shamanic religion lingered into the eighteenth. Forced labour in the Nasa mine between 1635 and 1659 emptied Pite and Lule Sámi districts.