The Nordic states did not merely convert the Sami; they prosecuted them. Sweden tried Sami practitioners under witchcraft law, and in 1693 the noaidi Lars Nilsson was burned at Arjeplog together with his drum and his images, after being seen drumming in grief for a drowned grandson. In Denmark-Norway, Anders Poulsen was tried at Vadso in 1692 and killed before sentence; his drum went into a Copenhagen collection and stayed there for three centuries.
The organised Norwegian mission followed under Thomas von Westen, who from 1716 travelled the north, trained missionaries in the Sami language, and personally collected well over a hundred drums. Confiscated drums were burned or shipped to southern museums. In Sweden the Church built the market-and-church towns that reorganised the Sami year around Christian obligation.
Suppression did not end with the mission era. From the later nineteenth century Norway pursued fornorsking, Norwegianisation, and Sweden and Finland pursued comparable policies: boarding schools, prohibition on the language, land law favouring settlers. The Kautokeino rising of 1852, in which Sami acting out of a Laestadian revival killed a merchant and a sheriff, is usually read now as a response to that pressure rather than as fanaticism, and Laestadianism itself, a severe Lutheran movement, remains strong in Sami communities and is genuinely theirs.
Recovery is recent and political as much as religious. Sami parliaments were established in Finland in 1973, Norway in 1989 and Sweden in 1993. The Church of Sweden apologised formally in 2021, a Norwegian truth and reconciliation commission reported in June 2023, and Denmark transferred ownership of the Poulsen drum to a Sami museum in 2022. New drums, offerings at sieidi and open ceremony now exist alongside a largely Lutheran Sami population, and the reconstruction is honest about being reconstruction: the chain of trained noaidi was broken, and what is being rebuilt comes from written sources, surviving custom and deliberate choice.