The noaidi was the specialist of Sami religion, and the instrument of the office was the frame drum: an oval or bowl-shaped wooden frame, a reindeer-hide membrane, and a painted design in alder bark red laid out as a map of the cosmos, with gods, the sun, dwellings, reindeer, and the roads to the land of the dead. A marker was set on the skin and the drum struck; where the marker travelled answered the question. The same drum, beaten harder and with joik, carried the noaidi into trance, in which a helping spirit in animal form went out to look for a lost soul, to find game, or to argue with the powers holding a sick person.
That much is reasonably secure. Beyond it the evidence is awkward, because almost everything written about the drums was written by the men suppressing them, and the surviving objects are few. Roughly seventy to eighty drums are known to exist worldwide, out of a great many more that were taken.
Joik, the Sami vocal form, was bound up with all of this and outlived it. A joik is generally described as being of its subject rather than about it: a person, an animal, a place, evoked rather than narrated. Missionaries treated it as devil-song and it was still being punished in schools within living memory. It is now the most publicly visible element of Sami tradition, and the least restricted.
The drum is not a museum object to Sami people today. Its confiscation is remembered as theft, and the drums held in Nordic and German collections are the subject of active repatriation claims rather than of antiquarian interest.