The Sami homeland runs across the north of Norway, Sweden and Finland and into the Kola peninsula in Russia, and the border closures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cut herding routes that had crossed it for centuries. State policy in each country then pursued assimilation. In Norway the policy known as Norwegianisation ran from the middle of the nineteenth century into the second half of the twentieth, through boarding schools, the exclusion of Sami from the classroom, and restrictions on land purchase by Sami speakers.
Laestadianism, a Lutheran revival movement begun in the 1840s by Lars Levi Laestadius, who was himself of Sami descent, spread widely through Sami communities and remains strong. It is a Christian movement and it is also, in its history, a Sami one.
The Norwegian parliament's Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported in 2023 on Norwegianisation and its consequences, and comparable processes have run in Sweden and Finland. Sami parliaments now exist in all three Nordic states. The older religion is not simply gone. Offerings at sieidi continue, drums are made again, and Sami artists and joik singers work with material that was banned within living memory. The atlas describes this as a living tradition that was interrupted rather than as a reconstruction.