Sami religion recognised spirits of place and marked them at sieidi, particular stones, rock formations or wooden posts that received offerings connected with hunting, fishing and herding. The bear held a special position, hunted under strict protocol and buried with its bones arranged so that it could return, a practice attested archaeologically across Sapmi.
The specialist was the noaidi, and the instrument of the office was the drum, its head painted with a diagram of the world across which a marker was read. Hakan Rydving's study of religious change among the Lule Sami in the decades around 1700 works from the Swedish court records of the campaign against that practice, and those records are detailed because they are prosecutions. Drums were confiscated and burned in large numbers, noaidi were tried, and in at least one case a man was executed. Roughly seventy drums survive, almost all of them in museums outside Sami control, and their return is now an active question.
Rydving's central point is that conversion was not a single event but a long period of two religions held at once, in which people attended church and kept the older observances, and the church records read as they do because they document a struggle rather than a completed replacement.