SAMI etchings

 

“Almost all Sámi drums were destroyed by Lutheran pastors”, write the curators at Siida — a museum in Inari, Finland, a municipality where 31% of the inhabitants are Sámi, according to a 2019 electoral census — and fewer than one hundred historical specimens are thought to survive today.

 

 

 

Fact or fiction, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, the Swedish Lord High Chancellor, took action in 1671, requesting that the Swedish College of Antiquities appoint a scholar to study the ways of the Sámi people, their territories, and to ascertain what role they had played in the Thirty Years’ War. The antiquarians decided the right man for the job was Johannes Schefferus, a professor of rhetoric and politics who had little prior knowledge about the Sámi, the indigenous peoples who inhabit Sápmi, a region of Fennoscandia that includes territories of modern-day Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.

SAMI are sacred and ancient, Otis said, smiling. They are still here...

HOGWASH:

This drum is cosmological in scope according to Schefferus (who presumably numbered its figures), depicting, inter alia: the river Torne (2), God (5), the Sun (6), the Moon (7), Saint Matthew (13), England (32), Turkey (36), the cities of Finland (39), the cities of Germany (41), a countryman (53), a bailiff (58), a bear (64), “the most dangerous and malicious sorcerers” (79), “the young One of a Raindeer” (87), a cat (89), the devil’s ditch (100), “the first President of the Assembly of Magicians” (117), “the fourth President of the same Assembly” (120), the gallows (124), health (147), “a mortal Wound given by a magical Javelin” (149), and the condition of “not [being] allowed to Sacrifice to any God of the Mountains, neither to the Trunk of a Tree, nor to any Stone, because this Character implies, that it will be in vain, and unsuccessful” (150).  

more: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/etching-of-a-sami-drum/

Today, Sámi drums continue to disappear from museum collections.