Contemporary Sami communities across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia have, particularly since the later twentieth century, pursued broader efforts at cultural and political revival, including renewed interest in pre-Christian Sami spiritual heritage, alongside the continuation of Christianity, predominantly Lutheran, that became dominant among Sami populations over previous centuries and remains the majority religious identification today. This revival movement is generally led by Sami cultural organizations and individuals themselves, working partly from surviving historical fragments, partly from continuous but suppressed folk practice, and partly from genuinely new synthesis, a combination scholars of indigenous religious revival note is common wherever colonial suppression created a significant historical gap in unbroken transmission.
Because Sami communities themselves are actively engaged in determining how their spiritual heritage should be represented, taught and revived today, following their lead rather than presenting an outside summary is the approach this entry takes, consistent with the broader principle applied across this atlas's treatment of traditions where a living community maintains its own authority over sacred material, particularly material recovering from a documented history of colonial suppression and forced silence.