The Sami people are the indigenous Finno-Ugric people inhabiting the Sápmi, the cultural region which today encompasses parts of far northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Kola Peninsula of Russia, and the border area between south and middle Sweden and Norway. Known also as Lapps, an exonym considered by them as pejorative, the Sami have pursued a variety of livelihoods (including coastal fishing, fur trapping, and sheep herding), but the most representative is the semi-nomadic reindeer herding. Although they lived in Arctic Europe since prehistoric times (being mentioned for the first time in about 98 CE), they have been for centuries the subject of discrimination and abuse by the dominant cultures, being recognized as an indigenous people only in the last part of the 20th century in Norway, Sweden and Finland, and in Russia not even today.
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