>Prior to that the people would have looked more
>"traditionally" asian/native/inuit (from my perspective) all
>the photos of the Sammi were taken after a conservative 1,000
>years of assimilation/blending

When I first learned about them (through music, the exotic-sounding 'joik') I actually originally assumed the Sami were a brown people because of a conditioned conflation of 'indigenous' with non-white.

Regardless of that, while
a) a lot of the scientific language is over my head; and
b) there is some disagreement between studies over exactly how much of the Sami gene pool is non-European (specifically Asian),

there seems to be a scientific consensus supported by genetic analysis that, while they are genetically distinct, the Sami are European in origin.

from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707618928

"It suggests that the large genetic separation of the Saami from other Europeans is best explained by assuming that the Saami are descendants of a narrow, distinctive subset of Europeans. In particular, no evidence of a significant directional gene flow from extant aboriginal Siberian populations into the haploid gene pools of the Saami was found."

"We conclude that the phylogeography of mtDNA and Y-chromosome variants that correspond to the maternal and paternal gene pools of the Saami does not provide any evidence for the Saami population arising among the northernmost Uralic-speaking populations—Siberian Ugric and Samoyedic speakers—or among any other aboriginal Siberians. The Samoyeds are the least genetically close to the Saami among the people of the Uralic language family, whereas nearly all of the mtDNA and Y-chromosomal heritage of the Saami can be adequately explained within the European pools of the two haploid genetic systems. This genetics-based reconstruction (fig. 4) is in agreement with the reconstruction of the spread of Ahrensburgian and Swiderian Mesolithic technologies in northern Europe, linking it with population expansion that can be likely traced back to the post–Last Glacial Maximum recolonization of the European north (Torroni et al. 2001; Tambets et al. 2003). The results also stress that the grouping of populations according to language families should be used exclusively only in a linguistic context."

and several others, mix of primary and secondary sources:

https://www.laits.utexas.edu/sami/dieda/hist/genetic.htm

https://www.nature.com/articles/5201712

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/the-men-of-the-north-the-sami/



interesting stuff.

-------
so I'm in a band now:
album ---> http://greenwoodburns.bandcamp.com/releases
Soundcloud ---> http://soundcloud.com/greenwood-burns

my own stuff -->http://soundcloud.com/lonesomedstringband

avy by buckshot_defunct