Lars Levi Laestadius was a Swedish Sami writer, ecologist, mythologist, and ethnographer as well as a pastor and administrator of the Swedish state Lutheran church in Lapland who founded the Laestadian pietist revival movement to help his largely Sami congregations, who were being ravaged by alcoholism. Laestadius himself became a teetotaller in the 1840s, when he began successfully talking his Sami parishioners out of alcoholism. Laestadius was also a noted botanist and an author.

The Sámi are the traditionally Sámi-speaking Indigenous peoples inhabiting the region of Sápmi, which today encompasses large northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and of the Kola Peninsula in Russia. The region of Sápmi was formerly known as Lapland, and the Sámi have historically been known in English as Lapps or Laplanders, but these terms are regarded as offensive by the Sámi, who prefer the area's name in their own languages, e.g. Northern Sámi Sápmi. Their traditional languages are the Sámi languages, which are classified as a branch of the Uralic language family.