Comment by vintermann

They were not that much more sparse than their neighbors. They typically moved with the seasons, so maybe they needed a little more space (a summer place and a winter place at the very least), but not radically more so. After all, the Norse had summer pastures in the mountains too.

Reindeer herding is younger than people think, as I said. Until the major predators were exterminated, it wouldn't have been possible to have herds of the sizes we're used to. Land wasn't the limiting factor for herd size. Until eastern Norwegian immigrants came in the 1750s on, and settled inland - a crazy thing to do according to locals since of course you wanted to live by the sea where the fish, the money were, and it was cold inland - there wasn't much land use conflict.

There were no centrally organized assimilation efforts until von Westen at the earliest. And while he was zealous about rooting out superstition and customs which he saw as pagan, he was also protecting the language, teaching people in their own language (for a generation after Westen, Sami were said to be more educated than other northerners, and you see it in the censuses!) and certainly wasn't putting people into encomiendas or otherwise forcing them to change their material way of life.