The Sami weren't living anywhere near the primitive lives that Europeans ascribed to them. The Sami are Finns that were subjected to racist segregation by Scandinavian monarchies, which is where this stereotype comes from, but one can clearly see from history that the Sami were living in the same feudal mode of production as their Scandinavian and Russian neighbours.
Also, the term "hunter-gatherer" is clearly just a fancier modern term for what Thomas Hobbes called the "State of Nature", which is something he invented to argue that Native Americans - who had states, had agriculture, even had their own sports, and did such things like create combustion from whale fat and extract oil - didn't have sovereignty, therefore making it okay for the English to keep colonising them. Pretty sure that if the Europeans had been colonised, we would have the non-European colonists (with their equivalent of the term "anthropology") speaking of them as "hunter-gatherer" societies.