This webinar showcases four innovative PhD dissertation projects on Finnish North American history and heritage. The speakers will present new approaches from the perspectives of history, folklore studies, linguistics, and literature.
This webinar is organized by the “Migrant Experiences, Past and Present” project funded by the Public Diplomacy Section of the US Embassy in Finland, in collaboration with the Migration Institute of Finland, Immigration History Research Center, Immigration History Research Center Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, and the Finnish American Studies Association.
Register for the webinarMirva Johnson, University of Wisonsin-Madison, “From Ethnic to Local: Linguistic and Cultural Change in Northern Wisconsin”
Tanja Juuri, Tampere University, “The Finnish-Canadian Multilocal Landscape of Home and Labour in the Early 20th Century”
Lotta Leiwo, University of Helsinki, “Weathering Capitalism: Finnish American Women and Nature-Related Socialist Rhetoric”
Roma Lucarelli, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, “The Legacy of the Kalevala: Finnish Immigration, Co-Operative Mechanisms, and Agricultural-Based Homesteading”
Mirva Johnson is a PhD candidate in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research spans linguistics and public folklore, focusing on linguistic and cultural change in immigrant communities over time.
Tanja Juuri is working on PhD research in Tampere University. Her dissertation title is: “Pantu kartalle summassa vaan:” A multilocal landscape of home, labour and death in the Finnish-Canadian narrative in the years 1900–1939.
Lotta Leiwo, a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, studies weather writings and Finnish migrant-settler women in the early 20th century U.S. Leiwo’s dissertation, titled “Knowing Nature: Climate, Weather, and Settler Colonialism in the United States Finnish Women’s Political Rhetoric,” delves into the political role of women in the socialist movement, historical understandings of weather and climate, and Finnish settler colonialism.
Roma Lucarelli is a second-year PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Roma’s research interests focus on Postcolonial literature, immigration, environmental humanities, and 20th- and 21st-century literature
Polkabilly music has entertained listeners throughout the North American Midwest since the mid 19th century, with repertoires consisting of continental European folk music, dance tunes, old time hillbilly songs, and more. James Leary (2006) argues that polkabilly repertoires of both popular and local traditions challenge common definitions of American folk music. How did such mixed repertoires develop? Based on fieldwork in northern Wisconsin and building on previous approaches to the development of regional folklore, I discuss how the social setting of language shift over the 20th century in a northern Wisconsin Finnish American community influenced the development of local traditions–using the repertoires and performances of Finnish American polkabilly bands as a key example. I use the Finnish American example in northern Wisconsin as a case study to suggest a cultural parallel to dialect formation following migration, combining approaches from linguistics and folklore.
This presentation will address Finnish-Canadian experiences of establishing home in a foreign land, with particular attention to the implications of settler colonialism in the early 20th century. One of the central concepts and theoretical frameworks of my research is the idea of landscape. A prevailing myth has suggested that Finnish migrants moved to Canada primarily because the landscape resembled that of their old homeland. However, work opportunities and the presence of other Finnish migrants were the primary motivations for settlement. This presentation explores how first-generation Finns experienced both their new home in Canada and their original home in Finland within this multilocal reality. How did they conceptualize and construct a sense of home in a foreign land, relying on their own labor? In Finnish-Canadian narratives, settlers often described building homes and reshaping the landscape in what they perceived as an empty land. However, these places had long been inhabited by Indigenous peoples.
Finnish migrant-settlers in the early 20th century U.S. used narrations of nature to discuss abstract topics, such as politics, community, and identity. Finns played a significant role in the U.S. labour movement, with socialists advocating for a post-capitalist world. Nature was a recurring theme in Toveritar (Woman Comrade), a Finnish-language socialist women’s newspaper published from 1911 to 1930. The paper served as a transnational mouthpiece for Finnish Socialist Federation and gave a literary voice to Finnish American Women.
In this presentation, I examine Finnish American women’s nature-related writings in Toveritar, focusing on how they used weather to express ideas about capitalism. I analyze reader-writers’ letters published in the newspaper, asking: How did these women understand and experience weather? How did they connect capitalism and climate? I will also explore how these themes relate to settler colonialism.
Women, responsible for raising children, played a central role in transmitting colonial ideas. By integrating migration, labour and women’s histories with cultural studies of climate and settler colonial studies, we can better understand women’s participation in maintaining settler colonial structures as well as how people adapted to new climates.
Finnish immigrants arriving and settling in Minnesota throughout the 20th century heavily relied on homesteading and agricultural practices to sustain themselves and their communities. This presentation explores appropriate frameworks for understanding environmental sustainability from a Finnish immigrant perspective. It demonstrates that the Finnish land ethics that are transmitted throughout Kalevala and various archival materials contained at the Immigration History Research Center Archives (IHRCA) were collaborative in nature and community-based. More specifically, this presentation traces Elias Lönnrot’s illustrations of agriculture and cooperation in the Kalevala as they appear in various ways throughout selected 20th century archival documents housed at the IHRCA. It considers how the Kalevala, a literary text that refashioned oral traditions into national ideologies, helps shape the reality for Finnish immigrants who were arriving in Minnesota in the early 20th century and were taking up cultivation through means of homesteading. This presentation comparatively explores Finnish land ethics through a diverse range of genres and time periods, enabling a closer examination of the stakes that co-operative land ethics, as modeled by farming Finnish immigrants, maintain in relation to Indigenous land epistemologies, settler colonialism, and the environmental humanities at large.
The Immigration History Research Center Archives is co-hosting a series of webinars as part of the project Migrant Experiences, Past and Present: A New Finland-U.S. Research and Archival Partnership, with the Migration Institute of Finland and the Immigration History Research Center, College of Liberal Arts. Funded through the U.S. Embassy in Finland’s Public Diplomacy Grant.
What: Webinar: New Directions in Finnish North American Research
When: Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025 | 10 a.m. CST (18.00 Finnish time – GMT+2)
Where: Online | Register to receive the Zoom link
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