story by John Gagnon, promotional writer
Photo by Arvo Toolanen, IronwoodInfo

Houghton - January 24, 2010

Ulla Aatsinki, a Fulbright scholar from Tampere, Finland, feels right at home at Tech these days as she studies Finnish immigrants to Upper Michigan. She has traveled far and found the familiar.

She says these newcomers brought with them a frame of mind that they shared with their forbears in the homeland: sisu, a Finnish word for which there is no literal translation.

The general idea, Aatsinki says, is: "The work which is started will be finished, always." As well, she adds, sisu describes an able-bodied person: "Work hard, solve your problems alone, and don’t ask for help."

Finnish emigrants carried this indomitable spirit around the world, including the Copper Country. Between 1880 and 1920, then, 87,000 Finns came to Michigan, most to the Upper Peninsula, where they sought more opportunity and left a decided cultural impression: saunas, Finnish street names, and restaurant fare like nisu and pannukakku.

This Finnish presence in Upper Michigan, concentrated on the iron range and the copper range, attracted Aatsinki to Michigan Tech. Working in the social sciences department, she is studying how Finnish immigrants fared here. To do so, she is poring over newspapers and documents at the Michigan Tech Archives and the oral histories at the Finnish American Heritage Center at Finlandia University.

Originally from Finland's Lapland region, Aatsinki studied history at the University of Oulu and the University of Tampere. Her PhD focused on political radicalism in northern Finland, where the people were poor and restive.

She is here to study Finnish immigration from the 1900s to the 1920s. She is especially interested in how Finnish American children integrated into American society and in "the values and attitudes that ordinary people had."

In the Old Country, many Finns were active in temperance and labor movements. "They continued that activity here," Aatsinki says. "They were active in cooperatives and strikes and other popular movements."

But not uniformly so, for there were what she describes as "Church Finns" and "Red Finns"--one conservative, one radical. In both Finland and America, she says, the leftist Finns encountered resistance, and many were "blacklisted as troublemakers."

Besides transplanting political proclivities to America, immigrant Finns welcomed their adopted land and especially valued what they didn't have at home: a livelihood for themselves and schooling for their children.

These opportunities shaped their new lives, where work, family, and ethnic ties were equally compelling. Aatsinki says, "It'll be interesting to find out what kind of life they found, how they were treated in a new country, and how they were integrated into a new society."

Aatsinki says her inquiry will amount to "a description of the social and cultural heritage of two countries." She adds, "I would like to compare the differences and similarities."

Another common thread: Finns in America had a reputation for working hard (newspaper ads specifically sought Finns for hire). And they were known for making do. Thus, one oral history at Finlandia describes how the poor old immigrant women brushed out the flower barrel with a bird's wing.

"They came here because they were poor," Aatsinki says of these resilient masses. "Emigration was a common solution for Finnish people to get a better life."