People whose ancestral origins in North America include family members who came
from Finland and the Finnish-speaking sections of Russia, Norway, and Sweden. Most
come from western Finland and are known simply as Finnish Americans or Finnish
Canadians. However, Finnish Americans include people identified also as Finland
Swedes, Finland Sami, Finland Karelians, Finnish Laestadians, and Finnish American
Indians. All but the Finnish American Indians reflect separate folk communities also in
Finland. These subgroups share a Finnish cultural geography, although the Finland
Swedes speak Swedish and the Finland Sami speak Sami.
Finnish people participated in American colonial history, both in the New Sweden
colony in Delaware after 1638 and in the Russian colony in Alaska in the 1840s. The
Delaware Finnish colonists introduced a wooden log cabin dwelling using a dovetailed
corner construction method whose influence intrigues 20th-century historical
geographers. In Alaska Finns worked as carpenters and other skilled craftsmen. Finnish
influences remaining in Alaska include the Sitka Lutheran Church and the carpentry work
done by Finns on the Russian bishop’s house, the most significant remaining building
from the Russian American era. Sitka Finns later helped form Finnish communities along
the Northwest Coast, in Seattle, Astoria, and San Francisco.
Modern Finnish American immigration to the United States began in 1864 and
continued until 1924, when the immigration gates effectively closed to Finnish
immigrants. By that time, 300,000 immigrants had settled in the United States. Finnish
Canadian immigration began as second-stage migration from the States in the 1880s.
Immigration directly to Canada from Finland began around the turn of the 20th century.
After 1924 Finnish immigration to North America shifted to Canada until the Depression
effectively halted most migration. Although some post-World War II Finnish immigrants
entered the United States, most went to Canada, swelling urban Finnish communities in
Thunder Bay, Toronto, and Montreal. At the beginning of the 1990s, 658,870 Americans
identified themselves as Finnish Americans and 100,000 Canadians identified themselves
as Finnish Canadians.
Most Finnish immigrants between 1864 and 1930 were general workers, people
familiar with agricultural and unskilled labor but unfamiliar with industrial work or urban
life. Men worked in the mining, lumbering, and fishing industries, and they joined
railroad and dock work gangs. Before 1892 women who came largely joined their
husbands or brothers; they provided essential services like room and board, shopkeeping,
and managing the small farms they started with their husbands. After 1892, when the
immigrants were largely young and single men and women, women came to do domestic
work in the major cities while men found work in the steel industry, in logging, and in the
coal-, iron-, and coppermining fields, primarily in the Upper Midwest and the mountain
states. Artisans such as stone carvers, carpenters, painters, tailors, and jewelers joined this
later migration, but the professional people who came were few, mostly journalists,
teachers, ministers, political activists, and adventurers. In spite of the distances separating the sexes, Finnish immigrants primarily married other Finnish immigrants, using
newspapers ads and national summer festivals to meet.
The earliest Finnish immigrants, primarily Laestadians firom northern Finland, around
the Tornio River, and from northern Norway, arrived in 1864 to homestead prairie lands
in south central Minnesota and in 1865 to work in the copper mines in Michigan. The
first Finnish American communities, Cokato, Minnesota, and Hancock, Michigan,
originated from these two groups of immigrants, whose letters home encouraged others to
follow. By 1887, around 21,000 had arrived. Most 19th-century Finnish American urban
communities formed in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in Minnesota, and in the
Pacific Northwest. Finnish immigrants homesteaded in Minnesota, South Dakota, and
along the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington. Urban communities originating
with Finnish sailors also existed in San Francisco, New York City, and Boston.
Immigrants created a prai rie homestead community in New Finland, Saskatchewan, in
1889 and an urban community in Nanaimo, British Columbia,by 1890.
As immigration expanded, Finns moved across the northern tier of die United States.
The permanent Finnish American settlements formed three regions—East, Midwest, and
West—which further subdivided into twelve subregions: (1) New England and upper
New York state; (2) New York City; (3) West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and
northeast Ohio; (4) southern Lake Michigan, including Detroit and Chicago; (5) the
copper country, or the Keweenaw Peninsula, on Lake Superior in Michigan; (6) the ironmining and cutover region of northern Michigan and Wisconsin; (7) the Minnesota Iron
Range and the cutover lands adjacent; (8) western Minnesota and the Dakotas; (9) Rocky
Mountain states (particularly Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho); (10) Oregon and
Washington; (11) San Francisco and Northern California; and (12) Southern California
and Arizona. Each region developed distinctive features based on variables such as where
the immigrants came from in Finland, die time and place the region was settled, the
employment options, and forms of interactions with American neighbors. In the 1990s,
more than half of all Finnish Americans continue to live in the Midwest regions.
Migration between regions affected the cultures that developed. Many Finnish
Americans, for example, trace their family’s origins in the United States to Michigan’s
Keweenaw Peninsula, from which they then continued to migrate to other Finnish
American settlements throughout the nation. Thus, the Copper Country developed a
reputation (which continues) as the pesäpaika (nesting place) of Finnish America. In
addition, from very early days Finnish Americans would settle farmsteads and maintain a
seasonal migration pattern with a nearby urban area. For example, a rural area like
Naselle, Washington, developed a symbiotic connection to Astoria, Oregon; Cokato,
Minnesota, developed a similar relationship with Minneapolis/St. Paul; and Tapiola,
Michigan, with Hancock. Later, mining regions in northern Minnesota developed
connections to Duluth and Minneapolis, just as Upper Peninsula mining and rural
communities developed connections to Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago. Thus, rural
settlements maintained an urban perspective, and tradition dictated where children
migrated when they left the farms.
Within these regions, Finland Swedes concentrated in Massachusetts, New York City,
Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, and California. Sami peoples
settled predominantly in Michigan, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Oregon, and Washington.
Finnish American Indians live primarily in northern Minnesota and in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Since the late 1950s, an additional region has emerged in Florida,
particularly around Lake Worth/Lantana and Tampa/St. Petersburg, where Finnish
Americans and Finnish Canadians joined Finnish nationals in search of the sun. During
the winter, temporary residents transform Lake Worth/Lantana into the largest urban
Finnish American community in the country, a curious contemporary recreation of the
earlier Finntowns that dotted the Finnish American regions across the nation.
Permanent Finnish Canadian settlements formed three regions—the east, the prairie
provinces, and the far west. These communities, largely begun after the Finnish
American communities, reflect a different set of variables based on place of origin, time
of settlement, and employment options. Furthermore, differences between Canadian and
American social and political climates make the Canadian cultural regions even more
distinct. Almost two-thirds of Finnish Canadians settled in Ontario. The second-largest
group settled in British Columbia. Farming communities in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and
Manitoba also developed. In the 1990s, these regions continue to define the Finnish
Canadian population.
A rich body of Finnish American lore with regional and individual variants confirms
this cultural geography. Part of that lore grows out of the strong Finnish American and
Finnish Canadian institutions the immigrants created in their communities—churches,
temperance societies, workers’ halls, cooperatives, and benefit societies. The arts,
particularly community theater, bands, and choirs, flourished at regular local programs
and at regional and national festivals. Hall life included dances and sports exhibitions. In
the larger communities, such activities attained high standards, often involving
professionals hired to organize and direct. Largely literate, Finnish immigrants valued
education and the power of the word. The proverb “Suomalainen uskoo sanan voimann”
(A Finn believes in the power of the word) encouraged the immigrants to create lending
libraries, self-education study groups, and a rich Finnish-language newspaper, serial, and
book-publishing life. The nyrkkilehti (fist newspaper) was a spontaneous creation that
occurred in many immigrant enclaves. This handwritten immigrant newspaper circulated
among friends and local organizations, providing a colorful honest record of immigrants’
lives.
These institutions, even though effectively separating Finnish immigrants from other
Americans, helped them adjust and fit into American culture. The Finnish cooperative
movement illustrates how this worked. Cooperation was a central value to the Finnish
immigrant, illustrated in the many informal cooperative efforts, like the talkoo työ (work
bee), which built the immigrants’ early churches, halls, houses, and outbuildings. The
cooperative spirit promoted efforts at communal living, the best known being Kreeta,
Michigan, a collective farming community on Drummond Island in Lake Huron, and
Sointula (meaning Harmony), the utopian colony (infamous also because stories implied
that the colony had practiced free love), offshore from Vancouver Island in British
Columbia, 1901–1904. By the end of the 19th century, however, the Finns had begun to
create formal Finnish cooperative solutions to consumer issues particularly suited to
Finns living in an American culture.
What they created out of these efforts, finally, was the largest working retail
cooperative in America: the Central Cooperative Exchange, later renamed the Central
Cooperative Wholesale, an organization that united scattered retail and generalmerchandise stores across the Upper Midwest. Their initiative also created an enduring Midwest oil company, the Minnesota-based Mutual Life Insurance Company, and the
Workers Credit Union of Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Nonetheless, the cooperatives
emphasized Finnish solutions for Finnish immigrants, and non-Finns defined it as
clannish behavior, part of the reason for the continuing reputation for clannishness that
Finns have with the general American public who know them.
Finnish American cooperatives took different forms: in urban areas, cooperative
boarding houses, restaurants, groceries, general merchandise, and apartment buildings; in
rural areas, groceries, retail, and general-merchandise stores. Started as buying clubs,
they became full-fledged businesses as strikes and other labor conflicts made buying
difficult. In farming communities, the “co-op,” as it was called, gave new meaning to the
proverb “oma tupa, oma lupa” (Your own cottage, your own freedom). Origin stories for
these rural co-ops tell often how the co-op began after the local merchant promised to pay
a certain price for timber or farm produce, then reneged one too many times on the
agreement. Cooperatives stopped such exploitation and encouraged the immigrants to
make communal consumer decisions that created an intimate ethnic environment where
even Brooklyn, New York, cooperative apartment buildings came complete with
humorous Finnish nicknames (Köngäs 1964.)
In spite of the rich yet separate cultural life, Finnish immigrants never created a united
community to speak to the larger North American world. Finns divided into numerous
factions, some emphasizing spiritual issues, and others emphasizing politics and
economics. Most Finnish immigrants had been members of the Church of Finland
(Lutheran), but in the United States the Lutherans split into three branches, as well as
smaller groups of Methodists, Pentecostals, Congregationalists, and Unitarians. Similarly,
while many immigrants, particularly those who came after 1892, were politically
progressive and organized nationally as Socialists in 1906, by 1914 the Wobblies left the
Federation to form their own group, the Industrial Workers of the World. After 1917 the
Social Democrats split away from those who were joining the Communist Party. Finally,
in 1929, the Central Cooperative split away from the Communists. All of this proved
once again that “If you have four Finns in a room, you’ll get four separate organizations.”
Stories about these factions usually refer to two general categories—“Church Finns”
and “Hall Finns” or, using Finland’s Civil War of 1917–1918 as the source for the
categories, “White Finns” and “Red Finns.” Rhetoric aside, all groups participated in
some form of the cooperatives, and most were active in unions. When strikes occurred,
Finnish halls often served as strike headquarters for all ethnic groups. In this latter
context, Finns developed reputations for troublemaking in the community, and non-Finns
developed stories that talked about the Finns “brazenly marching down the street carrying
a red flag.” This non-Finn lore about the “radical Finns” worked in counterpoint to
Finnish Americas own lore about the sisu (bravery or stubborn determination) that drove
the Finnish workers on against incredible odds.
Finns, the first and largest foreign-language unit in the Socialist Party of America,
remained 17 percent of the mem-bership in 1917. In the late 1920s, they accounted for
more than 40 percent of the Communist Party. For both their labor activities and these
political connections, other Americans racially attacked the Finnish Americans. Although
Finns had earlier developed reputations for hard drinking and fighting, that reputation
took racist overtones when labor troubles began. Epithets like “Finn-LAND-er” and
“dumb Finn” were common, and vigilante attacks occurred. The double racism implicit in statements that Finns were Mongolian and, therefore, Asian hurt so deeply that one
Finnish American group still needed to refute the issue in its 1957 book publication,
Finlandia: The Racial Composition, The Language, and a Brief History of the Finnish
People. All sorts of slurs practiced in Finnish American cultural regions continued well
into the 1970s (Jarvenpa 1976).
In the 1990s, Finnish Americans often tell about this racism practiced against Finns,
racism that either they experienced or know occurred, and they counter the racist attacks
with a repertoire of materials based in ethnic pride. They will speak about the Delaware
Colony, a body of lore that incorporates the beliefs that John Morton, one of the original
signers of the Declaration of Independence, was, in fact, a Finn, and that the American
log cabin begins with Finnish log construction dating back to Delaware. They will speak
of the ancient folk epic, the Kalevala, and the ancient folk instrument, the kantele. They
will speak of Finland’s modern heroes, of the athlete Paavo Nurmi and the composer Jean
Sibelius. They will speak of Finland’s honesty—“the only country to pay their war
debt”—and of Finland’s sisu—a small nation fighting the Russians alone in the 1939–
1940 Winter War.
In addition to the institutional and politically motivated lore, Finnish Americans
developed lore about the immigrant work life. This includes richly detailed stories about
Finnish domestics working for wealthy Yankee employers like John Pillsbury, who
learned to like puuro (Finnish porridge) from his Finnish cook; jokes built around Finnish
mainarit (miners) who use words like horiop (hurry up), vastu mdre (what’s the matter),
and sanomapits (son of a bitch); and even tall tales about Finnish loggers like Otto Walta
in northern Minnesota (Karni 1967). Large oral collections of such Finnish American lore
exist at Wayne State University in Detroit; at the Immigration History Research Center,
University of Minnesota; at the Finnish Heritage Center, Suomi College, Hancock,
Michigan; at the Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota; and at the Iron Range
Research Center, Chisholm, Minnesota.
Finnish Americans themselves recognized early the need to collect their own oral
traditions in a written form. Salamon Ilmonen collected the origin stories of countless
local Finnish American individuals, families, and communities across the country and
published them in a series of volumes from 1919 to 1939, all in Finnish. Excerpts from
some of these, for example in Minnesota, are available in English translations made
during the WPA (Works Progress Administration) period of the 1930s and 1940s. In
addition to Ilmonen, Viljami Rautanen collected the origin stories of the churches, and
Elias Sulkkonen compiled the origin stories of the workers’ move ment within the
Finnish American community. After World War II, members of the aging immigrant
generation began to publish their own community and regional histories, some as
chapbooks, others as monographs. After the 1970s, secondgeneration Finnish Americans
have been prolific authors of memoirs and family histories. In the 1980s, the Immigration
History Research Center at the University of Minnesota became the repository of a
largely third- and fourth-generation collective effort, the Minnesota Finnish American
Family History Project with histories of more than 100 families. The emphasis
throughout these efforts has been to record the collective ethnic culture rather than to
promote achievements of the individual because “Oma kehu haisee” (Self-praise smells
putrid). In spite of this rich ethnic lore born in the Finnish American immigrant experience,
most folklore fieldwork among Finnish Americans has emphasized survivals of folklore
from the old country. Finnish Americans were the exotic people living under the shadow
of the enormous Finnish folk collections developed and maintained in Finland. The
collections of verbal materials from which Elias Lönnrot created the Finnish national
epic, the Kalevala (1835), led early collectors of Finnish Americana to look for similar
treasure troves among the Finnish Americans. Marjorie Edgar, the semiprofessional
folklorist collecting in Minnesota in the 1930s, looked specifically for surviving Finnish
folklore items. Likewise, Richard M.Dorson, in the mid-1940s, went looking for
Märchen (fairy tales) among the Upper Peninsula Finnish Americans. However, Finnish
American immigrants largely represented folk groups from western Finland, and the
Kalevala had been assembled from the collected oral traditions of folk groups in the more
remote regions of eastern Finland. In actual fact, Finnish Americans learned about the
Kalevala more in America, becoming familiar with it because Anglo Americans
expressed interest in this aspect of their culture (Wargelin Brown 1986).
Collectors have never stopped turning to the Finns for survival folklore, and they have
continually discovered and documented a broad variety of old-country verbal and
material-culture traditions embedded in Finnish American life. Dorson, for example,
found old-country stories about the noita (healer) and die tietäjä (seer), as well as jokes
and tall tales from western Finland, when he collected in the Upper Peninsula of
Michigan in the 1940s (Dorson 1952). Ten years earlier, Marjorie Edgar had collected
music, proverbs, and charms, all survivals of Finnish folklore from fieldwork conducted
in Minnesota. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, as the immigrant institutions
disappeared, it was the vernacular log construction that people valued and saved
(Lockwood 1990:24–31). In the 1980s, folklorists discovered in Minnesota how strong
the Finnish tradition of bread making remained, particularly rieska (unleavened rye
bread) and pulla (cardamom-flavored coffee bread). Equally important were the daily
ritual of coffee drinking and the habit of entertaining at the kahvi pöytä (coffee table)
(Kaplan, Hoover, and Moore 1986).
Museums with Finnish American collections attest to the interest in old-country
survivals. A number of open-air museums include Finnish Americans’ folk buildings.
Old World Wisconsin maintains two farmsteads. Embarrass, Minnesota, maintains an
entire historic district created from a farming community. The Honka homestead in
Arnheim, Michigan, and the Wirtanen farmstead near Duluth, Minnesota, provide
examples of small backwoods farmsteads. The National Historic Register identifies
similar buildings and living sites throughout the regions of Finnish America. Museum
collections of Finnish American material objects, while few, emphasize survival
materials as well. The Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, Washington, and the Finnish
Heritage Center at Suomi College, Hancock, Michigan, have largely undocumented
collections. The Cokato, Minnesota, city museum includes a good view of 19th-century
Finnish American homestead life. Peoples’ created museums throughout Finnish
American regions will also display old-country survivals. The Michigan State University
Museum has a significant collection, professionally documented, of materials that include
both old-country and Finnish American objects.
The one survival that attracts everyone’s attention is the sauna, the Finnish steam bath.
Already in the earliest nonFinn stories told about the Finns are references to the sauna, that strange custom brought with the immigrants. It attracted the interest of the average
citizen as well as the professional researcher. Looking for survival folkways, the late-
20th-century researcher discovers that the sauna remains, in many minds, the primary
folkway survival from Finland, practiced by the immigrants and continued by the third,
fourth, and even fifth generations. Immigrant homesteaders, legends record, built their
sauna before cabins. As traditional believers in natural health care, immigrants used the
sauna for massage and cupping (bloodletting done with small animal horns inserted in the
back); immigrant women gave birth in the sauna with the assistance of traditional
midwives. The sauna kept the immigrants clean and healthy. Finnish men, coming home
from the logging camps, would head straight for the sauna to get rid of lice or bedbugs.
Later generations have not continued all of these early practices, but they maintain a
strong belief in the healing power of the sauna. If a person is sick, he or she takes a sauna.
A Finnish proverb still repeated says “Jos ei sauna ja viina ja terva auta niin se tauti on
kuolemaksi” (If a sauna, whiskey, and tar salve don’t make you well, death is imminent).
Not only is the sauna good medicine for respiratory and circulatory problems, it can relax
stiff muscles, cure aches and pains, and relieve stress. Finnish Americans know how to
pronounce the word (SOW-nah) and how to create löyly (steam from the hot rocks) and
practice the rituals for taking a sauna. The saunas in suburban basements and at the
lakeshore attest to the importance that the sauna retains (Lockwood 1978).
Other traditions maintained are less visible to the outsider (and thus less documented
by collectors) yet remain markers of the survival of Finnish folkways. Particularly
important are berry picking, hunting, trapping, woodworking (carpentry, furniture
making, carving), and fiber working (knitting, crocheting, embroidery, lacework, and
weaving). Rag-rug weaving and rag rugs used in the home have become a signature piece
for Finnish Americans, a practice noticed in an exhibition developed by the Michigan
State University Museumin 1990.
Music, too, has been a source of survival folklife. Some have wished the survival had
been the ancient Finnish folk instrument, the kantele, and the immigrant community did
have some kantele players. However, the musical instruments of choice for immigrants
were fiddles and accordians, and they remain the instruments of those who maintain the
traditions (Gallmann 1982; Leary 1988). Some people, like legendary accordianist, Viola
Turpeinen, and Art Moilanen, violinist and 1990 National Heritage Fellow, took these
forms and adapted them to American audiences (Leary 1988; Lockwood 1990). All of
these traditions are enjoying a revival as third- and fourth-generation Finnish Americans
have rediscovered the traditional Finnish American musical repertoire and have created
musical groups with names like Koivun Kaiku (Song of the Birches), a kantele group, and
Ameriikan Pojat (Boys of America), a brass-band ensemble. A few Finnish American
choral groups continue from their origins in the immigrant communities, but most
Finnish American choral singing, like the bands, has disappeared.
Finnish Americans maintain several Finland-based holidays. On December 6, many
communities commemorate Finnish Independence Day, December 6, 1917. During the
Christmas season, Christmas parties (pikku joulu) occur. Laskiainen (a celebration of, and
participation in, winter sports activities) is traditionally Shrove Tuesday. The
Smithsonian Institution film At Laskiainen in Palo, Everyone Is a Finn (1983) reveals
something of how Finnish holidays have been adopted by the larger non-Finnish
community. Some communities also celebrate Kalevala Day (February 28) programs in honor of the Finnish epic. Midsummer celebrations, complete with ìkokkoî (large fire)
burning in the night during the parties, are held during the summer.
Separate from survivals, Finnish American folklore created in the United States and
collected by professional folklorists begins with Dorson, in the 1940s, who recognized
the dialect stories told by both first- and second-generation Finnish Americans (Dorson
1948). This has been a continually fruitful field, even published by Finnish-American
folk authors like Hap Puotinen and Jingo Viitala Vachon. (Tradition Bearers, a 1987 film
by Michael Loukinen, includes a segment on Vachon.) More recently, folklorists like
Yvonne Lockwood have examined unique folk traditions created in the United States,
such things as the “pasty,” a meat pie eaten by Cornish miners and adopted and adapted
by the Finns (Lockwood 1990). Likewise, Marsha Penti has examined a national Finnish
American summer festival, FinnFest USA. Beginning from the Finnish American
immigrant tradition of large summer festivals, FinnFest USA, held annually, alternates
among the various Finnish American regions (Lockwood 1990).
Finnish Americans have created a new culture revolving around the Finnish word sisu,
a unique characteristic of Finns. While the word is known and used in Finland, the term
takes new meaning in the Finnish American community, a badge of honor found on
sweatshirts, hats, and coffee mugs. It has become an explanation for the Finnish
American’s stoicism, independent spirit, and stubbornness, part of a special ethnic
mystique called upon in difficult situations, part of a mantra recited by Finnish
Americans: “Sauna, Sisu, and Sibelius,” the three S’s that describe Finnish American
culture.
Finally, one completely Finnish American folkloric invention has been St. Urho, an
invented Finnish saint reputed to have driven the ubiquitous grasshoppers out of Finland.
St. Urho has become the reason for a holiday commemorated in many Finnish American
communities. Finnish Americans have managed to get the day declared an official day of
commemoration in all fifty states in the nation as well. Not surprisingly, the day is
celebrated March 16, the day before St. Patrick’s Day, and has inspired a collection of
broad dry-wit poems and songs, a color code of purple and green, and an excuse for
greeting cards, parades, and parties. Sources indicate that the origins of the elaborated
ethnic joke are in the state of Minnesota. Finnish Americans use it as a day that permits
pranks and good times (Lockwood 1987).
One of the early Finnish American factions, were the Laestadians, who continue to
maintain a conservative Finnish American lifestyle, based in early Finnish American
experiences. Laestadians, who practice a form of Lutheranism based in active use of the
Finnish language and circumpolar spiritualism rooted in Sami culture, live separate from,
but within, traditional Finnish American cultural regions. As a group, they help validate a
separate Finnish cultural life that continues to be practiced in the communities where they
live. One faction, known as the Esikoisuus (the first born), visibly distinguishes
themselves through clothing and hairstyle choices. Most, however, are unique only in that
they tend to create a separate community with their own cultural activities.
Among the other smaller Finnish folk groups, little if any collecting has been done
from Finland Swedes specifically. Recent efforts to recognize Sami Finns have resulted
in the beginning of a new effort to study and collect their heritage. Their quarterly
journal, Baiki, has become a good source for information. The Karelian Finns, eastern
Finland Finns who emigrated from Finland after World War II when Karelia was taken over by the Russians, have had little scholarly attention given to their traditions. Neither
have the Finnish American Indians, largely Chippewa descendants of Finnish American
fathers or mothers. Their Finnish American lore relates mostly to stories of interracial
relations with their Finnish American relatives and their own personal experiences with
such Finnish folklife as saunas.
K.Marianne Wargelin
References
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Gallmann, Matthews. 1982. Matti Pelto: Finnish American Button Accordion Player. Midwestern
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Jarvenpa, Robert. 1976. Visual Expression in FinnishAmerican Ethnic Slurs. Journal of American
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