Since my last blog post the HUMANA project has progressed very nicely, even though COVID-19 pandemic forced us to cancel our research trips to Sugar Island both in the spring and fall 2020. So that obviously has caused some practical problems, but we were really looking forward to meeting our Sugar Island friends again.
On a positive note our first joint article was published in May 2020 in American Studies in Scandinavia journal. And another positive thing that happened this fall is a grant from the American Finlandia Foundation National. The grant included funds for us to come to Washington, D.C. and give talks at the Finnish Embassy and we hope we can do that next spring and continue to Sugar Island.
Dr. Francis Flavin has been developing new program that makes it easier for us to convert raw data to visualization tools. It will make our research much easier and faster and allows the handling of enormous amounts of data. We have found a lot of new data on Sugar Island community, not only the Finns, but we have data reaching back to the 1850s, which is exciting. We also hope to write something about the Finns and their relations to the Chippewa.