Post by: Saara Kekki As present-day islanders will tell us, Frank Aaltonen was one of the first Finns on the island and quickly rose to prominence (see also Rani Andersson’s post on Aaltonen’s politics and Justin Gage’s on land ownership). Our research supports this view, especially when it comes to the variety of positions he …
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Frank Aaltonen, Oskari Tokoi, and Native Americans
(Blog adapted from Socialist Visions of American Dreams: The Finnish Settler Lives of Oskari Tokoi and Frank Aaltonen by Rani-Henrik Andersson & Rainer Smedman in Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America: Rethinking Finnish Experiences in Transnational Spaces Rani-Henrik Andersson, Janne Lahti (eds.) In the summer of 1921, two Finnish immigrants met on the streets …
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PI’s Blog 2021-2022
The Humana project has been going on now for about four years and is gradually winding down. While this has been exciting research it has also posed us some challenges. Especially difficult was the period of COVID-19 pandemic. We could not, for example, conduct field work and archival research in Sugar Island and Hancock, Michigan …
Changing Sugar Island: A Study of Twentieth-Century Finnish American Settlement, Part 3
This is the third post of three in series called Changing Sugar Island: A Study of Twentieth-Century Finnish American Settlement. Look for the other two posts in the menu above. In 1938, Finnish Americans owned 83 of the 309 homes on Sugar Island. The Finns had a higher rate of homeownership than other residents. Even …
Changing Sugar Island: A Study of Twentieth-Century Finnish American Settlement, Part 2
This is the second post of three in series called Changing Sugar Island: A Study of Twentieth-Century Finnish American Settlement. Look for the other two posts in the menu above. For the second of three blog posts about Finnish American migrants to Sugar Island, Michigan and their use of the land, I will focus on …