In an interview that I conducted with some relatives, they mentioned how many Finnish-Americans from the Amasa area had been recruited to go to the Soviet Union, to the northwestern Russia area of Karelia. They were eventually killed by Stalin. I decided to do a bit of research about it, and came across this film, Letters from Karelia:
For more information, see Disillusionment on the Grandest of Scales: Finnish-Americans in the Soviet Union, 1917-1939
Here are two random bits of information that I just uncovered about my great grandfather, Elias Puotinen. First, he owned his own logging camp in 1912 (source). Second, he sponsored a lot of immigrants coming over from Finland:
Mr. Puotinen was a prominent Finnish gentleman who was at one time manager of the Hematite Mercantile Store and, together with Matt Hurja of Crystal Falls, helped arrange for the immigration of his countrymen to work in the local mines. It is said that Mr. Hurja had agreements with the steamship lines in New York and was so well known that when men from Finland disembarked at New York, they were pinned with a tag which read “Matt Hurja”, and sent to Crystal Falls (source).
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Bonus: Also found this narrative by “Hap” Puotinen (my dad Art’s uncle/Grandpa’s brother) about logging in the UP.
I’ve long been interested in representing the Puotinen Farm land as a character in my farm stories. I’ve never imagined it as merely the passive setting for the action. The first farm film that I created in 2001 attempts to express this through the title, The Farm: An Autobiography. While I’m not sure I still like this title, the goal was to tell the story of the land. I imagined the digital video as the autobiography of the farm. In the second farm film, The Puotinen Women, I made the land one of the four main storytellers. In that digital video, I interspersed the stories of Ines Puotinen, Judy Puotinen, Sara Puotinen and the Farm.
In this story experiment, I’m still working through how to represent the land. Maybe this blog post, Eyes Open, Ears Up—Writing about Place will help.
As Robert Macfarlane writes in The Old Ways, “Landscape is not the passive object of our gaze, but rather a volatile participant…I prefer to take landscape as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil, and building, the sounds…the scents…and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment.”
This past month my son FWA, who is in 5th grade, completed a family heritage project. He decided to do it on the Puotinen family. Since the focus was on the immigrant experience, we talked about Elias and Johanna Puotinen and their journey from Evijärvi, Finland to UP, Michigan in the late 1800s. While his project was not that extensive (a few hours of talking + writing), I became really curious about my grandparents and the immigrant experience. That curiosity led me to do a little more research (which I’ve already posted about on this blog) and to speculate on ways to incorporate their immigrant stories into The Farm project. After talking with Scott and FWA, I (we?) came up with an idea: a RPG, Oregon trail-like video game in which you participate in the process of both emigrating from Finland and then trying to survive/thrive in the UP.
While starting in Evijärvi and paying some attention to the process of traveling from the Old Country to the UP, much of the focus will be on living in the new country. Players will make choices (such as: gender, occupation, urban/rural location, stay in America or return to Finland) as they struggle to survive harsh winters, terrible working conditions, hostile neighbors and as they discover ways to celebrate their heritage and maintain their strong family and community ties.
I don’t know that much about video games (how to play them or how to create them), so I’m hoping that FWA will be interested in helping me. I already have a lot of research about the immigrant experience (and a great resource: my dad, Arthur Puotinen, who did an extensive Oral History about the Finnish immigrant experience while writing his dissertation in the 1970s). And I know that there are some DIY RPG game maker tools available. So, I don’t anticipate that this game will be too time-consuming. I envision it as a fun experiment and a part of the bonus material for this project.
A few resources:
The Farm is located in the heart of the “sauna belt.” Here is a video tour by my dad of the sauna at the Farm. Originally it was a savusauna (smoke sauna), but was later converted into a steam sauna.