This morning I found Finnish American Lives. It’s a great documentary from 1982 about three generations of a Finnish American family living in Ironwood, Michigan. It’s amazing that you can stream the entire film (45 minutes) online. The site has additional essays on Finnish Americans in the UP, the Sauna and 2nd and 3rd generation Finnish American culture.
I also found a preview for another film about Finnish Americans, Children of Labor: A Finnish American History
Like many Finnish farmsteads in the U.P., the Farm had a sauna. Here’s a trailer for a movie about the significance of the sauna for the Finns. I’d like to find a copy somewhere to watch:
My great grandparents, Elias and Johanna Puotinen immigrated to the United States (6 years apart, 1886/1892) from Evijärvi, Finland. While doing a random search online, I found this video. The landscape looks a lot like the UP.
During the summer of 2002, I spent almost a month with my mom at the Farm. In the morning, after taking a walk, she would work in her sewing room while I sat at the dining room table studying French for my doctoral language exam. In the afternoon, we explored different hiking trails near the Farm. We both usually brought our cameras. She would take pictures while I shot video footage.
To commemorate that wonderful month, my mom crafted a photo book using construction paper, duct tape, card stock and many of the photographs that she had taken. She gave it to me as a thank you:
I love this book. I love how her stories about our month are written around the photos in her neat handwriting. And I love that she took the time to mark the occasion in such a creative and crafty way.
In the spring I plan to have her photo book professionally scanned and to combine it with my video footage and stories in an interactive book. For now, here’s my first effort at combining our stories:
Yesterday I posted More Rocks than Potatoes on Cowbird. It’s about my dad’s classic story of learning the value of hard work and persistence on the farm by picking more rocks out of the soil than potatoes. It was difficult to write. I struggled to make sense of my feelings about it when I learned that they didn’t just clear the field of rocks once to plant the potatoes, they did it every year. Picking rocks once sounded hard, but picking rocks every year, knowing that new ones would pop up the next spring, seemed like too much. My dad understood this rock picking to be a good lesson in life about the necessity of hard work, but I wasn’t so sure. Maybe, I wondered, the better lesson would be to give up on planting potatoes altogether. I’m big into the mantra: work smarter, not harder. But then I put their activity in the context of the Finnish concept of “sisu” and it started to make a bit more sense.
According to many sources that I’ve found, sisu doesn’t translate into English easily. Most frequently, it’s understood to mean guts, inner strength, hardiness, persistence, resilience. It also means a willingness to push beyond one’s physical and mental limits, to act even in the face of insurmountable odds. For some, sisu describes the spirit of the Finns who, having fought so many wars against Russia and lost (almost?) every single one, continued to fight anyway. Maybe the picking of rocks in a field, year after year, knowing that you’ll never get all of them and that new ones will pop up again, is an example of Sisu? I’m still not sure, but it has made me curious enough to want to do a little more researching and thinking about sisu and how it does and doesn’t fit into the sprite of the Puotinen farm and its inhabitants.
Here are a few sources that I’ve found so far:
