Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America: Rethinking Finnish Experiences in Transnational Spaces

Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America approaches settlement and migration from a range of directions and represents, as Gunlög Fur notes in the book's afterword, a welcome “first effort to collect scholarship on Nordic involvement in settler colonialism in the Americas” (287). Focusing on settler colonialism as both a historical process and analytical category, the volume builds on previous work by historians outlining Nordic involvement in European colonial expansion (Ipsen and Fur 2009). Previous historical works on Finnish migration to North America (Kero 1974, 1997; Kostiainen 1990, 2014) have to date “disconnected Finns from broader context of colonial conquest in North America,” or otherwise described them as “benevolent colonizers,” predisposed to understand and connect with Indigenous peoples (Lahti and Andersson 7–8; Skurnik 38). This book both problematizes and fills a gap in these approaches by showing how traditional histories of Finnish migration are missing critical engagement with settler colonial frameworks. It furthermore joins other recent works in highlighting the transnational connections Finnish settler-colonists engaged with, both in terms of mobility and communication (see Blanck and Hjorthén 2021). Each chapter addresses how Finns acted as settlers engaged with the production of settler colonial narratives or otherwise benefitted and took advantage of settler colonial structures. The editors identify the book as “trying to decolonize the scholarship on Finnish migration histories, by exposing these foundational myths, by linking the Finnish experience to settler colonialism, and by treating the Finns as settler colonizers, as actively engaging in the settler project” (8). In this regard, the book is an overwhelming success and will find readership in those engaged in both migration and Finnish studies broadly.The chapters as a whole explore the experiences of Finns in the context of North American settler colonialism, offering a series of perspectives that have not previously been applied to Finnish migration or history. The chapters are united in addressing the concept of settler colonialism: “a structure rather than an event” (Saramo 212), “shaping individual experiences and mindsets, as well as individual engagement with those settler colonial framings” (Lahti 262). While Finland was not an explicit colonial power, the collected chapters show how individuals, identified as settlers, writers, workers, and researchers of backgrounds with varying privilege, demonstrated colonial complicity that allowed them advantages in settlement and further benefit from power structures that disenfranchised Indigenous peoples. The chapters assess how settlers engaged with the land, the people, and the structures in place that allowed for their particular settlement success in “modern North America, which has never been decolonized but remains settler colonial” (Hieta 181).Divided into three sections, chapters focus on historiography, life writing, and literary analysis, respectively, intertwined within each section to give a multifaceted presentation of approaches to the settler-colonist. Major themes of the chapters are reflected in its organization in sections, including a connection to the land, the creation of settler colonial identities at the time of settlement and in present day, and life-writing and correspondence as engaging with settler colonial narratives and legacies. A strength of the volume is the diversity of sources drawn on for the research, including early 1800s fiction, newspaper articles, correspondences, scholarly discourses, maps, settler life writings, and looted artifacts (Lahti and Andersson 4).The first section, “Taking the Land,” with chapters by Johanna Skurnik, Justin Gage, Aleksi Huhta, and Johanna Leinonen, focuses on the processes of acquiring land, disseminating knowledge, and building community by settler colonials in locations such as the New Sweden colony in Delaware and Sugar Island, Michigan, as well as across utopian Finnish migration histories and a less studied colony in Itabo, Cuba. The second section, “Contested Identities,” has chapters by Sirpa Salenius, Rani-Henrik Andersson and Rainer Smedman, and Erik Hieta, steering conversation toward racialist thinking in the construction of layered identities in settler encounters and self-perceptions in literature from the era, the movements of two socialist settlers, and the development of the North American Sámi movement. The third section, “Settler Narratives and Legacies,” gives study of settler writing by Samira Saramo, ethnic myths in Finnish American literature by Roman Kushnir, and an individual explorer's colonial legacy by Janne Lahti, as well as an afterword by Gunlög Fur (Lahti and Andersson 10–11).A strength of the volume is the way that historical studies of individuals and locations of colonization are presented intertwined with literary analysis of fiction and life writing from the period of settlement, allowing for a richness in perspectives and approaches that further underscores the value of a settler colonial approach to Finnish migrant history. The chapters successfully problematize previous studies and approaches to Finnish migration and settlement, most notably romanticized historical images of migrants from Finland as exceptional immigrants in their more positive relationship with nature and Indigenous peoples, in “sharp contrast with the majority of other Europeans in North America” (Kushnir 235). A theme of renaming as a settler-colonist action is the focus of Skurnik's chapter and is a theme addressed at least in passing across other chapters. Several chapters passingly engage with Finns’ shifting racial identifications from a consideration as “Mongols” in the late 1800s racial hierarchy to “preferred immigrants” by Finland's independence in 1917 (Saramo 214). While these subthemes could have received more explicit development, especially in relation to the framing of settler colonialism, they offer fruitful connections for future works.This is an important volume that challenges commonly held assumptions and methodological frames for Finnish experiences in migration and transnational spaces. By bringing together chapters across disciplines, the book's thematic division into three groups is complemented by differing approaches spanning the historical and literary. The collected chapters show that colonial complicity is a past that Finland has only begun to reckon with, and this book offers a clear leap in problematizing previous histories of Finnish migration and settlement. It highlights colonial complicity and the power structures that Finnish settlers from a range of backgrounds and with varying goals benefitted from and fit into upon their arrival in the Americas. This important contribution will find readership amongst those engaged with Finnish migration across disciplines, as well as researchers and students of social history and Indigenous studies.