Apurahat ja residenssipaikat

Tiede

Deep Mapping the “Uncharted Territories” of Finnish Immigrant History

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

This transdisciplinary project creates a multilayered and multisensory digital map platform to challenge entrenched assumptions about Finnish immigrant history in North America. By allowing platform users to layer maps, narratives, photographs, soundscapes, statistics, and archival documents, the project provides new ways of seeing complicated claims on place, belonging, and history. Through the digital map platform, Finnish immigrant history is situated not only in the community’s own significant cultural and everyday places, but also over time in the changing contexts of the physical environment, Indigenous place-views, state-imposed colonial frameworks, and overviews of historical population/economic data. The project encourages dialogue among Finnish society, immigrant communities, and scholars about the assumed “natural” place of Finns in Canada and the USA. To successfully develop this ambitious map platform, I will collaborate with University of Saskatchewan’s HGIS Lab, engage Finnish immigrant communities, conduct extensive archival research, and create reflexive ethnographic photographs, soundscapes, and interviews. The project will be communicated to academic audiences (3 articles, conferences) but connecting to public dialogues on Finnishness, belonging, and place is of central importance. Ways to accomplish this include: a photography & soundscape exhibit, a public forum on Finns & Colonialism Abroad, and events where people can use and discuss the map platform.

This transdisciplinary project fostered opportunities to engage with the history of Finnish settlement in North America, and specifically the Canadian province of Ontario, from new perspectives that allow deeper insights on complicated claims on place, belonging, and history. Through the project’s digital map, exhibit, presentations, and articles, the project has invited Finns, Finnish North Americans, and others to think about the ways Finnish migrant-settler history is entangled with the contexts of settler colonialism, extractive industry, and the environment.

The project involved field work in historic Finnish settlement areas, archival research, community workshopping, photography, soundscape recording, GIS mapping, and the compilation of census materials. Artistic practices, learning from Indigenous (Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee) cosmologies, and attunement with the more-than-human world have significantly marked the project. The project paid particular attention to the ways heritage, memory, community, and identity work draw on multiple temporalities of place, with the past, present, and future all impacting how we understand ourselves and our position in the world.

While the focus of the project was Finnish Canadians in Ontario, its approach and analysis are broadly applicable. The project was an exploration of whether multisensory dissemination and respect- and care-based community engagement can lead to fruitful new dialogues, beyond those enabled by traditional academic approaches. The project can be considered a success if even a few people are inspired to return to their important and beloved family stories and histories of migration and settlement, to add new layers that situate them in the social, political, environmental, and cultural contexts that surround them.

For project results and future updates, please visit: www.samirasaramo.com/aboutproject

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