Bear visiting the kitchen window at Birch Lake; photo taken by Greg Hanson

Amelia, my adult child, and I are boarding flights in mid-June, first to Helsinki and then to Oslo, all with the aim of arriving at a place between those two – the Forest of Finns in Sweden.

We’re off to discover an answer to that question, “Why did our ancestors leave their homelands and settle themselves on land of the Ojibwe?” As Amelia wrote about our trek—

We bend and shift

Our souls and our hearts

We move at paces unannounced[1]

We don’t know what we’ll find. We’ll go to a place called Mattila, a old Finn farm with a smoke sauna and smoke kitchens. [I grew up just around the bay from another place called Mattila, this one on Birch Lake in Minnesota. What has that Mattila to do with the one we’ll go to. Both, I presume were Finnish?] Not far from Mattila, we may find my great-great-grandfather’s grave.

We’ll be there for Midsummer. We’ll probably follow the Swedish custom of dancing around a pole raised in a field. For sure we’ll hike with others to a flat rock on which we’ll dance to welcome summer as Forest Finns have done for hundreds of years.

We’ll be holding in our hearts the similarities between the Finns who went to Northern Minnesota and the Ojibwe they displaced there–

• Both cultures practice shamanism.
• Both consider bears their close relatives.
• The Finnish sauna and the Ojibwe sweat lodges are both heated with rocks, both are places of purification, both are holy.
• Women farmed and were respected quite equally with men in both groups.
• Both cultures tended to be communal.
• Both cultures used fire in agriculture and to replenish the health of forests
• Both were hunter-and-gatherer cultures whose people were comfortable moving from place to place.
• Each culture consider the land they are on as home, themselves as part of the land.
• Both groups crafted much of their daily needs from birchbark and other natural materials – shoes, backpacks, bowls, lodgings.
• Each group’s culture and language and traditions were disrespected by the more dominant, hierarchical cultures that closed in on them.

We didn’t know any of this two years ago. Now I know that my great-grandparents left the forest in Scandinavia, to which their ancestors had moved four hundred years earlier, because they felt hemmed in by people who thought themselves to be superior to the Finns. By 1880 when they left, they often had no food because their means of providing for themselves had been outlawed. My great-grandparents came to Ojibwe land and joined the European settlers already in Minnesota in hemming in the Ojibwe. My ancestors appeared to be European, even though Finnish people are not genetically of European stock and do not, to this day, consider themselves Scandinavian. However, my ancestors chose to pass as Swedes. They did not let their descendants know that they were Finns. Did any of them learn from the Ojibwe? Did they all reject the culture they came from?

We are fools on a journey

We all always were

We are light on a journey

And light dances and swirls

From water and air

Bringing light to new soil

We carry it all on our backs

I know now that there is, and there was, a vibrant Findian culture in Northern Minnesota. Many Ojibwe and Finnish people recognized their affinity. But we didn’t. I grew up outside of both the Finnish and the Ojibwe cultures.

But, maybe, just maybe, Findian is the culture Amelia and I are choosing to claim. Whatever our ancestors chose and whatever their reasons, we two are now carrying this history and these connections “on our backs.”

Our journey’s unclear

It always will be

We never can see where it leads

But light brings us back

It does and it has

Before and again and again

We are children of light

And we leap off the edge

Seeking truth

Something new

Something pure

Or maybe just something messy. We will go back, the first that we know of from our lineage, to the land my great-grandparents left. We take the mystery in our hearts, knowing that we know nothing.

We’ll be letting you know where our leap lands us. Maybe, just maybe, some bear spirit will discover us there in the forest of the Finns as this bear came to our house at Birch Lake.

[1] All quoted lines are from a poem by Amelia Hanson