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

(Post-it notes are to remind birds that glass is hard.)

Amelia, my adult child, and I are boarding flights June 15th, 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 follow up on the question, “Why did our ancestors leave their homelands and settle themselves on land of the Ojibwe?” We might discover something about further questions, “Why were my grandmother’s people so similar to the people on whose land they settled?” and “Did they ever recognize the connections?” 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 community of cabins called Mattila that sit on an old Finn farm with a smoke sauna and smoke kitchens. The Birch Lake house that the bear above visited is down the lake from another settlement named Mattila. What has that Mattila to do with the one we’ll go to? How similar are the forests they rest in?

Not far from Mattila, in the churchyard at Torsby, we will look for my great-great-grandfather Pål Olsson Moijainen’s grave.

We’ll be there at 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. For hundreds of years, Forest Finns have celebrated Midsummer by dancing on large rocks to the sound of accordion and harmonica and fiddle.

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

• 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 considers 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 these commonalities two years ago. We didn’t even know that Grandma was Finnish. Her entire ancestral culture had been hidden from us.

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. They participated 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. In fact, they spoke negatively of Finnish people themselves.

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

We know now that there is, and there was, a vibrant Findian culture in Northern Minnesota. Many Ojibwe and Finnish people recognized their affinity. But my family 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 “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 that my great-grandparents left. We take the mystery in our hearts, knowing that we know nothing.

We’ll be telling you where our leap lands us. Maybe, just maybe, some bear spirit will discover us there in the forest of the Finns like the bear who came for breakfast at our house by Birch Lake.

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