A Documentary Film
Pelkie: One Hundred Years of Finnishness in the North Woods
A note to the reader: I imagined how a reporter might write this story and this news release to be sent to local newspapers morphed into this. Enjoy, ML
During the 1971 deer hunting season, Michael Loukinen, a Michigan State University graduate student, was about to begin his doctoral dissertation research on what sociologists call “exchange theory.” He wanted to study how inter-household labor and non-monetary material exchange helps rural communities survive. Funded by a Ford Foundation Fellowship, his advisors: Professors Bo Anderson and Fred Waisanen, the latter was a second generation Finnish American from Point Abbeye. They advised him to go to the Copper Country to find a community to study. Shortly after shooting a four-pointer in Jacobsville, MI, where he had spent his childhood summers on his uncle’s dairy farm, Loukinen found himself in the Baraga County MSU Extension Service office. Dick Breyer, then the MSU Extension Agent, advised, “Go to Pelkie. There is a lot of cooperation out there. You might stay at Sylvia Jokela’s home in the central village area. She is one of the best cooks in the county.”
Loukinen settled into to Pelkie, gained authentic Yooper blubber by devouring Sylvia’s gargantuan servings and fantastic homemade pastries and began visiting virtually all of the homes. His wife, Elaine Foster, then an MSU Anthropology graduate student, joined him and for about three years they lived on Larson Rd, next to Evert, Evelyn and Hildur Larson, then moved to Horoscope Rd across from Ray and Gertie Makela and finally to Voito Vanhaalo’s home in Elo on the east side of the Pelkie Rd just north of the Houghton County line. They made life-long friends with many residents.
Dr. Loukinen recently retired after 40 years of teaching at Northern Michigan University, in Marquette, MI. After writing several sociology articles using his Pelkie data, Loukinen became a documentary filmmaker. His first two films, Finnish American Lives (1982) and Tradition Bearers (1984) won prestigious artistic and historical awards in national juried competition and he was suddenly a credible filmmaker. Four decades and over a dozen documentaries later, he has retired from teaching. Loukinen is now a Sociology Research Associate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at NMU. The Sociologist/Filmmaker is completing a personal scholarly circle by returning once again in to the Pelkie that he came to love, this time to make a documentary film: Pelkie: One Hundred Years of Finnishness in the Northwoods (Tentative title).
The Pelkie that he knew in the 1970s no longer exists. The Pelkie area was for two centuries a seasonal Anishinaabe hunting and fishing site and later a frontier logging settlement known as King’s Landing where French Canadians, Swedes and a mixture of several other Euro American pioneers gathered at Alphonse Gauthier’s store and Tom Bond’s Saloon. Then it was called “Kyro.” A wave of Finnish immigrant ex-miners flowed in because of the 1913 Copper Country Strike. Ex miners found themselves living in “Pelkie” in 1914 when the post office was established.
Like many of the other Finnish American communities in the Western Lake Superior “Sauna Belt,” Pelkie had the full spectrum of ethnic institutions. Worshippers supported two Finnish Apostolic Lutheran churches, and the Suomi Synod’s Kyro Church that later evolved into the current non-ethnic Mission United Evangelical Lutheran Church. Pelkie Finns also supported a Socialist Dance Hall, the Pelkie Co-op, two privately owned stores and at one time, even three gas stations. Now there are three churches, no store and no bars.
By the early 1970s, only about four of the original 1st Generation, Finnish immigrants were still alive and by the early 1980s, they had vanished like waves receding from the beach.
Pelkie’s Finnish immigrants had an average of 6.5 surviving children. Now only three of their 2nd Generation offspring remain in Pelkie – Reuben and Evelyn Turunen and Bertha Mutkala-McClung. A few others, originally from Pelkie, live in neighboring communities. Only these remnants of the 2nd Generation and their children, the immigrants’ grandchildren (3rd Generation) remain to tell the story.
Most of this 3rdand virtually all of the 4th generation left the community to build families and careers in the metro areas of our country. Of the 3rd generation, 70% left Pelkie, only 7% returned to live in Pelkie. (Statistics from Loukinen research.) Those who remained usually inherited a family farm, business or other capital. After their parents’ funerals, the “leavers” seldom return. Nevertheless, they still carry a lingering deep emotional attachment to their home community and a few heartstrings connected to a faint ethnic identity.
Dairy farming gradually withered and farms were about to become vacant. Around 1985 a Mennonite family came from Illinois and another from Wisconsin. Then a small chain migration came to Pelkie from the Dawson Creek area of British Columbia, followed by migrants from all over the nation and even from foreign countries. They have their own church and school and keep to themselves socially. Most work in the forestry occupations, some maintain small beef cattle herds and a few families produce and sell eggs, jam, pallets, farm machinery and firewood. They find it easier to live a biblically disciplined life in rural communities.
A few back-to-the-land counter culture people entered in the 1970s. And then in the 1990s the Ojibwe Casino and the Baraga Correctional Facility brought jobs into the area. Casino workers and prison guards do not interact much with the few remaining Finnish Americans nor the Mennonites. Pelkie is no longer a community where “everyone was in the same boat,” with almost everyone being related to or knowing one another and sharing a common ancestral culture. It is fragmented. As Loukinen drives past homes on the back roads where his friends once lived, Loukinen now feels a lonely, almost ghostly sense of loss and almost every home triggers memories.
Michael Loukinen’s award-winning documentaries have all been created from the point of view of the people featured. People tell their own story rather than have an outside narrator telling viewers what they are seeing. Current and former residents will have to tell their Pelkie story. This style of filmmaking requires an enormous commitment to editing because one has to string together a story from what people have said. If he were to narrate the film himself and just cut in a few remarks from the residents, editing would be simple, quick and expensive. The project is burning $117 a day, 5-6 days a week, every week, just to do the PRELIMINARY editing.
His team has video-recorded interviews with many Pelkie residents, especially Dan Maki, former Papin Road farm boy, now a retired History Professor from Finlandia University. Also helping are Dr. Hilary Virtunen, Director of Nordic Studies (FU) who has published articles on aspects of Finnish American folk culture and especially her student researchers. On the team are outstanding video producers Kristen Ojaniemi (Bruce Crossing), who is using her video productions as a way of searching for her Finnish American identity.
Alex Maier (Marquette) edited Loukinen’s recent PBS film, Winona: A Copper Country Ghost Town (2016). He leans toward recording images of wild landscapes and is becoming an expert at drone video recording. Since he is both video recording and editing, he is learning how to organize an enormous amount of audio and images information from beginning to the end and he is seeing how a film evolves based upon capturing extremely high quality content. Completing the team is Dr. Yvonne Hiipakka-Lockwood, a retired MSU Professor of Folklore who has published on the sauna, rag rugs and foods as sources of ethnic identity. The team is very, very well suited for this undertaking.
The project has thus far struggled with an enormous amount of unpaid labor and supported by a small grant from the Finlandia Foundation National Chapter and through Up North Films (at NMU) DVD sales, and contributions made to the NMU Foundation. Only a few followers of the Pelkie Documentary Project Facebook page have donated. This undertaking needs support.