Suomalaisten historiaa Amerikassa

Minnesotan radiosta löytyy pitkä juttu suomen historiasta otsikoituna "Finland Was a Poor Country". Jutussa mainitaan pulkanlaskujuhla Laskienen. Kaivosyhtiö kuvailee suomalaisia sanoin: "A surly, troublesome lot" and complained about their socialist tendencies."

Suomalaiset eivät alistuneet kurjiin työoloihin, vaan menivät lakkoon, mutta siitäkään ei hyvä seurannut: "That winter, timber workers went on strike, and lost. Blacklisted from the mines and the lumber camps, the Finns had one other opportunity - the chance to homestead a hundred and sixty acres of some of the worst farmland in America."

Ainoastaan suomalaisille kelpasi "jättömaa". Sanottiin, että suomi oli ainut kieli, jota jättömaa ymmärsi: " Much of the land the settlers farmed was called stump farm land - land the timber companies had logged over and left - and no one but the Finns seemed to want it. It was said that Finnish was the only language the stumps understood. Winter temperatures in the area often dropped to 40 or 50 degrees below zero. Esther Norha's family homesteaded near what became the Finnish farming community of Embarrass."

Jutun kakkososa kertoo, että suomalaiset naiset veivät feminismiä Amerikkaan: "In this country, Finnish immigrant women were active in the suffrage movement. In Duluth, they tried to organize a union of domestic workers and published a daily radical feminist newspaper."

Sosialismikaan ei ollut vieras aate suomalaisille: "Finnish immigrants were the first in the nation to found a foreign-language group of the American Socialist Party."

Suomalaiset kohtasivat syrjintää, epäiltiin, että suomalaisilla ei ollut sielua: "Finns often faced hostility and discrimination from others. Their radical politics were part of the reason, but there were others, too. The Finns were known as "clannish." They had a strange, difficult language; their beloved sauna, was seen as an outlandish, barbaric custom. Finns had a reputation not just as troublemakers, but as hard drinkers and knife fighters. An American newspaper writer once questioned whether Finns possessed souls. The word "Finlander" became a derisive term of both ethnic and racial prejudice."

Suomalaisia pidettiin aasialaisina: "Racial prejudice against Finns sprang from a belief that they were related to Mongolians. Some 19th century scientists cited the Finns' exotic language, which is completely unrelated to other European languages, as evidence that Finns were racially unrelated to Europeans as well. It was said that they descended from a tribe that migrated from Mongolia. At a time when federal law barred all immigration from Asia, a federal immigration committee investigated the Finns' racial background, examining them for such physical characteristics as small eyes, high cheekbones, round heads, or stocky stature."

Suomalaisten kutsumanimiä, Kiinanruotsalainen(aika paha): "China Swede" was one term, "roundhead" was another."

Shineworldin kautta löytyi linkki mm. näihin kahteen kuvaan. Katsokaapas kuvia tarkkaan ennen kuin luette kuvien alla olevat kommentit ja yrittäkää sanoa, mitä "ihmeellistä" noissa kuvissa on. Olen hämmästynyt. En tiennyt, että tuollainenkin on mahdollista.