FINLAND  The earliest traces of settlements in Finland date from around 8500 BC. And just like their cousins in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, these early people were hunter-gatherers. Since the Finns did not have Vikings there is not much known of their early history except from archeological findings. Around 5300 BC pottery first appeared in Finland. An extensive network of exchange existed between the Finns and Northeastern Europe around this time. Flint from Scandinavia and amber from the Baltic region has been found in archeological sites. Rock paintings seemingly related to shamanistic and totemistic belief systems have been found, especially in Eastern Finland. 
Elks, people and a boat at the Astuvansalmi rock painting site | 
Female figure with a bow, a rarity among rock drawings. Found at the Astuvansalmi rock painting site |
Around 3200 BC the Indo-European speakers appear, just as in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The Battle-Axe culture brought agriculture and animal husbandry to Finland late, around 2000 BC. Further inland the hunting-gathering lifestyle stayed for a longer while. In the early Iron Age Finns appear for the first time in a written document but it's unclear if it's the present Finnish people that Tacitus is referring to. The first Scandinavian documents mentioning a "land of the Finns" are two runestones dating from the 11th century. It doesn't appear that the Vikings settled in Finland although some Swedish settlements have been found. By the beginning of the Bronze Age, around 1200 B.C., proto-Finnish or Finnic tribes were geographically divided. Those in southwestern Finland were heavily influenced by Scandinavian cultures (Sweden, Denmark, Estonia), while those in the interior and eastern districts had ties with peoples of the Volga region. A series of crusades by the expanding Swedish Kingdom between the 1150s and 1293 was the vehicle for spreading the Roman Catholic church into Finland. By the time of the Lutheran Reformation in the early sixteenth Century, the Swedish crown had strong control of colonial Finland, and a modified estate system forced Finnish peasants to participate in the wars of their Swedish lords. The destruction of Finnish settlements and crops, as well as large population losses, resulted from conflicts between the Swedish and Russian empires. By the mid-eighteenth century strong Finnish separatist movements were growing. Russia finally conquered Finland during the Napoleonic Wars of 1808-1809, annexing it as an autonomous grand duchy. The nineteenth Century was a period of coalescence of Finnish national consciousness in scientific thought, politics, art, and Literature, as exemplified by Elias Lönnrot's 1835 compilation of Finnish and Karelian rune songs in the famous Finnish epic poem, the Kalevala. This movement served as a counterpoint to a growing Russification of Finnish institutions, and Finland declared its independence immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1917. However, like Russia the new Finnish state was immediately embroiled in a civil war, the result of growing class tension between property owners (the counter-revolutionary "White" forces) and landless farm, forest, and factory workers (the "Red" forces) who wanted a socialist state. The scars from that strife had not entirely healed when Finland was united by its conflicts with the Soviet Union during World War II. Finland surrendered several eastern Territories amounting to 10 percent of its area, and 420,000 Karelian Finns in those ceded areas chose to migrate across the newly formed national boundaries to Finland, requiring a massive resettlement and rural land-reform program. After World War II the Finnish parliamentary state actively pursued an official policy of neutrality combined with expanded trade and cultural contacts with the Soviet Union, a political adaptation known as the Paasikivi-Kekkonen Line.Swedish is the second official language of Finland and is spoken by about 6 percent of the population. Living primarily in the southwestern part of the country, Swedish colonists and Swedish-speaking Finns had for centuries been the source of a ruling elite. Swedish was the language of Commerce, the courts, and education, and Finnish was regarded as a peasant language until the nationalist movement of the nineteenth century advanced Finnish as an official, written, and cultural language of the majority. Political tensions arising from this ethnolinguistic division have largely faded as the Swedish-speaking minority declines in size and assimilates through frequent marriage with Finnish speakers. By contrast, Finland's 4,400 Saami or Lapps have largely avoided assimilation into the cultural mainstream, having been displaced from the southern part of the country by northward colonizing Finns over the past 2,000 years. Separateness is now reinforced as much by the economic marginality and limited educational opportunities in Finnish Lapland as by cultural-linguistic enclavement. Gypsies have lived in Finland since the sixteenth century and, perhaps, have endured the greatest prejudice of any minority. They number between 5,000 and 6,000, and in recent decades Government measures have attempted to improve their economic situation and mitigate overt discrimination. 
| This runestone documents an 11th century Swedish Viking who died in Finland |
FINNISH IMMIGRATION TO AMERICA The first Finns in North America came as colonists to New Sweden in 1638. When the colony was abandoned to the Dutch in 1664 the Finns remained, working the forest. But nothing is known about their descendants. A second colonial effort involved Finns in the Russian fur trading industry in Alaska in the 1840s and 1850s. When Alaska was transferred to the United States in 1867 some of the Sitka, Alqska Finns moved down to communities developing along the northwest coastline, such as Seattle and San Francisco. Main Finnish immigration occurred primarily between the years 1864 and 1924. These early Finnish immigrants did agricultural work and unskilled labor, some worked in mines. They lived in the mining region of Michigan and in the homestead lands of western Minnesota, South Dakota, Oregon and Washington. For more information see http://finland.fi/History/ |
