Savo-Karelians

[Loddfafner]

A pamphlet, The Log Cabins of New Sweden, mentions that the main settlers of the New Sweden colony were not just Finnish convicts, but specifically Savo-Karelians. I am hoping that the forum Finns may be able to inform me as to just what those are. Apparently, their culture was just compatible enough with the Indians of the Delaware Valley (the Leni-Lenape) that they were able to communicate with them and get good deals in the fur trade, and then show the Germans and English how to penetrate the frontier.

The specific customs include sweat lodges/saunas, boys becoming initiated into manhood by killing a bear, slash-and-burn agriculture, and relations with certain animals (reindeer/white-tailed deer). The Savo-Karelians also introduced log cabin construction to America.

The pamphlet refers to a book called The American Backwoods Frontier by Terry Jordan as its source.

[The Ripper]

Sounds like that pamphlet had a deal of romanticizing in it. :D

Savo-Karelians, for all that I can gather, would be the population of eastern Swedish-ruled Finland (more specifically the historical provinces of Savonia and Karelia), that was used to settle various other parts of the Swedish realm at the time.

http://jares.ktweb.fi/images/histormaakunnat_337x500.jpg

Forest Finns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Finns)

Tornedalians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornedalians)

Ingrian Finns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrian_Finns)

So to clarify, there is no Savo-Karelian identity or group as such, it it seems the term is simply meant to cover the two historical provinces from where most of the migrants originated. Eastern Finland was of course, for all intents and purposes, a frontier in itself as much as the New World in those days. :D

[The Ripper]

Wikipedia on New Sweden's Finnish influence:


Finnish influence

The colonists came from all over the Swedish realm. The percentage of the Finns in New Sweden grew especially towards the end of the colonization.[21] The year 1664 saw the arrival of a contingent of 140 Finns. In 1655, when the ship Mercurius sailed to the colony 92 of the 106 passengers were listed as Finns. Memory of the early Finnish settlement lived on in place names near the Delaware River such as Finland (Marcus Hook), Torne, Lapland, Finns Point and Mullica.[22]

A portion of them were known as Forest Finns, people of Finnish descent living in the forest areas of Central Sweden. The Forest Finns had principally immigrated from Savonia in Eastern Finland to Dalarna, Bergslagen and other province in central Sweden during the late 16th and early to mid 17th centuries. Their relocation had started as part of an effort by Swedish king Gustav Vasa, to expand agriculture to these uninhabited parts of the country. The Finns in Savonia traditionally farmed with a slash-and-burn method which suited better for pioneering agriculture in vast forest areas. It is notable that this was the method used in farming by the native Indians of Delaware as well.[23]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sweden#Finnish_influence

[Motörhead Remember Me]

Sounds like that pamphlet had a deal of romanticizing in it. :D



I agree.

What the eastern (Forest) Finns had in the luggage was several generations of experience in living in the periphery, as their ancestral homes were the spearheads of human settlements which they cut into the big forests of Eastern Finland/Russia and later in Sweden and Norway.
What these people were mainly driven by to live in the perifery was their farming method which required vast areas which gave large crops of rye but also the eternal and stubborn will of simple and poor people to be the masters of their own lives and live as little as possible affected by oppression and taxation.
The farming method is presumed to have been invented by eastern Slavs and then perfected by the Forest Finns. The groundbreaking thing was that coniferous (spruce, pine) forrests could be farmed by certain slash and burn techniques. Before that all farming was limited to the fertile soils near waters and temperate forests, which are not that common in the north.
Their lifestyle include fishing, hunting, trading, animal husbandry as well as farming.
Living in such a symbiosis with the wilderness creates a certain relation to it and maybe this was the thing that both Native Americans and Finns could easily understand and respect in each others cultures.

But the bear rituals are indeed super old and super intresting. It's known that all Eurasian peoples (from Scandinavia through Siberia to Japan, the Ainu people) and North American Indian tribes had similar and not so similar but related to the bear rituals and taboos. The core of this is essentially that where-ever there are bears, there are humans. Humans and bears compete for the same nutrition (fish, meat and berries) and humans developed fear, respect and even hatred towards this competitior.