Black Finns

[Harkonnen]

On New Shores includes a chapter called “The Finns of Embarrass, Minnesota,” and the writer strives from the outset to expose scandal while visiting the fiercely Finnish community in northeastern Minnesota, fueled by the prejudices of his local guide.

In Embarrass — and in the Finnish communities through which Bercovici traveled by auto from Duluth — the starkest symbol of this resistance was clear to him in the arrangement of the farmstead: “[A]lways there was one little building too many. Generally, it was a square, squat log house, which seemed to be half in the ground, with a wide door and a blind window.” The writer fails to find any sin beyond a certain standoffishness in the Finns he talks to, but he freely quotes the guide, a man named Hall, for a more sinister view of these people of the marsh edges: “[T]he Christian Finns are all right… like the Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes we have in this State…. But the black Finns of Embarrass are not Christians at all. They believe in witchcraft. Every family has its own witch-house close by its living-quarters. And as often as a good Christian says his prayers, these black Finns visit their little witch-houses. It is a funny sight to see the whole family, each one wrapped in a large white sheet, going to this little house to pray to some deity. Now these black Finns, too, are good workers, but we know enough about them to keep away from them.”

Bercovici confirms that this was not a singular impression, stating that other locals were convinced that the sauna was a place for strange and exotic worship. Wandering north from St. Paul, he had first visited the Danish community of Askov, Minnesota, and praised the disciplined order of the community’s Scandinavian immigrants, who were eager to assimilate, perfecting their English faster than any other nationality. But he paints a stark contrast in Finnish Embarrass, where no two Finns and no two houses are alike.

Bercovici predicted that it would take at least two generations for Finns to shake the sauna habit



The caption to this engraving, “The Black Finns,” from On New Shores by Konrad Bercovici (1925), addresses the perception that the Finns were uniquely alien among North American immigrants; their peculiar language, penchant for radical politics, and practice of communal bathing set them apart.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/steamoflife/p...ite-of-cold/8/

[Harkonnen]

Finnish man saying prayers to Tapio



As black as it gets.

[Harkonnen]

Glorious monument of the Black Finns



The Cokato savusauna, built in 1868, was moved from its original roadside location because non-Finnish neighbors complained about public nudity and demanded its removal. It is now a proud monument to Finnish pioneers at a well-traveled rural corner.

[Komintasavalta]

The concept of Black Finns as a more savage type of Finns who were unassimilable to civilized society is similar to the concept of Black Tatars (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Татары_(этноним)):

Chinese medieval historians divided the Tatars (in a broad sense) into three parts [11]:

- _White Tatars_ are nomads living south of the Gobi Desert along the Great Wall of China. Most of them were onguts. They were influenced by Chinese culture, and politically obeyed the Khitan, and later the Jurchen.
- _Black Tatars_ lived in the steppe and were engaged in cattle breeding. They obeyed their "natural" khans and despised the white Tatars "because they sold their freedom to foreigners for silk rags." Kereites and Mongols were included in the number of black Tatars [12].
- _Wild Tatars_ - South Siberian tribes of hunters and fishermen (the so-called "forest peoples"), including the ancestors of modern Buryats, Tuvinians and Evenks. They did not know the khan's authority and were ruled by elders.

https://www.nmu.edu/upperpeninsulast..._article_2.pdf:

Called puukkojunkkari or the "knife-fighters" in Finland, they soon earned the names "Black Finns" or "Jack Pine Savages" by the Americans because of their constant drunken state and frequent fights in Hibbing's saloons. [...]

The Marxist "Red Finns," along with the "Black Finns," were seen as distinctly inferior to the middle-class immigrants who had more effectively assimilated American political and cultural norms. Thus, middle-class Finnish immigrants denounced the activities of "Red" and "Black" Finns, thereby reinforcing their "white" status among Anglo-Protestant Americans. Further, Anglo-Protestant Americans recognized a racial difference between "white" Finns and "Black" or "Red" Finns.

[Komintasavalta]

Black Finns are also more Mongoloid than White Finns (https://mlpp.org/21-day-forum/topic/tribal-membership/):

My grandma and her family culturally identified as "black Finns" (dark haired, dark eyes, sometimes dark white skin). My grandma was in favor of full assimilation into "American culture" and didn't teach anyone how to speak Finnish or share a history of the oppression and colonization that occurred in Finland by countries such as Russia and Sweden. My grandma's side of the family was called lots of different names because they were "dark haired, and almond eyed like mongols" as my grandma used to share. People would call my aunts "mongols" and "mongoloids".

https://www.cookcountynews-herald.co...sh-traditions/:

Bachelor Finnish loggers became known as Jack Pine Savages. Signs posted on taverns said, "No Indians or Finns allowed." As recently as 1908, "a federal district court in Duluth had considered the issue of whether Finns were Mongols and thus ineligible for citizenship as a colored people under the 1882 immigration act, commonly known as the Chinese Exclusion Act."

[MechtoidAfalouHG]

E-V13 Finns?

[Komintasavalta]

Ripley's book "The Races of Europe" (1899) says that Samoyeds are Black Finns (https://archive.org/details/raceseur.../-151/mode/2up):

The same utter confusion of racial - that is to say, of somatological - relations, incident to a linguistic division of the Finns, appears at once in any like attempt to classify the Turkish-speaking branch of the Asiatic peoples. For the Chouvaches, just across the Volga from the Cheremiss,* not in any important respect to be distinguished from them physically, as our map shows, have by chance adopted the language and religion of the neighbouring Tatars. It is as absurd to class them with the latter as Turks by race, as to jumble the broad-headed and brunet Samoyeds, who are quite like the Lapps, with the Zyrians just south of them;† or to confuse the Tatars as a class with the Kirghez.

† Keane calls the Samoyeds Finns, Ethnology, p. 305, To be sure they speak Finnic, but are really Mongols. Mainof is clearest, perhaps, in classing them as "black Finns."

[Harkonnen]

The concept of Black Finns as a more savage type of Finns who were unassimilable to civilized society is similar to the concept of Black Tatars (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Татары_(этноним)):

Chinese medieval historians divided the Tatars (in a broad sense) into three parts [11]:

- _White Tatars_ are nomads living south of the Gobi Desert along the Great Wall of China. Most of them were onguts. They were influenced by Chinese culture, and politically obeyed the Khitan, and later the Jurchen.
- _Black Tatars_ lived in the steppe and were engaged in cattle breeding. They obeyed their "natural" khans and despised the white Tatars "because they sold their freedom to foreigners for silk rags." Kereites and Mongols were included in the number of black Tatars [12].
- _Wild Tatars_ - South Siberian tribes of hunters and fishermen (the so-called "forest peoples"), including the ancestors of modern Buryats, Tuvinians and Evenks. They did not know the khan's authority and were ruled by elders.

https://www.nmu.edu/upperpeninsulast..._article_2.pdf:

Called puukkojunkkari or the "knife-fighters" in Finland, they soon earned the names "Black Finns" or "Jack Pine Savages" by the Americans because of their constant drunken state and frequent fights in Hibbing's saloons. [...]

The Marxist "Red Finns," along with the "Black Finns," were seen as distinctly inferior to the middle-class immigrants who had more effectively assimilated American political and cultural norms. Thus, middle-class Finnish immigrants denounced the activities of "Red" and "Black" Finns, thereby reinforcing their "white" status among Anglo-Protestant Americans. Further, Anglo-Protestant Americans recognized a racial difference between "white" Finns and "Black" or "Red" Finns.

https://www.academia.edu/6146431/_Th...2_2006_137-180

[Lemminkäinen]

I am sure that black Finns are mentioned in Orcadian folklore.

In Orkney folklore, Finfolk (sometimes Finnfolk) are sorcerous shapeshifters of the sea, the dark mysterious race from Finfolkaheem who regularly make an amphibious journey from the depths of the Finfolk ocean home to the Orkney Islands.

Finfolkaheem = Finland /Finnland

[Komintasavalta]

Patriarch of Black Finns: