Deep Mapping the ‘Uncharted Territories’ of Finnish Immigrant History

Kone Foundation, 2020-2024

Project Director: Samira Saramo

Project Objectives:

The objective of this project is to create a multilayered and multisensory digital map that provides new ways of viewing and thinking about to challenge Finnish migrant history in Ontario. This openly accessible map will allow cartography, narratives, photographs, soundscapes, demographic statistics, ecological description, and archival documents to be layered in different ways in the hope of offering new ways of seeing complicated and overlapping claims on place, belonging, and history. Through this approach and tool, Finnish migrant histories will not only be situated in the community’s own significant sociocultural and everyday places, but also spanning over time in the changing contexts of the physical environment, Indigenous place-views, state-imposed colonial frameworks, and overviews of historical population and economic data. The project contributes to bridging migration history and Canadian settler colonialism studies.

For an introduction to the project see: https://historyjournal.org.uk/2020/11/24/deep-migrant-settlerhood-unfolding-histories-of-finns-in-canada/https://historyjournal.org.uk/2020/11/24/deep-migrant-settlerhood-unfolding-histories-of-finns-in-canada/

Project researcher: