This transdisciplinary project creates a multilayered and multisensory digital map platform to challenge entrenched assumptions about Finnish immigrant history in North America. By allowing platform users to layer maps, narratives, photographs, soundscapes, statistics, and archival documents, the project provides new ways of seeing complicated claims on place, belonging, and history. Through the digital map platform, Finnish immigrant history is situated not only in the community’s own significant cultural and everyday places, but also over time in the changing contexts of the physical environment, Indigenous place-views, state-imposed colonial frameworks, and overviews of historical population/economic data. The project encourages dialogue among Finnish society, immigrant communities, and scholars about the assumed “natural” place of Finns in Canada and the USA. To successfully develop this ambitious map platform, I will collaborate with University of Saskatchewan’s HGIS Lab, engage Finnish immigrant communities, conduct extensive archival research, and create reflexive ethnographic photographs, soundscapes, and interviews. The project will be communicated to academic audiences (3 articles, conferences) but connecting to public dialogues on Finnishness, belonging, and place is of central importance. Ways to accomplish this include: a photography & soundscape exhibit, a public forum on Finns & Colonialism Abroad, and events where people can use and discuss the map platform.

2020