Practical Dreamers: Communitarianism and Co-operatives on Malcolm Island (review)

Reviewed by: Practical Dreamers: Communitarianism and Co-operatives on Malcolm Island Ron Harpelle Practical Dreamers: Communitarianism and Co-operatives on Malcolm Island. Kevin Wilson. Victoria: British Columbia Institute for Co-operative Studies, 2005. $23 Sointula is a small town on Malcolm Island, just off the coast of Vancouver Island. Among those familiar with the history of Finns in North America, the very name conjures images of utopian thinkers like Edward Bellamy and Thomas More. Sointula means [End Page 266] ‘place of harmony,’ and in 1900 a group of Finnish immigrants to British Columbia gave this name to their new community. The original settlers were mostly families of miners who were already working on Vancouver Island and were a part of the first wave of Finnish immigrants to North America. Although economic opportunities were a major part of the attraction, political constraints at home had also played a significant role. Finland was part of the Russian Empire, and in 1898 Tsar Nicholas II adopted a plan aimed at ‘Russifying’ the Finnish population. This course of action involved the banning of Finnish-language newspapers and introducing Russian into the civil service, parliament, and schools. The Finns of British Columbia were not alone in their flight to North America. Their compatriots settled mostly in mining and logging regions around Lake Superior. The Finnish community of British Columbia was, therefore, at the very end of a long string of similar, first-wave communities founded in Canada and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Like other immigrant groups, the Finns desired a community where their language, customs, and beliefs could be preserved, and Sointula became that community in Canada’s western-most province. Practical Dreamers is a readable, twentieth-century history of the evolution of the communitarianism on Malcolm Island where Sointula is the best known of several small and originally Finnish communities. It was a community designed with utopian ideals of cultural preservation, independence, mutual cooperation, and collective economic security in mind. It was founded by the Kalevan Kansa Colonization Company, a cooperative formed by Finnish miners who sought to secure rights to land on Malcolm Island. To organize the community the miners invited Matti Kurikka, a journalist, to lead them and he, in turn, invited his friend, Austin Maskela, to help out. These two men were (in)famous radicals and they brought with them their ideals of communal ownership as well as other quite unusual ideas like the equality of men and women. This radicalism was reflected by other immigrants to the community as well and became the foundation upon which Sointula was built. Beginning in late 1901, construction began on the island and Sointula soon became one of Canada’s best known experiments in the creation of a utopian community. However, the radicalism of the Finnish residents of Malcolm Island was soon tempered by the forces that shape every immigrant community. The experiment worked as long as the community was focused on its ‘Finnishness,’ especially as they were involved in back-breaking labour, like clearing the forest. [End Page 267] However, with the passage of time and as the Finnish identity and culture declined in importance because of external factors, the original vision of its founding members began to fade. Kevin Wilson documents the rise and fall of the Kalevan Kansa Colonization Company, demonstrating that the politics of Sointula were largely indistinguishable from those of other Finnish communities in Canada and the United States. Divisions within the community were a reflection of events in Finland, and the fortunes of Sointula paralleled those of similar towns elsewhere. Finnish independence in 1917 was followed by a bloody civil war that produced a new wave of Finnish immigration to Canada. This was followed by economic decline in the West and the migration of thousands of North American Finns to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s to, ultimately, an uncertain fate. Finland’s participation in the Second World War on the side of Germany, following an invasion by the Soviet Union, created more division among Finns in North America. The Finnish community of Malcolm Island more or less weathered these events, but the founding ideals became a distant memory. The most enduring thread...

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