Sarah Thomas
My name is Sarah Thomas.
Jim Thomas
My name is Jim Thomas. My grandparents were immigrants.
Sarah Thomas
Will you say a little bit about how Finnish and Sámi immigrants were treated when they got to this country, and also the work that was done when they were still in Finland to entice them?
Jim Thomas
American mining companies wanted cheap labor. They wanted to keep the labor unions out of the mines. The history of Finland is that there were often crop failures, and people would face famine at least once every 10 years, and they didn't realize they were walking into a situation where they were actually scabs in the mines.
My grandmother's mother was of Lapp or Sámi ancestry, which is a minority group that lives in northern Finland. They were originally a nomadic people that herded reindeer. She was a little woman in a new country where she didn't speak the language, and one of the complaints was that she spoke gibberish. That's her native Sámi language! And she was placed in an institution, but was enterprising enough to escape in winter, cross the Canadian border and find work for herself, managing a chain of boarding houses in Winnipeg, Canada.
My grandmother, Helen Nimi, came from Finland with her parents. She taught me that the first thing you do when you get up in the morning, before breakfast, is sit down at the kitchen table and share dreams with each other. And a very typical one: her young son had died a few months before. She had been very sad, but she was just radiant and smiling, and she said, "I had a dream that the angels told me that after I've passed from this Earth, I'll be allowed to take care of the baby Jesus."
Sarah Thomas
Was it her grandmother who was the Lapp witch?
Jim Thomas
Her mother's mother. And she told me not to tell anyone, because we're Christians. We can't admit that we have a Lapp witch in our ancestry. But "witch" meant traditional healer, most likely, and she married Veno Saveleinen, a Finnish immigrant, also, and they met and married in Minnesota, and he worked in logging and mining.
And my other grandmother was Anna Christina Bergstrom, who came from a Finnish minority that lived in central Sweden. All the neighbors loved to stop by and sit at her kitchen table and have coffee with her, because everyone felt comfortable and welcome in her home. And then she married Frances Aloysius Thomas, who was of Irish ancestry, and they met in Chicago.
Sarah Thomas
Didn't she start giving you little cups of coffee and National Geographic magazines when you were a really little kid?
Jim Thomas
From the time I was tiny. We would always sit at the kitchen table and go over every page and talk about the different cultures and peoples and sites of the world.
Sarah Thomas
Talk a little bit about pine bark bread.
Jim Thomas
Across far northern Europe during famine times, people would take the inner cambium of the pine tree and scrape it off, bake it, and grind it to a powder and add it to flour. And they said the old people who immigrated to this country, even though it's a little bit of a bitter piney taste, they would miss that from their childhood. But plants were our extended family, that's where most of our medicines originally came from.
Sarah Thomas
And it's important too to know about the community around you, aside from just people. From a really young age, I believed that being outside was being with family, and I feel really lucky that you raised my brother and I outside as often as possible in a gentle way, taking us on easy hikes, stopping to, like, whistle back to birds or play in a stream for an hour without the stress of like having to march up a mountain.
Jim Thomas
You can have any kind of difficulties going on in your life, and you get out in a quiet, pretty place, and you feel better. Especially if you have Finnish ancestry. Nature is your antidepressant.
