Revisiting the ‘poisoned lands of Sudbury’ : Sakari Pälsi and Finnish immigrant miners in Canada in 1927

Abstract

<div lang="en" class="abs"><p class="abs_header">Abstract</p><p>Sakari Pälsi was a pioneer of Finnish archaeology and a globetrotting adventurer, who in 1927 travelled across Canada visiting various Finnish Canadian communities along the way. He was impressed by Canada’s vastness and beauty but appalled by the large-scale extraction of natural resources and devastation of landscapes. Pälsi called the Sudbury-Copper Cliff region in northern Ontario as the epicenter of this destruction and described his impressions of the area and the life of immigrant Finnish workers. This article revisits the Greater Sudbury region and Pälsi’s observations on the extractive industries and Finnish immigrants 95 years after his visit. We use his texts as a baseline for examining Finnish heritage in the area, in honour of his unique approach to travel writing. Pälsi’s account of the area, and Canada more generally, reads out almost as a Socialist critique of the destructive Capitalist practices and careless large-scale exploitation of the environment.</p></div>