Up North Films

A man hikes 550 miles across the North Country Trail in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula from July through February, experiencing it in all of its seasons.

The deep northern forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula are home to small villages of Finnish Americans—communities carved out from the forest where Finnish language, cultural worldview, and traditional arts remain crucial to social life more than a century after immigration. In this beautiful and rugged north country, the extraordinary, ordinary descendants of Finnish immigrants still eke out modest lives to this day on old farmsteads, working with the resources they have available to them, showing their creativity and ingenuity in simply getting by and making do, and living in ways not dissimilar from their ancestors who migrated three or four generations ago.

When the immigrants came to America, their cultures entered the "great melting pot." In Michigan's Upper Peninsula Finnish immigrants mixed their musical traditions with many other cultures, creating a sound that was unique to the "Copper Country."

Between 1865 and 1920, Finnish immigrants brought traditional arts to America, including woven and braided rag rugs. As a hallmark of Finnish ethnic culture, rag rugs and their makers hold special places in the hearts of Finnish America. Cultural sociologist Michael Loukinen brings us into the homes and to the workrooms of traditional weavers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He portrays the interwoven world of cultural beliefs, aesthetic practices, and family history that each rug represents. From the treasured family-memory heirloom, from each carefully protected rug to its threadbare, tattered clump on a tractor seat, these rugs are an art form that embodies several Finnish American cultural values.