‘To the Homeland’: Settler Monument, Memory and the Finnish Colony of Petsamo on the Finnish–Russian Borderlands

Abstract

This article examines a set of entanglements between settler memory and a monument in a nation that does not acknowledge that it ever had a colonial history. It looks at the efforts of exiled Finnish settlers to keep alive the memory of Petsamo as ‘their homeland’ through a monument they set up in Ivalo, Northern Finland, in 1985. Before being forced out of Petsamo, a province on the Arctic Ocean, by the Soviet Union in 1944, Finnish settlers tried to reshape Petsamo from a multi-ethnic borderland into a Finnish homeland for over two decades. Their settler memory is inscribed on and funnelled through this Ivalo monument, via claims of belonging and connection to a lost homeland. The monument set up by the settlers is meant to speak to their specific stories, their version of the past and of themselves. It serves settler purposes, declaring settler belonging to the broader public, to the nation and even to the world. It maintains and channels settler memory to future generations and remains uncontested and largely ignored in today's Finland.