Dreams of Harmony
Although the utopian Finnish co-operative on British Columbia’s Malcolm Island was short-lived, its influence has persisted.
AS USUAL, THE FINNS OF SOINTULA, B.C., WERE arguing. Well, they were having strong differences of opinion — until someone yelled, “Fire!” Dozens of people ran for the narrow staircase to escape the wooden hall’s upstairs meeting room, but smoke poured up at them. Flames were already licking through the floorboards of the building on Malcolm Island, northeast of Vancouver Island.
“People jumped from the windows of the upstairs second and third floors,” Sointula colonist Matti Halminen wrote in 1936, thirty-three years after the incident. “Those who were already too overcome from smoke and were faint were dropped down from the windows by others.” A few on the ground level were able to stumble out the doors. As the blaze roared on into the January night, the horrible reality sank in. Eight children, two women, and one man had died.
A colony in turmoil was now a community in ashes.
Even though its name means place of harmony in Finnish, life in Sointula had never been easy. Born of deeply held beliefs in equality, co-operation, and hard work, the colony had, for a few short years at the start of the twentieth century, offered a shining alternative to a world of exploitation and competition.
Indeed, it was the desire for a different life that united a small group of Finns working in the Vancouver Island coal mines of uber-capitalist B.C. premier James Dunsmuir. Although many of the Finns had left their native land in the late 1800s, most were tradespeople and farmers rather than labourers, said Susan Ness, a modern Sointulan with family connections to one of the colony’s founders, Teodor Tanner. “They were among the best-educated of the migrants to North America.
They were also very familiar with the rising labour movement, and they knew they were being taken advantage of by James Dunsmuir.” The brutal labour, low pay, and squalid living conditions of company housing had led to widespread hopelessness and frustration. This was not what these adventurous young people had hoped for when they left their homeland.
Rather than despairing — or sinking into drunken brawling, as some of their countrymen were vilified in the local press for doing — a group of Finnish miners, including Halminen, chose hope. They believed that it was possible, as he wrote, “to progress from the old to the new, from falsehood to truth and from servitude to freedom.”
When they read the work of philosopher and writer Matti Kurikka, they were sure they’d found the person who could help to make that progress a reality. On behalf of the group, early in 1900, Halminen wrote to Kurikka, who had left Finland in 1899 with a group intending to found a Finnish colony in Australia.
That colony failed in less than a year, which perhaps should have raised the first of many red flags about Kurikka’s ability to put his ideas into practice. He was a socialist who angered Marxists by practising what he called a socialism of the head and heart, rather than merely of the stomach; and he was a Christian believer who rejected the church. He favoured a school of thought known as theosophy, which emphasized the oneness of all people.
Handsome and charismatic, Kurikka was a persuasive writer and a powerful speaker. In his reply to Halminen, he wrote, “my dalliance here in Australia has begun to become increasingly distasteful,” and he complained of “brigandage … degradation … and alcoholism to such an extent that all attempts at joining this trashy society have begun to seem repulsive.” (Allan Salo, a master’s student at the University of British Columbia, translated both Halminen’s and Kurikka’s writings, including Halminen’s account of the colony, as an appendix to his 1978 thesis.)
Kurikka was also — red flag number two — broke. “I am as poor as a church-mouse — despite the fact that we have worked here even beyond our physical capabilities,” he wrote. “If by some means you were able to procure for me the travelling expenses, I would be prepared to get underway immediately and to give myself solely to the service of founding that community.”
Halminen’s group scrounged together $125 (something like $5,000 today), and Kurikka arrived in Nanaimo, B.C., in the fall of 1900. Within a few months Kurikka and the colonists had established a newspaper called Aika (Time) and sent money to bring Kurikka’s former
newspaper columnist and fellow socialist A.B. Makela (sometimes known in Canada as Austin McKela) to Nanaimo from Finland.
The planning began in earnest with the establishment of the Kalevan Kansa Colonization Company, or KKCC. (Kalevan Kansa translates as “people of the Kalevala,” a reference to the Finnish national epic.) The Finns decided how their colony would be run and appealed to the B.C. government for a land grant. On November 27, 1901, they received the right to all 11,300 hectares of Malcolm Island, then known to only a few Europeans as an isolated spot for getting away from the ills of modern life.
Of course the territory had been used for generations by the Kwakwa- ka-´wakw, among whom the Kwakiutl, Mamalilikala, and ´Namgis First Nations still assert ties to the island. The land deal was made with no thought to the fact that the island’s towering cedars were valued for the creation of totem poles and that its abundant berries were an important source of food. (There is a thriving ´Namgis First Nation community on nearby Cormorant Island, the third point on the modern ferry run that includes Port McNeill and Sointula.)
The B.C. government stipulated that the KKCC had to ensure that there was one “settler or head of a family on Malcolm Island for each eighty acres of land.” The settlers had to improve their properties to the tune of $2.50 per acre (0.405 of an hectare) and, in an interesting bit of wording, had “to take steps to become British subjects.” The colonists would not have to pay tax for seven years but had to build any roads, docks, bridges, or other infrastructure.
For its part, the company required participants to contribute $200 as well as labour toward common projects. Some people, however, were admitted if they could come up with $50; they were expected to work off the rest.
The colony’s founders had made their first mistake. Work was plentiful, but cash never was, making the colony’s financial foundation shaky from the start. “They had good ideas, but they weren’t well enough financed. It was the lack of money that made the colony collapse,” observed Ness. Almost until the end, Kurikka continued to use Aika to exhort new members to join the utopian venture, even though the existing settlers didn’t yet have adequate food, shelter, or clothing.
From the start, the colony was an uneasy mixture of sometimes contradictory principles. It was at once a communitarian effort with individually held property; a wilderness settlement requiring hunters and labourers but largely peopled by craftsmen and farmers; a group of equals among whom a few were revered by the many, at least at first; and a socialist economy dependent on income from capitalist purchasers.
Kurikka held fast to his vision of Sointula as a place where the best qualities of Finns would create true harmony free from the evils of religion, self-centredness, and capitalism. Churches, alcohol, and tobacco would not be allowed. Existence would be elevated from crude “animal passions,” as Kurikka wrote in Aika, when he described how the colony would function. “As we strive for a higher level than present mankind, we need to break away from the system, which always forces us to think of ourselves, and we need to form a system, where one isn’t forced to think of one’s own good at all, if one doesn’t want to.”
By March 1902, a vanguard of fourteen men and one woman had begun the unfamiliar, unrelenting work of clearing small patches of land and building a large log cabin. As more settlers trickled in, it was soon clear that the rough accommodation would not be able to house the new families and that, while hastily procured tents were acceptable for the summer, they could not protect inhabitants from the damp chill of the fall and winter.
“Oh, that was a terrible place to bring a family. There was nothing there.” The unnamed woman being interviewed by researcher and broadcaster Howard Smith in 1977 about her childhood in Sointula couldn’t have been clearer. “There wasn’t enough food, or the right kind of food for kids. It was just bush country.” Her companion chimed in on the BC Archives oral history recording, saying, “It was absolutely untouched when the Finns went there.”
Work gangs focused on farming and fishing — the colony had bought a salmon-fishing boat and a steamboat for longer distances — as well as logging and the makeshift machine shop and blacksmith shop. The initial plan was to make money from logging, but inadequate equipment meant that logs had to be cut into unprofitably short lengths that still needed to be towed to faraway markets.
“The first logging crew was not of professional calibre,” Kurikka wrote in the colony’s first annual report in 1902. He acknowledged that “the beginning was not overly impressive, but credit goes to these fellows who during
those times and in those conditions left to make the first cutting into the wilderness.”
It’s hard to fathom how such an intelligent, dedicated group could have made a string of bad decisions like the ones that seemingly dogged every move of the Kalevan Kansa. “If we had from the very beginning arranged our company’s affairs in a different manner we would have been spared many miseries and tribulations,” Halminen wrote.
A brick-making factory was built, despite the obvious problem that towing bricks to markets would make them untenably expensive. And when a Nanaimo dairy went out of business the colony, in desperate need of nutritious food and milk for the children, bought eleven cows and a bull, despite not having enough pasture cleared nor places to house people, let alone animals. The cattle ended up having to be kept on Vancouver Island, with the colonists taking them purchased hay and bringing milk back across the channel.
It was starting to become clear that the ideals Kurikka and Makela espoused were not always precisely workable. “We can begin producing everything we need, so that finally we won’t have to buy anything from the outside,” Kurikka had written optimistically. But that day was nowhere in sight. Practically speaking, by the time the shoemakers of Sointula brought in their supplies, those raw materials already cost more than the finished product would have cost elsewhere. Contracts to produce logs or lumber were always underpriced due to Kurikka’s inexperience, meaning the colony saw no actual returns for the back-breaking work done by colonists who had no time or lumber left for projects on the island.
“When educated gentlemen, and especially those who have recently come from Finland and write intelligent and penetrating articles about all the facets of society and on the support of their knowledge evaluate the various transactions, it must be said that they are just impractical theorists working on paper,” wrote Halminen, the man who had so looked up to Kurikka that he brought him to Nanaimo from Australia. “In many instances their practical putterings appear at times to be quite childish and they have a great deal of difficulty to lower themselves to accept a workingman’s knowledge which he has gained through experience.”
Aika stopped printing late in 1902; the plan was to move the press to Sointula, another questionable decision given that there was no building where it could be set up. It didn’t start publishing again until late in 1903, this time in booklet form.
By then, many of the original colonists had left, the bright hope of harmony blotted out by intolerable living conditions and a monotonous diet. But at least some central buildings had finally been completed in the area mapped out for the town. The community had a kitchen and communal eating area, a meeting space, and some desperately needed accommodation.
The terrible fire of January 29, 1903, didn’t immediately spell the death of the colonization project, but it shook the settlement badly. Not only had eleven of its 193 people died, much of the colony’s store of supplies had been burned, along with nearly all of its paperwork. Whispers and then outright accusations blamed Kurikka, saying he had set the blaze to destroy records showing his financial mismanagement. (There is no evidence to suggest that the tragedy was anything other than the result of a badly designed building that ran heated pipes through dry wooden walls.) “The fire brought to an end what little cohesion existed among the settlers,” Salo noted in his thesis.
At a meeting a month later, Kurikka demanded the expulsion of two colony members he believed to be rumour mongering. Hard times and diverging ideas had also caused a split between him and Makela, one that had perhaps been inevitable given Kurikka’s grandiose theosophical ideas and Makela’s unswerving commitment to Marxist socialism. Neither man had the experience necessary for leading a group of willing but increasingly dispirited colonists.
“Let it be known,” Halminen wrote, “without any attempt to hide the matter, that Kurikka and Makela were not practical managers, nor were they suited to direct economic life in the circumstances in which we the poor workmen tried to begin to create a spiritually guided industrial society within the virgin forest. We tried to accomplish it primarily by enthusiasm and good wishes.”
Fishing and forestry were not yielding the profits required for progress, and money was so scarce that at times food for the colony had to be bought on credit.
In December 1903, members opted to consolidate the KKCC’s debts by securing a loan of ten thousand dollars, using its buildings and equipment as collateral.
A newer, bigger sawmill was producing lumber faster, although prices were so low that sending it to market offisland was still unprofitable. But Kurikka had found a use for it in a new opportunity — a good one, he was sure.
“The KK [Kalevan Kansa] has undertaken its first bigger construction contract,” he wrote in the May 15, 1904, issue of
Aika, gliding over the fact that the colony had precious little experience even with smaller construction projects. “The city government of North Vancouver has accepted our offer to build bridges over the Capilano and North Seymour Rivers.”
He described the three-thousand-dollar payment as “undeniably low.” But, he added, “when all lumber will be processed on the island and it will come out of our own forests, we are supposing it will pay. The main thing is to get in contact with this city that is being built, and we can look forward to new contracts worth tens and thousands of dollars, if we just manage to pull this first one through successfully.”
Kurikka’s confidence was as breathtaking as his incompetence. After seeing a newspaper ad calling for bids, he based his hasty submission on estimates from a Finnish businessman he trusted. His bid accounted only for the lumber required (although not the expense of moving it from the ship to the building site), which of course cost the colonists only their labour. It did not include the cost of a small item known as a foundation nor somewhat important hardware such as metal supports, nails, and bolts.
Back in Sointula, calculations clearly showed that it made more sense to abandon the project and forfeit the $150 deposit Kurikka had paid, but he insisted that seeing the contract through was the only way to bring in money for essentials such as food. Halminen described the increasing dismay of Kurikka, who, as he realized his own folly, encouraged the workers to strike. “But these men would no longer bend their ears to catch Kurikka’s talk,” Halminen wrote.
In the end, Halminen estimated, the extra supplies cost three thousand dollars, and the colonists contributed at least another eight thousand dollars in unpaid labour over four months. Thousands of dollars of lumber had essentially been given away, while no one had time to work on improving life in Sointula.
Although in mid-1904 Kurikka was still asserting in
Aika that “the life of the Sointulans had never been as happy and as hopeful as it was today,” his personality and beliefs were causing even deeper divisions. With his inability to manage finances laid bare, the colonists were no longer willing to overlook his other precepts.
From the start, Sointula was intended to become a place where women were treated as equals when it came to decision making and even owning property, although they were still generally consigned to cooking, cleaning, and laundry. “We are indeed on the threshold of a new social era, but the men who are in the lead, burdened with work themselves, haven’t given enough thought to their wives’ slavery at home in order to realize that women too have the right to freer conditions and more intelligent activities,” Kurikka had written in one of the earliest editions of Aika.
Perhaps lost in his high-minded exhortations was the fact that Kurikka had definite ideas about how women were to be freed for greater things. Rather than actually consulting them on their wishes, he continued to push for the things he believed would relieve women of the tedious tasks that kept them from fuller participation outside the home, principally child rearing.
Kurikka was adamant that the children of the colony were to be raised in a central facility, which was completed in March 1904. Many mothers objected to sending their children to a home that didn’t necessarily meet their standards. In response, the increasingly tone-deaf Kurikka wrote in
Aika that children were not for their mothers; they were for the colony. After all, did simply giving birth qualify a woman to be good at raising a child?
Before long, a blistering Aika article, signed “The Women of Sointula,” noted the cost to mothers of allowing others to raise their children and rebuked the colony’s men for their use of nicotine and “dirty talk.” The item also detailed the women’s sacrifices in offering up their last treasured articles of jewellery to create a “magnificent raffle” intended to help “bring the company out of its chronic financial difficulty.” (In typical colony fashion, only after hopes were raised and all the preparations were in place was it discovered that the
province had a law against raffles.) Makela fired back in print against the women’s “scribble,” asserting that the surrender of children was just as hard for fathers as for mothers and that, overall, the women had given up less than the men.
On an even more personal issue, though, Kurikka found himself at odds with nearly everyone else. His more general statements — such as: “We have already agreed before that love is a private affair that outsiders have no say in. The KK as a company will not interfere in the private love life of its members and due to good order will not have a supervisory body for this delicate field” — couldn’t have prepared the people of Sointula for his full-on advocacy of women’s sexual freedom.
He wrote with increasing fervour of his belief that marriage where love was absent was a form of sexual slavery and that women should be freed from such “marital shackles.” (In one especially painful article, he described conversations with “the mother of my daughter … a woman that had been my wife for a decade” that led to the logical consequence of divorce.) Above all, he insisted that a woman who chooses to have a child but not marry should not be shamed or rejected.
Kurikka’s continued focus on such discussions, when the settlement still lacked adequate food, shelter, and income, further widened the divide with Makela and angered colonists still expressing betrayal about the bridge debacle in group gatherings. “Kurikka’s manner at those meetings was so anger-inspiring and blameworthy that there eventually arose among those who felt differently from him the question, can such a man remain as the director of the Kalevan Kansa?” Halminen wrote.
Even Kurikka knew his time was over. On October 10, 1904, he resigned his position and left Malcolm Island with about half of the colonists, generally described as being mostly single men. He founded a second Finnish utopian community, Sammon Takojat (another reference to the story of the Kalevala), in Webster’s Corners, now part of Maple Ridge, B.C. When he left on a speaking tour to raise money for the venture, its participants wrote to ask him not to return. Kurikka returned to North America after being unable to fit in back in Finland; he worked on a newspaper in New York State and ended his days in Rhode Island.
Makela took over as head of the Kalevan Kansa Colonization Company, which was left with far fewer people struggling to pay off its huge debts.
To provide the remaining colonists with protection against the inevitable, land was parcelled out to anyone who wanted to stay. Aika was discontinued and its press sold at a loss. Makela secured a loan from the province in exchange for the return of the land; the receiver sold off the island’s forests. On May 27, 1905, the Kalevan Kansa held its final meeting.
But Sointula, the place of harmony — that was something that could not be so easily dissolved. “It was historically an important moment. It might have failed in the sense that the company failed, but the community did not fail. The community survived,” said Heather Graham. The retired writer, publisher, and bookseller moved to the island in 2010 and immediately immersed herself in its intriguing history. “But not the Finnish part: the working-people-trying-tohave-a-different-kind-of-life part” did not survive.
Although Sointula was now a place where people built their own houses and earned individual incomes, that didn’t mean it had lost its communal spirit or concern for the well-being of neighbours.
Just two years after the dissolution of the KKCC, islanders formed the Sointula Socialist Club; a little later it became the first chapter of the Finnish Socialist Organization of Canada to be located outside of Ontario. Socialism had seeped into the lifeblood of the community, due in part to the continuing influence of its grand old man, A.B. Makela. Sointulans were active in union drives in the fishing and logging industries and were enthusiastic members of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and, later, the NDP. The man on that 1977 BC Archives recording proudly said, “I was a member of the CCF when it started, and I’ve paid dues ever since.” The woman with him added, “And we’ve been voting for them ever since.”
In 1909, the community established the Sointula Co-operative Store, which is still the island’s hub.
One of Sointula’s founding principles was the rejection of organized religion; Kurikka was a big fan of Jesus (to whom he referred as Issa in his writings) but not of the church. Socialist meetings were the closest thing to religion on the island for decades, but informal religious gatherings got a tentative start in the 1940s. After decades of often bitter debate, the Sointula Community Church — still the only one on the island — opened in 1961.
Malcolm Island’s reputation eventually attracted the modern counterparts of its first settlers. In the 1960s and 1970s, American back-to-the-landers, hippies, and draft dodgers drifted to the island. Although they shared many communitarian ideals with the descendants of the original colonists, their outlandish appearance evoked suspicion. Eventually, those who were willing to work hard on their small farms and to commit to the community became part of the island’s story.
To this day, Sointula is a distinct corner of the world with clear connections to its origins. Where you land on the merits of those origins depends almost entirely on your jumping-off point. Was it a romantic idea doomed to failure by human nature, a noble experiment in solidarity among working people, or a qualified success that ultimately resulted in a different, perhaps more humane way of living?
The answer is yes. Sointula and the Kalevan Kansa Colonization Company were all of those things.
MALCOLM ISLAND’S REPUTATION EVENTUALLY ATTRACTED THE MODERN COUNTERPARTS OF ITS FIRST SETTLERS.
There are towns up and down the B.C. coast that have endured 120 years of booms and busts because they were created to serve industry, Graham said. “This community was not settled for industrial reasons. People came here because they wanted to try something different. It was an intentional community at a time when that term didn’t exist.”
If you’re looking at Sointula expecting to see a functional utopia, your vision will be distorted, she added. “This community was never meant to be shut away from the world. The big central difference is this idea that they had a mission to show the rest of the world what could be done, and in that way they don’t fit the mould of a utopia.”
Writing in Aika in July 1904, Kurikka rejected what he called the selfish ideas of those who said their colony should leave the capitalist world to its competitions and focus on building harmony on Malcolm Island. Not so, he wrote: “The great humane task of the KK lies mainly in the fact that it can mould the laws of a small society, so that others around the world can use them to build their own Sointulas.”
You’d think that just the mention of Kurikka’s name would be enough to send most Sointulans’ eyes on an epic roll, but you’d be wrong. Despite his record, said Susan Ness, “you can’t really fault him. Financial planning wasn’t his strength. He was a visionary.”
“Sointula probably wouldn’t have ever gotten off the ground without him,” said Graham. “They brought him in not just to be a leader but because of his reputation as a political activist and a journalist. And he spoke English, which the Finnish miners couldn’t. They needed someone like him, of his many abilities.”
Even Matti Halminen — the man who brought Kurikka to British Columbia, worked with him to establish the colony, observed “the shadowy sides of his nature,” and ultimately watched with relief as he departed — could muster praise. “He had taken as his life’s work the emancipation of the oppressed and the worker and he tried to make their lives more joyful with all his ability by trying to found a new society which would act as a road marker for those others who are suffering.”
In the end, wrote Halminen, “Those utopian dreamers who came to the wilderness of Malcolm Island could not truthfully realize their ideals.” But, he added, the original colony was made up of people who were innovative, progressive, and willing to work. “Its legacy has not been discarded nor forgotten on Malcolm Island.”