By Mirabella Markham
From the very beginning in 1899, Northern Michigan University (then Northern State Normal School) was created to train educators with a focus primarily on teaching, not research. Of course, over the past 125 years, this has changed dramatically, yet one of the things that sets Northern apart from so many other institutions of higher learning is that instruction is still a top priority for the faculty. With that said, Northern has an excellent record of scholarship going back to the beginning of the institution that continues to this day.
Where the research of many scholars at Northern has taken them to the corners of the globe and beyond, the Upper Peninsula itself has been a great inspiration for faculty at the university over the years. Ironically, the most significant research that has been done about the Upper Peninsula has been from faculty who were not originally from the region. After arriving here, these faculty have found research opportunities they had never imagined before.
One of the first was history professor Lew Allen Chase, who arrived at Northern in the summer of 1919 to replace Catherine Maxwell as the head of the History department. Chase was a fascinating individual, born in Elsie, Michigan and forced to leave school as a child because of his near-blindness. He was homeschooled and then attended the Michigan School for the Blind. His disability did not hinder his academic and professional goals, as he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1910. He went on to become an educator and school administrator in Coloma, Michigan, then headed to Kansas State Agriculture College (now Kansas State University) and eventually found himself in the U.P. at both Hancock and Houghton schools. It was in the Copper Country that he began to study the history of the region, employing that knowledge in his classroom, and helped to found the Keweenaw Historical Society.
Within Chase’s first year at Northern, he was publishing his book, “The Government and People of Michigan,” and was commissioned to write a history of Marquette. He also published an article in the Northern News in December 1919, entitled “Normalites Should Promote the Study of U.P. History.” In this article, he states that, “...if we study Upper Peninsula history, then, we shall learn how the Upper Peninsula came to be what it is today: how its mining, lumbering, agricultural, fishing, shipping and transportation interests have developed from small beginnings during many years to their present importance...” In 1927, he published an article in the Michigan Education Journal extolling the need for greater study and teaching about the history of Michigan in schools. Over the next few decades, he would write over 25 articles and books about the history of Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. In addition, he wrote many articles on local history for the Mining Journal newspaper and the Marquette County Historical Society, where he was a very early member and officer.
Chase would serve as head of the History department until his retirement in 1944. Even in retirement, he continued to consult with others and write about local history. One of these consultants included Henry Ford, who visited with Chase during one of his trips to the Upper Peninsula. Lew Allen Chase passed away at his home in Hayward, California on May 21, 1957.
Over the following years, other Northern scholars conducted research about the region, whether it be in the subjects of history, sociology and the natural sciences. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new group of scholars began to look at the Upper Peninsula to augment their classwork and involve it in projects that would help bring prestige to Northern through academic research.
One of these scholars is Russell M. Magnaghi, born and raised in a San Francisco, California family originally from Northern Italy. He attended the University of San Francisco where he began to take a great interest in studying local history. Since he had spent his whole life in California, Magnaghi was encouraged by his faculty to leave the region to study further, and he took their advice. He left California to attend St. Louis University, where he received his Master’s and a doctorate in history. His focus was on Latin American history, but he also began to study the French influence in the Midwest. This led him to join a friend on a trip to the Upper Great Lakes, where they arrived in the U.P. for the first during a snowstorm.
Soon thereafter, a position opened up for a history professorship at Northern, where Magnaghi applied and secured the position teaching Latin American and Medieval history. While at NMU, he began looking at more diverse topics outside of his original expertise. His Native American history course was the first at a university in Michigan. One of his students, Bob Archibald, encouraged him to study the local history, which Magnaghi’s limitless curiosity had already begun to explore. He began traveling around the U.P. to learn more about the region and find topics to research and teach.
In the fall of 1975, he offered his first course on Upper Peninsula history. He found that “Yoopers” had an inferiority complex about their relationship with both Michigan and the rest of the Midwest. In addition to this course, he began giving talks about the local history and the role the region played in the history of the United States. All of his U.P. history courses were very popular and important to his own research. The student’s papers and research helped to develop a bibliography of resources, which he has continued to expand to this very day. His course included trips to historic sites such as Fayette and Nahma. He also began giving history tours of Northern’s campus to students and the public.
Where there had been a great deal written about the industry and settlement of the U.P., Magnaghi found that the people, especially the immigrants, were not usually part of the story. He began to focus his research on particular ethnic groups, with one of those groups being the Italians in the region. He was asked by the Paisano Club of Marquette to write a book on Italians in the county, but his research led him to expand the book to include the entire Upper Peninsula. He ended up interviewing 150 people for what would become the book, “Miners, Merchants and Midwives: Michigan’s Upper Peninsula Italians.”
One of Magnaghi’s most important research projects was a study of the 1910 U.S. Census covering every county in the Upper Peninsula. From 1983 to 2010, he had students look through the census to determine the individuals who were not born in the United States, noting their country of origin and occupation. This information is crucial to understanding the ethnic make-up of the region today, because 1910 is seen as a bellwether for determining the ethnic make-up of the U.P throughout the rest of the 20th century.
The U.P’s primary ethnic make-up can be traced in the research, films, and articles on Finnish American culture. The Finns of the U.P. make up a large portion of the region’s ethnic background, and professors of the same heritage take pride in learning, researching, and representing rural Finnish culture and attitudes. It was a kinship with shared genetic histories and culture that tied professors Jon Saari and Michael Loukinen to the Upper Peninsula.
Saari’s connection to his Finnish heritage began in Hurley, Wisconsin. He would visit his uncle Maltzer where he experienced his first saunas, though his upbringing was thinly connected to his paternal Finnish ancestry. As an adolescent, the closest Saari came to understanding his culture came in the form of a high school world history essay on the theme of Finnish and Russian relations.
From Whitefish Bay, Saari went to Yale, graduating in 1962, and continued to follow his interests in studying European history. In the end, Saari knew he wanted to be a historian in a small town. Historiography became Saari’s main field of study, which was utilized in his work at Northern. Steve Martwell, the chairman of the History department when Saari was hired in 1971, recognized Saari’s Finnish last name. Martwell employed Saari with an interest in strengthening the university’s connection to the students, teaching subject matter that was for them and about the region. Saari was tasked with creating a course on Finnish-American studies, a pursuit that was not only important for the school, but also for Saari’s understanding and connection to his identity.
The course on Finnish Immigrants in America was created and taught while Saari was finishing his dissertation in the mid-1970s. Students responded well to the course as nothing had been offered quite like it, and many students were able to deepen their understanding of their own backgrounds. For those students who were not Finnish, Saari paired them with a Finnish family in the area so they could experience firsthand the ties of the people close to the land. By that time, Saari had discovered his own relatives and formed relationships with his Finnish roots. Those personal contacts became important for his career and relationship with the Upper Peninsula.
On coming to Northern, Saari saw that the Upper Peninsula held rich knowledge that had not yet been fully investigated. There was the sense that the region itself had not been accurately represented. Saari has a catalog of academic work that strives to highlight the diverse people and places populating the U.P. Local topics were important to Saari, and he laid the foundations for this area of research on Northern’s campus at a time when regional studies were growing. Saari took pride in bringing to light the rural Nordic history that surrounds Northern and these histories are things that he believes should always be evaluated with new eyes, as many stories were often not seen the first time.
As identities become more complex and intertwined throughout our lives, Saari takes pride in looking at his own identity as a mosaic of many different relationships, something that is incomplete and always being redesigned. What remains, he believes, is place. He sees the importance of developing a caring attitude in how people interact, understand, and become stewards of the world around them. Saari finds ground in studying the regional history of the Upper Peninsula, the people's reverence for the land, and their ability to hold onto cultural ties for generations.
Sociologist and filmmaker Michael Loukinen, before he looked at the intergenerational relationship of one rural Finnish-American family in the Upper Peninsula, lived as an adolescent in the inner city of Detroit. Loukinen’s aunt had a farm in Jacobsville, up in Houghton County, which he would visit in the summer with his mother and his siblings. Loukinen was familiar with the Finnish language as a child, only as the secret dialect that was used to keep Christmas presents hidden. Being Finnish in a predominantly black neighborhood showed Loukinen the “pockets of consciousness,” or ways of thinking and being, that inhabited different people and communities. This is the idea that inspired his career as a sociologist.
Loukinen went to Michigan State University for his undergraduate degree studying to be an engineer like his father. Quickly becoming tired of repeating equations, Loukinen went into advertising and packaging, learning the subliminal psychology of selling ideas. After graduation, Loukinen continued to dive into the world of social psychology, which led to a Ph.D. from Michigan State University in Comparative Sociology with a minor in Cultural Anthropology.
A dissertation on social exchange theory took Loukinen to Pelkie, Michigan where he studied cooperation and survival mechanisms between households. In the former mining town, Loukinen collected data from 152 Finnish households and 450 people. Because his project was centered around examining his cultural history, Loukinen became more connected to his Finnish-American identity. John Jamrich, then president of Northern, was recruiting a rural sociologist to study and research the Upper Peninsula, subsequently hiring Loukinen for the task. Loukinen could be found filling in for absent professors where he engaged students with the Upper Peninsula by having them conduct interviews with rural residents of the area.
The idea to make a film on Finnish America stemmed from Loukinen’s work with students, showing them images and recorded dialogue from his dissertation, as well as his work with distance education, which brought professional academic presentations to rural communities in the U.P. His film, “Finnish American Lives” which was greatly supported and funded by Northern, centers on the Vourenmaa family. The patriarch, Erikki Vourenmaa, was responsible for keeping his household Finnish as he was a first-generation immigrant who continued to speak the language of his birthplace. The film received a second-place blue ribbon at the American Film Festival in New York City, putting both Northern and the Upper Peninsula on the map for urban audiences.
Because of his work with the Upper Peninsula, Loukinen was promoted to a position as a professor. Loukinen continued to make films on many diverse subjects concerning the U.P., always being inspired by the rugged independence and resourcefulness of Yoopers. In his course on rural sociology, Loukinen made a point to eliminate prejudice in the classroom by teaching his students about the innate and unique intelligence of rural communities.
Loukinen, through Northern and the diverse faculty therein, developed an incubator for regional studies to celebrate, understand, and appreciate the world around them. Instead of creating an export economy of students in a university that teaches them how to leave the U.P, Loukinen hoped to inspire students to hone a deeper appreciation for the place they were in. Both Loukinen and Saari were two vanguards of the U.P studies at Northern by showing respect, interest, and love for a land neither of them originated from, but who have nevertheless found and built a home here.
The Upper Peninsula is considered home to a diverse array of people. However, people are not the only species that consider the Upper Peninsula their place of residence. An important area of study that keeps the U.P. on the map is its natural wonders, the flora and fauna that cohabitate the landscape. Jill Leonard, current head of the Biology department at NMU, was born in Western Massachusetts and grew up near the Atlantic Ocean in Maine. Leonard majored in biology at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and received her Master's degree in marine biology and biochemistry from the University of Delaware. Her Ph.D. is in zoology, with a concentration in migratory fish which she received from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Leonard’s work specializes in aquatic migratory species. Her work with the killifish in Delaware piqued her interest in “oddball species,” as the killifish can go between freshwater and saltwater.
Despite having no cultural ties to the land or lake, Leonard’s choice to move to the Upper Peninsula was certainly inspired by Lake Superior’s aquatic biodiversity. But it was Northern itself, and the promise of employment, that brought Leonard up north. When Leonard arrived, the Biology department was focused on training technicians as opposed to training scientists to do independent, quality research. Leonard entered Northern while the science buildings were being renovated to accommodate the opportunities for better research. Her own research began by talking with the local organizations and communities that were already doing work in the Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on brook trout. Leonard took up the research on brook trout and has been continuing her research both independently and through Northern in collaboration with her students.
Leonard has been able to collaborate with the students at Northern through work studies and research groups, allowing students to gain first-hand experience in their field. It is the prospect of these types of projects and work that brings many graduate students to Northern. Having graduate students allows Leonard to interact deeper with local agencies and people in the area, creating an interconnected, symbiotic network of minds and resources.
Many of the students at Northern bring new ideas and information to Leonard’s desk. One of the more publicly recognized projects is Leonard’s work with migratory salamander research on Presque Isle in Marquette. One student informed Leonard that salamanders were being hit by cars as they migrated, and he wanted to take steps to protect them. By networking within the community, the student was able to receive a road closure to protect and learn more about the salamanders. Even after the student’s graduation, Leonard coordinates with the students interested in continuing this research, now known as the “Salamander Stewards” who moderate the annual salamander run.
The unique landscape of the U.P is just as understudied as those within its borders. As a biologist, Leonard enjoys figuring out and studying the local environment that she lives in. It is the local environment, more than anything else, that generates curiosity, as that’s where the stories are.