Keweenaw Ethnicity Symposium July 1

Symposium Schedule

The rich ethnic history of Michigan?s Copper Country will be examined during a day-long symposium in Houghton, Michigan. The event, titled ?An Interior Ellis Island: Ethnic Diversity and the Peopling of Michigan?s Copper Country,? is sponsored by the J.R. Van Pelt Library at Michigan Technological University. This project is funded in part by Michigan Humanities Council, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The symposium is scheduled for 10:00am ? 3:00pm on Saturday, July 1 in Room U115 of the Michigan Tech Minerals and Materials Engineering Building. The event is open to the public free of charge and there is no need to register. 

Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula became the center of the nation?s first capital-intensive mining boom in the mid-Nineteenth Century, propelling Michigan?s Copper Country to international fame and attracting the hopes and dreams of thousands of ethnic immigrants. The 1870 Federal Census revealed that Houghton County had the third largest percentage of foreign-born residents in the entire country; more than 95 percent of all Houghton County residents had at least one parent of foreign birth, the greatest such percentage in the entire United States. 

The peopling of Michigan?s Copper Country, like all migration, was an economic process. People were pushed out of areas in Europe that experienced high levels of surplus labor and pulled to areas like the Keweenaw that experienced labor shortages. This day-long symposium will explore the ?push-pull? mechanism of migration by examining the economic factors that pushed migrants out of various parts of the world and other factors that pulled them to the Keweenaw. 

The symposium will include presentations by five speakers. An opening address by Tim O?Neil from Central Michigan University will introduce the main themes of immigration and ethnicity in the Copper Country, Jo Urion of Keweenaw National Historical Park will provide a brief overview of Native American history in the Keweenaw, Kim Hoagland from Michigan Tech will look at ethnicity and company housing through a case study of the 1913 Seeberville murders, Ed Yarbrough from the Quincy Mine Hoist Association will review the effect of ethnicity on religious architecture in the Calumet-Laurium area, and Arnold Alanen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison will present a talk entitled "Saunas and Sisu: Finnish Immigrants and Settlements in the Copper Country."

The day?s events will also include a "virtual ribbon cutting" for a new web site devoted to Keweenaw ethnic history and a web-accessible collection of historical photographs from the Michigan Tech Archives & Copper Country Historical Collections that help tell the story of immigrants in Michigan's Copper Country.

For further information contact the Michigan Tech Archives at (906) 487-2505 or via e-mail at copper@mtu.edu