Yvonne R. Lockwood

Yvonne R. Lockwood is Curator of Folklife at the Michigan State University Museum and Associate Coordinator of the Michigan Traditional Arts Program. She is co-editor of the Michigan Folklife...

Finnish American Rag Rugs
Art, Tradition, and Ethnic Continuity

Yvonne R. Lockwood

This study of a fiber art tradition reveals a great deal about a little-known ethnic group: Finnish American Rag Rugs is a study about rag rug culture and the role of rag weaving in Finnish America. In a larger sense, it is also a study of how a craft can persist over centuries, reinforcing the culture, attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, and values of an immigrant group that retains a strong sense of its ethnic identity.

Finnish American Rag Rugs provides a history of Finnish immigration to and settlement in Michigan's Upper Peninsula alongside an examination of the tradition of rag weaving in the United States and the Nordic region. Although many other immigrants have a tradition of making rag rugs, Finnish Americans are one of the few groups to have maintained the culture of rag weaving since their immigration. In the process of studying this one activity of one ethnic group, the author uncovers new information about both the history of a ubiquitous form of fiber art and the beliefs and values of an understudied ethnic group. Illustrated with more than
200 color photos, Finnish American Rag Rugs is both informative and beautiful.

Reviews

"In Finnish American Studies...scholars have emphasized the study of institutions and movements. This is history outside of those institutions and movements. Finnish American Rag Rugs is unique because it writes Finnish American history that previously had been ignored in the rush to study institutions and events."
— K. Marianne Wargelin, Honorary Consul for the Republic of Finland

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