ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Narrating Migration in Nordic CountriesThe policy and measures of the authorities guaranteed opportunitiesfor the evacuated population to practise their former occupations.The settlement strove as far as possible to take into account the geographical,economic, communal, and religious conditions from whichthe evacuees had come. Naturally, the settlement process did not passwithout some problems (particularly in the distribution of the landsof the main population and in various cultural confrontations), buton the whole the measures taken in Finland after the Second WorldWar showed that the country had carried out the resettlement of largegroups of people in a sensible way that paid heed to the needs of theevacuees.On the basis of the Land Acquisition Act, 38 percent of the Karelianevacuees were able to obtain a livelihood from agriculture; in thetowns and cities they quickly made their way to those centres thatoffered work and a livelihood. Thus the Karelian evacuees did not endup in Finland as a rootless, errant section of the population; ratherthose who wished to do so were able to get land that they could till orjobs that they knew how to do (Nevalainen, 1994). At the same time,they were able to enjoy a decent human life in their new places of residence.Thanks to the Land Acquisition Act, some were even able to risein the social hierarchy from being dependent lodgers to landed farmers.According to Keijo K. Kulha, who has studied the public debaterelating to the settlement of the Karelian evacuees:“By moving en masse and voluntarily from the territory cededto the Soviet Union into Finland proper, the Karelian evacuees demonstratedtheir desire to live in a Finnish ethnic environment and toadopt in their relations [with the original population] a social orderand principles of justice that had been moulded by centuries of history.To some extent, the reactions to this action of those who receivedthem were evident in connection with the settlement measures. Allwere of one mind regarding the necessity of settling the evacuees, buteach group in the original population wanted to do so according to itsown principles and in accordance with its own interests. The possibilitiesof society to solve the evacuee problem in a way that was acceptableto the whole people were also limited by all the other difficultiescaused by defeat in the war. On the other hand, the process of rooting201