In 1971, future NMU sociology professor Michael Loukinen and his wife Elaine moved to the small community of Pelkie in Baraga County for Loukinen’s research on his doctoral dissertation, exploring inter-household labor and material exchange in rural communities. Loukinen, who would make a PBS series on the town in 2019, lived next door to the only Swedish family in the majority-Finnish Pelkie and used skills from his childhood on his uncle’s dairy farm in Jacobsville on the Keweenaw Peninsula to contribute.
Now in the Central UP Archives’ Loukinen A/V Collection, the couple’s 35mm photos from their years in Pelkie reveal not only a way of life lost in the Upper Peninsula, but the kind of photographic savvy that the North Wind has no choice but to highlight. Multimedia archiving often involves the careful digitization of hundreds of photos that are donated to archives, occasionally in bad condition and frequently without much knowledge of who or what they depict. The rest of these photos, and more multimedia artifacts from the UP’s past, are available on request in the archives; the series “Pelkie: 100 Years of Finnishness in Michigan’s North Woods” is available on PBS. You can also watch it for free with ads on YouTube, Tubi and Plex.
