My dad and I use to fish off sointula when we lived in Port Hardy, my father always admired them, especially their co-op.
In Sointula, a Wet and Faded Utopia
Sointula's Finnish Organization Hall Life meanders on in the former Finnish socialist commune.
By Crawford Kilian
Published: August 17, 2005
Early on a wet summer morning, I drove down Kaleva Road into Sointula, on Malcolm Island. A black sedan partly blocked the road: its rear end was in the bushes, and a front tire was blown. If the driver simply had spun out, though, why was there a dent in the left rear door, and why was the windshield bashed in? Had the driver hit a deer?
Minutes later at the seniors’ club in the Sointula Museum building, I learned the truth. The old-timers told me the car was driven by a local nuisance, a young man who thought it was funny to come close to sideswiping his neighbours. This was not the first car he’d trashed, but this one happened to be his mother’s. It appeared that after he spun out, he had a tantrum and kicked in the door and the windshield.
Life in Utopia isn’t what it used to be. The people drinking coffee at 7:30 on this rainy morning are longtime Sointulans, some of them second or third generation. They fish, log, and work in BC’s oldest co-op (founded in 1909). Some of them go back over 70 years, to when Sointula was Finnish and Red, and memories were still vivid of its idealistic birth in 1901.
Sointula was founded by Finnish émigré workers who’d had enough of Dunsmuir’s horrible Vancouver Island coal mines. Led by a charismatic socialist, Matti Kurikka, they formed the Kalevan Kansa, a utopian cooperative association, and obtained Malcolm Island (near the north end of Vancouver Island) from the provincial government.
Kurikka was a good talker and an energetic womanizer, but not much of a planner. While he drummed up new recruits, his compatriots struggled to clear land, cut timber, and build shelters and barns and machine shops. Kurikka talked them into some disastrous projects (including building bridges for the North Shore’s new Keith Road, which cost the community a fortune in unpaid labour). Meanwhile he was also promoting open marriage and daycare centres.
A doomed Utopia
But the real disaster was a fire that destroyed the community’s three-story dormitory and office building in 1903. Eleven people, many of them children, died in the fire. “Sointula” means “place of harmony,” but the community was bitterly divided by its losses.
The gap between Kurikka’s promises and reality destroyed Utopia, but not its people. In the spring of 1905, the Kalevan Kansa was dissolved and the island returned to provincial control. But many of the settlers chose to stay, to claim land and to build the kind of community that Matti Kurikka had dreamed of—secular, collective, and prosperous.
It was never easy. The Finns rowed around the Strait of Georgia, looking for work in logging camps and on fishing boats. They lived on salt fish and potatoes, and a skeptical view of capitalism. Local playwrights staged left-wing dramas in the Finnish Organization Hall: the curtain showed a young woman carrying a red flag, leading workers from an industrial hell into a pastoral paradise that looked a lot like Malcolm Island. Above the curtain, audiences could read Marx’s command: “Workers of the world, unite.”
Instead of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, kids joined the Young Pioneers and marched behind a hammer-and-sickle flag. Even in 1932, girls wore jeans. Religion played little part in Sointula life; the first church on Malcolm Island wasn’t founded until the early 1960s.
For years Sointula was proudly self-sufficient. The Co-op supplied not just Malcolm Island but the whole region with food, hardware, and consumer goods. The town supported brass bands, gymnastic teams, and theatrical companies. The old-timers recall 1970, when Sointula had the highest per-capita income of any community in Canada. Every fishing boat was freshly painted, and every fishing family had a new truck every year. Houses were freshly painted too, each with a manicured garden.
But that was then. For whatever reasons, much of today’s community is somewhere between funky and downright shabby. Even on First Street, the main drag, some yards display dead SUVs rotting in uncut grass. Other houses are immaculate. Some are suburban tract homes, while a few still look very north European.
A new way of life
A century after Utopia folded, Sointula is looking for a new way of life. The curtain from the F.O. Hall is now in the town’s museum, along with photos of the Young Pioneers. Seventy years later, logging is almost dead, and most of the professional fishermen are barely breaking even. In the Co-op’s liquor store, a young man told the clerk: “I was up in Area 3, just losing money. So I came back.” He consoled himself with sixty dollars’ worth of beer.
Many of the 800 residents of Malcolm Island now commute by ferry to jobs in Port McNeill. Plenty of houses are for sale. They tend to go to Californians who use them for a month or two in summer, or to middle-aged couples planning for retirement. Housing prices have reportedly tripled in recent years, so young families are more likely to try to sell their homes and move to cheaper places.
The local elementary school, built for 130 pupils, has only 30. Kindergarten has one student. So does grade one. Secondary students commute to Port McNeill; five Sointulans were part of North Island Secondary’s class of ’05.
The fall in enrolment could lead to the closing of the school, but a retired teacher isn’t sure what the critical number might be. One-room schoolhouses disappeared from BC a decade ago. Now they’re coming back, at least in small communities on northern Vancouver Island, because closing schools altogether would be logistically and politically impossible.
Never a cop when you need one
Crime isn’t serious enough to warrant a permanent RCMP detachment in Sointula. The last resident Mountie moved off the island several years ago. His wife reportedly hated the place. Now the Mounties drop by now and then, but not, the old-timers tell me, at times when drug users and drunk drivers are active. Meanwhile, neighbouring Alert Bay has eight Mounties in residence.
As Sointula enters its second century, it faces immense challenges. Its young people are leaving. Summer visitors are welcome, but add little to the economy. The old resource-extraction industries support fewer people, and the island is too remote to become another Saltspring or Hornby. Apart from the Co-op, few businesses prosper. Local New Democrats, at a dinner for an aspiring federal candidate, express their frustration about the local economy—and about their own party’s big-city ignorance of this remote part of the province.
Yet Sointula is a remarkably pleasant place. The town itself is a tranquil patchwork of new and old houses, some shabby and some beautiful. Deer wander the streets like teenagers in the Oakridge Mall. The food is good at the Wild Island Café, and so are the conversations that spring up spontaneously between one table and the next. Despite its forbidding name, Rough Bay’s marina is crowded with both fishing boats and pleasure craft. On a summer afternoon with a northwest wind blowing and the sun shining, no town in BC is lovelier.
Still a wild island
And even after a century of settlement, Malcolm Island seems startlingly wild. Bald eagles and gulls swoop on pilchard runs just offshore. Orcas surface off Bere Point while researchers huddle under tarps, eavesdropping on the whales with hydrophones. Mink and otters are common. Eight wolves, the old-timers say, have been trapped and killed in recent years; more are out there in the woods, and maybe some cougars. The deer in their hundreds could support far more.
Central-coast rains sustain big timber. The trail through the Sitka spruce forest above Beautiful Bay is intimidating: the woods are dense, dark, and full of enormous blowdowns from a windstorm in 2001. Halfway along the trail, a flight of stairs topples down a canyon to a stony beach: 5 km long and utterly deserted, facing Mount Waddington and the Coast Range across Queen Charlotte Strait.
Mateoja Trail, north of Sointula, leads through a moss-carpeted forest where fire raged for months in the summer of 1925. The burned cedars still stand, looking like abstract totem poles above their green descendants. The trail is like a tunnel through the trees, but a resident recalls riding her horse up the trail 15 years ago when she was a teenager.
At its upper end the trail curves past several small lakes and through Melvin’s Bog on a boardwalk (“Keep your clogs and your dogs off the bog!”), where a family of eagles complain about the hikers. The trail ends on the gravel road that runs 28 km from the Pulteney Point lighthouse on the west to the log-sorting grounds at Mitchell Bay on the east.
Isolated but engaged
The old-timers at the seniors’ club can recall when electricity came to the island (1950) and telephones (1956). As the gymnastics and theatrics faded out, Saturday-night movies and dances helped sustain a sense of community. But TV ended the movies, and now every house has a satellite dish. Computer users agitate for broadband access to the Web. Sointulans are still angry about the desertion of North Island College, which used to offer courses here and in Alert Bay, until a budget cut.
The island has always been a strange mix of isolation and engagement. People came here from Finland and Australia, and never forgot the outside world. They were as concerned with the perils of European fascism as they were with the storms that took the lives of their fathers, sons, and husbands.
That mix could yet inspire a revival of Sointula’s unique culture. The town has the basic infrastructure for education programs. It could be an ideal site for summer workshops in the arts and environmental sciences, and for year-round retreats. Once properly link to the Web, Sointula could become a centre for environmental education, with its own history and industries as part of the curriculum.
Unlike most BC resource towns, Sointula started with an idea, and a utopian one at that: a community combining work and a life of the mind. For decades, through wars and depressions, it sustained that idea. Now that idea may sustain the community.
Whatever Sointula’s future may be, it probably won’t include the guy who wrecked his mother’s car on Kaleva Road. The old-timers hear that the very next day, his mother packed his duffel bag, marched him down to the ferry, and kicked him off the island.
The idea of cooperation and sharing manifested into the CO-OPs that we now have today. With a population of about 800 people, we currently have 70 co-ops and non-profit organizations on Malcolm Island. The town is run by hard working volunteers and board members dedicated to keeping our island home a great place to live.
In Sointula, a Wet and Faded Utopia
Sointula's Finnish Organization Hall Life meanders on in the former Finnish socialist commune.
By Crawford Kilian
Published: August 17, 2005
Early on a wet summer morning, I drove down Kaleva Road into Sointula, on Malcolm Island. A black sedan partly blocked the road: its rear end was in the bushes, and a front tire was blown. If the driver simply had spun out, though, why was there a dent in the left rear door, and why was the windshield bashed in? Had the driver hit a deer?
Minutes later at the seniors’ club in the Sointula Museum building, I learned the truth. The old-timers told me the car was driven by a local nuisance, a young man who thought it was funny to come close to sideswiping his neighbours. This was not the first car he’d trashed, but this one happened to be his mother’s. It appeared that after he spun out, he had a tantrum and kicked in the door and the windshield.
Life in Utopia isn’t what it used to be. The people drinking coffee at 7:30 on this rainy morning are longtime Sointulans, some of them second or third generation. They fish, log, and work in BC’s oldest co-op (founded in 1909). Some of them go back over 70 years, to when Sointula was Finnish and Red, and memories were still vivid of its idealistic birth in 1901.
Sointula was founded by Finnish émigré workers who’d had enough of Dunsmuir’s horrible Vancouver Island coal mines. Led by a charismatic socialist, Matti Kurikka, they formed the Kalevan Kansa, a utopian cooperative association, and obtained Malcolm Island (near the north end of Vancouver Island) from the provincial government.
Kurikka was a good talker and an energetic womanizer, but not much of a planner. While he drummed up new recruits, his compatriots struggled to clear land, cut timber, and build shelters and barns and machine shops. Kurikka talked them into some disastrous projects (including building bridges for the North Shore’s new Keith Road, which cost the community a fortune in unpaid labour). Meanwhile he was also promoting open marriage and daycare centres.
A doomed Utopia
But the real disaster was a fire that destroyed the community’s three-story dormitory and office building in 1903. Eleven people, many of them children, died in the fire. “Sointula” means “place of harmony,” but the community was bitterly divided by its losses.
The gap between Kurikka’s promises and reality destroyed Utopia, but not its people. In the spring of 1905, the Kalevan Kansa was dissolved and the island returned to provincial control. But many of the settlers chose to stay, to claim land and to build the kind of community that Matti Kurikka had dreamed of—secular, collective, and prosperous.
It was never easy. The Finns rowed around the Strait of Georgia, looking for work in logging camps and on fishing boats. They lived on salt fish and potatoes, and a skeptical view of capitalism. Local playwrights staged left-wing dramas in the Finnish Organization Hall: the curtain showed a young woman carrying a red flag, leading workers from an industrial hell into a pastoral paradise that looked a lot like Malcolm Island. Above the curtain, audiences could read Marx’s command: “Workers of the world, unite.”
Instead of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, kids joined the Young Pioneers and marched behind a hammer-and-sickle flag. Even in 1932, girls wore jeans. Religion played little part in Sointula life; the first church on Malcolm Island wasn’t founded until the early 1960s.
For years Sointula was proudly self-sufficient. The Co-op supplied not just Malcolm Island but the whole region with food, hardware, and consumer goods. The town supported brass bands, gymnastic teams, and theatrical companies. The old-timers recall 1970, when Sointula had the highest per-capita income of any community in Canada. Every fishing boat was freshly painted, and every fishing family had a new truck every year. Houses were freshly painted too, each with a manicured garden.
But that was then. For whatever reasons, much of today’s community is somewhere between funky and downright shabby. Even on First Street, the main drag, some yards display dead SUVs rotting in uncut grass. Other houses are immaculate. Some are suburban tract homes, while a few still look very north European.
A new way of life
A century after Utopia folded, Sointula is looking for a new way of life. The curtain from the F.O. Hall is now in the town’s museum, along with photos of the Young Pioneers. Seventy years later, logging is almost dead, and most of the professional fishermen are barely breaking even. In the Co-op’s liquor store, a young man told the clerk: “I was up in Area 3, just losing money. So I came back.” He consoled himself with sixty dollars’ worth of beer.
Many of the 800 residents of Malcolm Island now commute by ferry to jobs in Port McNeill. Plenty of houses are for sale. They tend to go to Californians who use them for a month or two in summer, or to middle-aged couples planning for retirement. Housing prices have reportedly tripled in recent years, so young families are more likely to try to sell their homes and move to cheaper places.
The local elementary school, built for 130 pupils, has only 30. Kindergarten has one student. So does grade one. Secondary students commute to Port McNeill; five Sointulans were part of North Island Secondary’s class of ’05.
The fall in enrolment could lead to the closing of the school, but a retired teacher isn’t sure what the critical number might be. One-room schoolhouses disappeared from BC a decade ago. Now they’re coming back, at least in small communities on northern Vancouver Island, because closing schools altogether would be logistically and politically impossible.
Never a cop when you need one
Crime isn’t serious enough to warrant a permanent RCMP detachment in Sointula. The last resident Mountie moved off the island several years ago. His wife reportedly hated the place. Now the Mounties drop by now and then, but not, the old-timers tell me, at times when drug users and drunk drivers are active. Meanwhile, neighbouring Alert Bay has eight Mounties in residence.
As Sointula enters its second century, it faces immense challenges. Its young people are leaving. Summer visitors are welcome, but add little to the economy. The old resource-extraction industries support fewer people, and the island is too remote to become another Saltspring or Hornby. Apart from the Co-op, few businesses prosper. Local New Democrats, at a dinner for an aspiring federal candidate, express their frustration about the local economy—and about their own party’s big-city ignorance of this remote part of the province.
Yet Sointula is a remarkably pleasant place. The town itself is a tranquil patchwork of new and old houses, some shabby and some beautiful. Deer wander the streets like teenagers in the Oakridge Mall. The food is good at the Wild Island Café, and so are the conversations that spring up spontaneously between one table and the next. Despite its forbidding name, Rough Bay’s marina is crowded with both fishing boats and pleasure craft. On a summer afternoon with a northwest wind blowing and the sun shining, no town in BC is lovelier.
Still a wild island
And even after a century of settlement, Malcolm Island seems startlingly wild. Bald eagles and gulls swoop on pilchard runs just offshore. Orcas surface off Bere Point while researchers huddle under tarps, eavesdropping on the whales with hydrophones. Mink and otters are common. Eight wolves, the old-timers say, have been trapped and killed in recent years; more are out there in the woods, and maybe some cougars. The deer in their hundreds could support far more.
Central-coast rains sustain big timber. The trail through the Sitka spruce forest above Beautiful Bay is intimidating: the woods are dense, dark, and full of enormous blowdowns from a windstorm in 2001. Halfway along the trail, a flight of stairs topples down a canyon to a stony beach: 5 km long and utterly deserted, facing Mount Waddington and the Coast Range across Queen Charlotte Strait.
Mateoja Trail, north of Sointula, leads through a moss-carpeted forest where fire raged for months in the summer of 1925. The burned cedars still stand, looking like abstract totem poles above their green descendants. The trail is like a tunnel through the trees, but a resident recalls riding her horse up the trail 15 years ago when she was a teenager.
At its upper end the trail curves past several small lakes and through Melvin’s Bog on a boardwalk (“Keep your clogs and your dogs off the bog!”), where a family of eagles complain about the hikers. The trail ends on the gravel road that runs 28 km from the Pulteney Point lighthouse on the west to the log-sorting grounds at Mitchell Bay on the east.
Isolated but engaged
The old-timers at the seniors’ club can recall when electricity came to the island (1950) and telephones (1956). As the gymnastics and theatrics faded out, Saturday-night movies and dances helped sustain a sense of community. But TV ended the movies, and now every house has a satellite dish. Computer users agitate for broadband access to the Web. Sointulans are still angry about the desertion of North Island College, which used to offer courses here and in Alert Bay, until a budget cut.
The island has always been a strange mix of isolation and engagement. People came here from Finland and Australia, and never forgot the outside world. They were as concerned with the perils of European fascism as they were with the storms that took the lives of their fathers, sons, and husbands.
That mix could yet inspire a revival of Sointula’s unique culture. The town has the basic infrastructure for education programs. It could be an ideal site for summer workshops in the arts and environmental sciences, and for year-round retreats. Once properly link to the Web, Sointula could become a centre for environmental education, with its own history and industries as part of the curriculum.
Unlike most BC resource towns, Sointula started with an idea, and a utopian one at that: a community combining work and a life of the mind. For decades, through wars and depressions, it sustained that idea. Now that idea may sustain the community.
Whatever Sointula’s future may be, it probably won’t include the guy who wrecked his mother’s car on Kaleva Road. The old-timers hear that the very next day, his mother packed his duffel bag, marched him down to the ferry, and kicked him off the island.
The idea of cooperation and sharing manifested into the CO-OPs that we now have today. With a population of about 800 people, we currently have 70 co-ops and non-profit organizations on Malcolm Island. The town is run by hard working volunteers and board members dedicated to keeping our island home a great place to live.
Its just a beautiful interesting place, yous just want everyone to share it. :wink: Hey! hows about some other outer islands...Here is one galaniomama visits alot. Having been there myself many times, I find this description best describes Saturna island