Matti Kurikka

Matti Kurikka
Born	1863-01-24 Parish of Tuutari, Russia (Ingermanland)
Died	1915-10-01 Westerly, Rhode Island
Occupation	Journalist, colonizer, playwright, publicist
Father	Aatami Kurikka
Mother	Anna Pöyhönen
Partner	Anna Henriette Palmqvist Hanna Räihä

Matti Kurikka ((1863-01-24)24 January 1863 – 1 October 1915(1915-10-01) (aged 52)) was a Finnish-Canadian journalist, playwright, colonizer, and utopian socialist best known as the founder of the Sointula colony on Malcolm Island in British Columbia at the turn of the twentieth century.

Early life

Kurikka was born on 24 January 1863 in the parish of Tuutari, in the Ingermanland region of Russia, the son of Aatami Kurikka, a prosperous Finnish farm-owner, and Anna Pöyhönen. He spent his childhood in a bourgeois Finnish household and received schooling in Ingermanland before the family moved to Helsinki in 1872. He enrolled at the University of Helsinki in 1881 but left without completing his degree, relocating to Kuopio where he fell in with a circle of progressive intellectuals including the playwright Minna Canth, the novelist Arvid Järnefelt, and the socialist Augusti Bernhard Mäkelä. In 1884 he wrote his first major play, a work addressing class conflict.

Career as journalist and publicist

Kurikka developed an ideological outlook that blended utopian socialism, Tolstoyan anti-clericalism, and theosophy, while explicitly rejecting Marxism. By 1897 he had risen to editor of Työmiês (Worker), the leading Helsinki labour newspaper, but resigned in April 1899 after growing conflict with Marxist factions within the movement. Under Emperor Nicholas II, intensifying Russification policies in Finland drove many Finnish radicals to seek opportunities abroad.

Sointula colony

Kurikka emigrated from Finland toward the end of 1900, initially attempting a colonization venture in Australia before arriving in British Columbia. Finnish Canadian coal miners working near Nanaimo recruited him to lead a communal working-people's settlement. He assumed the leadership of the Kalevan Kansa Colonization Company and selected Malcolm Island, roughly 200 miles north of Vancouver, as the site for what he named Sointula — a Finnish word meaning "harmony." Settlement began in late 1901, with colonists drawn predominantly from the Finnish immigrant community, chiefly young men.

The colony launched its own newspaper, Aika (Time), which became the first Finnish-language newspaper in Canada, and operated on socialist-communitarian principles. Kurikka advanced a number of radical social positions, including opposition to church-sanctioned marriage, which he argued enslaved women, advocacy of motherhood outside wedlock, and the establishment of communal childcare. These views — and especially his embrace of free love — brought him into direct conflict with the more practically minded Mäkelä, who had arrived from Finland in 1901 and was also known in Canada as Austin McKela.

The colony struggled economically. Agricultural endeavours failed; logging and fishing proved unprofitable; and sawmill contracts ended in disaster. The population, which had reached 238 in 1903, fell sharply. In October 1904 Kurikka and roughly half the membership departed the colony. The Kalevan Kansa Colonization Company was liquidated on 27 May 1905. Mäkelä later characterised Kurikka and those like him as impractical dreamers ill-suited to the hard realities of pioneer settlement.

Later years

After leaving Sointula, Kurikka established a second colonization venture, the Sammon Takojat company, in the Fraser Valley approximately 30 miles east of Vancouver, where he served as secretary. This project also failed within months. Disillusioned, he returned to Finland in September 1905 but found it difficult to reintegrate. In 1908 he relocated to the United States, where he became a columnist and later co-editor of New Yorkin Uutiset (New York News). In 1913 he purchased farmland in Westerly, Rhode Island. He died suddenly of cardiac failure on 1 October 1915 in Westerly.

Legacy

Finnish Canadian socialists made extensive use of Kurikka's memory in the decades following his death, claiming him as an early figure in the Canadian left-wing political tradition. Physical and cultural traces of both his colonies persisted: at Malcolm Island, site of Sointula, and at Webster Corners in the Fraser Valley, the former Sammon Takojat site.

External links

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography