Follow the Sami Cultural Center through the last ten years of outreach activity with this colorful photographic display. Experience each year with a sampling of the events and people who have made the Center such an important part of the North American Sami experience. For more Center history, see our presentation “Putting Up The Lavvu” at 1:00 p.m. on Sunday. 

Finlandia Foundation 2012 Performer of the Year, Maria Voltaine will sing songs that discuss her own musical immigration journey, with a number of Eurovision songs, sometimes with a “twist,” a few of her originals, and other Finnish pop classics.

Maria is a Finnish-American pop singer/songwriter/producer and multi-instrumentalist. She started playing violin at the age of 4, piano at 8, and finally, singing in her early teens.

Through storytelling and community voices, this session invites reflection on what we inherit, what we pass on, and what it means to belong.

Practice your Finnish skills!

Come and speak Finnish in a relaxed and informal space! Grab some coffee from the tori, enjoy chatting with others, and learn more about Finnish language resources from Lily Obeda, the University of Minnesota Finnish instructor. From novice to native speaker, everyone is welcome!

‘Swedes we are no longer—Russians we do not want to become… so let us be Finns!’. This lecture addresses the birth of Finland’s Romanticism and its cultural and societal manifestations in different areas of life.

In this overview, Helena Halmari begins with the Turku Romantics and the publication of Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala. The nineteenth-century National Romantic ideas reached the areas of language, literature, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Still today, people draw inspiration from the “Golden Age” of Finland’s art, and the Kalevala continues to inspire—from art to heavy metal.

PRESENTER

Helena Halmari is a Distinguished Professor of English at Sam Houston State University. Her recent publications include Multilingual Finland, vols. I & II (2024–25, co-edited with Lotta Weckström) and Finnish Romanticism: Language, Nationalism, and the Fine Arts in Nineteenth-Century Finland (2025, with Michael Demson). Halmari has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Finnish Studies, and currently she is Associate Editor of Brill’s Nordic Approaches to Language and Discourse book series. She also translates prose and lyrics from Finnish into English.

Check out our two Nordic Walking vendors at the Tori Nordic Fair and find out when the FREE Nordic Walking tours provided are provided (each morning and afternoon).