
Interview With Dr. Arne Vainio
MM:
Let’s start with some basics. You’re Finnish and Native American …
AV:
I’m 50% Finnish. I’m also 50% Ojibwe, also known as Anishinaabe. My paternal grandparents immigrated from Finland in the early 1900s. My grandfather settled in Sturgeon, Minnesota in 1903 and my grandmother a few years later. She traveled on a ship from Finland and was a servant for a family in New York City. Later, she answered an ad to be a housekeeper for my grandfather and I presume travelled mostly by train to Minnesota. They were married and had a son and two daughters. The son, Aarne, was my father. My grandmother always pronounced my name with both A’s. It was the last thing she said to me before dying at ninety-four. I really believe she thought she was holding my father’s hand and speaking to him as she didn’t have that opportunity before he died.
MM:
Talk a bit about how Finnish culture was present in your upbringing.
AV:
I remember being at my Finnish grandparents’ house as far back as I have memories. We used to have coffee there even when we were really young. My grandmother would put a saucer with mostly milk and a little bit of coffee out. It was the only place we ever got sugar cubes: she knew we loved them. My grandmother made homemade bread on an old cast-iron wood stove. That stove would be going even in the summer and she’d bake bread every day. We used to have bread with butter and cheese and she’d let us dunk it in our coffee. She made soup with beef, potatoes, onions, carrots, and rutabagas. We’d have that on sauna nights and neighbors would come and have that with bread and butter and coffee after sauna. She made fish stew. When we traveled to Finland in 2010 and 2019, we had salmon stew almost every day. My grandparents, my aunts, and the people who came to visit would all speak Finnish. Sometimes we understood what they were talking about, sometimes not.
MM:
I’m fairly certain you’ve used the term “Finndian” to refer to yourself.
AV:
Being Finnish and Ojibwe is not necessarily rare in northern Minnesota. Finndian is a term that’s been used and, yes, a term I’ve used. Ojibwe people refer to themselves as Anishinaabe, (the first people) and I actually prefer the term Finnishinaabe, even though that’s also a made-up term. I’m from the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, a reservation in Minnesota. Finnish immigrants in the early 1900s and Ojibwe people understood each other. Both come from the same birchbark band of the Earth: the trees, water, and wildlife are similar. Finnish immigrants were late arrivals to America and weren’t always welcome. That gave them an understanding of how Ojibwe people were treated. They naturally gravitated towards each other. My Anishinaabe uncle loved my grandparents and my Finnish grandmother loved her grandchildren.
MM:
How did your Ojibwe heritage interplay with your Finnishness?
AV:
My father died when I was four. Anything Finnish in my upbringing came from my grandmother and grandfather. My grandfather was the stereotypical angry old Finnish man and didn’t interact with us as much as my grandmother did. I remember taking a sauna with my father: it’s one of my earliest memories. I was four years old and we were in the changing room after the sauna and he was swinging the screen door back-and-forth to try to get some cool air inside. I could smell the steam from the sauna stove and I could smell the Brylcreem he was putting in his hair. He rubbed his hands together and put some in my hair and carried me back to the house. It’s one of my best memories.
When I participate in native sweat ceremonies, it reminds me of that sauna with my father. Tobacco is important to Ojibwe people and primary to all of our ceremonies. I do a ceremony every morning. I put tobacco out and, as part of that ceremony, I thank my father, my grandmother, my aunt Bertie, and my aunt Helmi and tell them I love them. My father was a great fisherman and hunter and lived for the outdoors. He was welcome on the wild rice lakes with the Ojibwe people and shared his gifts with people he respected. He was fully accepted into the Ojibwe community and my mother was fully accepted into the Finnish community. My mother was traditional Ojibwe and lived that life. She instilled in us many traditional teachings throughout our childhood, mostly done without the realization she was teaching. We learned respect for all of creation. Taking the life of an animal for food was a spiritual experience and required ceremony. This respect carried into my adulthood and mixed well with my Finnish upbringing. When I was five years old, there was a skunk on the porch of my grandparent’s house. My grandmother opened the screen door, walked out, and grabbed it by the tail when it tried to spray. It’s said a skunk won’t spray if its feet aren’t touching the ground and she must’ve believed that. She carried it over a quarter of a mile to the river and threw it off a bridge. It swam to the other side of the river and never came back!
MM:
Let’s talk a bit about your education.
AV:
I never thought I’d become a physician. When I was growing up, that wasn’t something that was talked about and or offered as an opportunity. When we saw the doctor, it was for shots and stitches. He wasn’t interested in talking with us as children. Early on, I was a heavy equipment operator, a lumberjack, and worked in an auto body shop. My cousin‘s uncle went down when he was feeding his pigs. There were two people with him. They didn’t know what to do and one of them ran a quarter of a mile to get to a phone. It took forty-five minutes for the ambulance to arrive. By the time it did, he’d died. I never wanted to be a helpless person standing by so I took an emergency medical technician course. It was one hundred and ten hours long. It was the first time I was with people who were passionate about something. I loved that training but when it was done, it was done. All I had was a paper certificate.
I was working at the body shop when a logging truck collided with a pick-up. The woman in the pick-up was almost killed and I was the first one to get to her. I cleaned blood and broken teeth out of her mouth and held her still and kept her calm until the ambulance got there. Her whispered “thank you” was all I needed to realize my life needed to take a turn. I credit less than a double handful of people with getting me into medical school: she’s one of them.
I got a job as a professional firefighter and a paramedic and that led to medical school. I did my residency at the Seattle Indian Health Board from 1994 to 1997. I’ve worked on the Fond du Lac Reservation in Minnesota since 1997 and have only done Indian health. I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given and that’s part of my ceremony every morning. I’ve been a physician there for over twenty-seven years and have delivered babies from babies I once delivered. My Finnish grandmother was so proud of me when I graduated high school and I know she smiles on me now.
MM:
What health care challenges do your patients face that are different from the health challenges of the general population?
AV:
The healthcare challenges facing Native American people are similar to those everywhere. We traveled to Finland in 2009 with Walking into the Unknown. This was a documentary film my wife and I produced. We showed it four times in Finland. We had people come up to us afterward and say the same problems addressed in the film are also problems in Finland.
In my practice, I see lots of diabetes. When I was in medical school, one of the first lessons was “if you know diabetes, you know medicine.“ Diabetes affects all body systems and increases the risks for heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease, chronic diabetic ulcers, vision loss, and all other parts of health. I’ve been practicing on the reservation long enough to see this play out over nearly twenty-eight years, including the tragedy that can come with it. I’ve also seen the beauty that comes from a different perspective. Traditionally, indigenous people look at themselves as only part of the web of life and not dominant over the rest. This gives us a different way of looking at the world and of looking at each other. Our elders are to be treasured and are important to us as keepers of wisdom and tradition.
MM:
What are your thoughts regarding the Indian Health Services system?
AV:
We do good medicine at Fond du Lac. We have dedicated clinic staff and providers. I work as a family practice physician on the Fond du Lac Ojibwe reservation. I did my residency at the Seattle Indian Health Board in Seattle, Washington for three years prior to coming to Fond du Lac. Indian health is all I have ever wanted to do. The Indian Health Service’s stated mission is to raise the physical, mental, social and spiritual health of American Indians and Alaska Natives to the highest level. Every day, I go to work with people who share that mission and are constantly working to improve the health of our community.
MM:
Like any 21st century journalist, I Googled you and came across the site, We Are Healers (https://www.wearehealers.org/dr-arne-vainio).
AV:
We Are Healers has done beautiful videos encouraging indigenous dreamers to pursue careers in health care. I urge everyone to go to the website for inspiration and to see what guides us on the path to healing. When I was growing up, becoming a doctor was not on the horizon and was never discussed. My course to get into medical school was like that of a pinball and luckily, I hit all the right bumpers! I don’t want those who will follow me to depend on luck. I want them to see the possibilities in all of us. Certain people guided me in the right direction at the moments when I needed guidance. Without those folks, I could easily have been lost. I can only pay them back by paying it forward. My mentors have included physicians, teachers, traditional elders, and people at the end of their lives. Hopefully, allowing students (and those wishing to change their direction) the opportunity to see someone who looks like them practicing medicine will make a difference. I know it would’ve made a difference for me.
MM:
You’re a physician, a husband, a father, and a community leader. But you still make time to sauna with your good friend, Steve Leppälä…
AV:
I’ve been taking sauna with Steve on most Saturdays for almost two decades. We have a Facebook page called “Sauna Quest”. Our stated goal is to take saunas in historically significant and traditional saunas. This has led to invitations to some beautiful saunas. Steve, my wife, and I traveled to Finland in 2010 and 2019. Steve and I were pursuing traditional Finnish saunas and were able to take sauna in three savusaunas, a floating sauna, and a small sauna just steps from a Finnish lake.
Steve sent in a cheek swab: he tells me he’s 110% Finnish! I’ve not seen the paperwork yet, but I’ve no reason to doubt him. He drives a white SUV painted like the Finnish flag. It’s impossible to miss. I drive his old one, also a white SUV painted like the Finnish flag. When we park the cars side by side, it looks like something official is happening. When we take sauna, we talk about important things like science, rhubarb, the universe, and Steve’s pursuit of the Nobel prize. I keep hoping one day he’ll get it. In all seriousness, Steve has more SISU than any two people I know and I want us to take saunas together for as long as we can. I plan on building a woodfired sauna and also hope to build a savusauna.
MM:
Your wife, Ivy, is an extremely talented photographer and, like you, a terrific role model for children and students through her work in higher education.
AV:
I met Ivy in 1988 when I became serious about college. We met in biology lab. I graduated from medical school in 1994 and proposed to her two hours later at the casino in Hinckley, Minnesota. We were married in Las Vegas in 1997.
Ivy’s a gifted photographer. She’s always worked in higher education and worked in community service and event planning. This led her to working with students and people who are marginalized. Ivy treats all of them with the same love and respect and they love and respect her in turn.
We go to traditional Anishinaabe big drum ceremonies in the spring and fall. These have been going on for well over century and we’ve been going to them seriously since last winter. Making traditional blankets for gifts has long been part of the ceremony. We bought a sewing machine and she makes blankets the way my mother made them. She started making blankets last March and just finished her one hundred and twenty third blanket.
She never sells them: she gives them as gifts and has given them all away. She’s given them to elders we respect, people who have done good things and not been recognized for their acts, and people with no place to turn.
It doesn’t hurt that she’s hilarious and sees the positive in everything. Her spirit of kindness and generosity has always been there. Traveling through life with her has been more of a blessing than I ever hoped for. She’s a mentor to countless others and we understand what that means. We support each other and we have the support of the community.
MM:
What importance do you assign to cultural gatherings and festivals, whether indigenous or Finnish?
AV:
Cultural gatherings and events are important. Ivy and I go to Anishinaabe ceremonies and learn from our traditional elders and fluent speakers as often as we can. We recently lost four elders in our community. Those passings make us realize the importance of elders. Hearing our traditions and our creation stories in our language is important if we are to carry that on. When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time at my grandma Vainio‘s place. She spoke mostly Finnish and all of us understood her to some extent. She died when I was 21 and for the most part, I quit being Finnish.
Finnfest 2008 was in Duluth. My wife was on the opening ceremonies committee, where she met Steve Leppälä. Steve and I became friends and started to sauna together. With him being 110% Finnish, it reawakened my Finnish side. I was a panelist for a couple of sessions at FinnFest and something I said was translated into Finnish and was quoted in the Helsingin Sanomat. This led Finnish Journalist Rauli Virtanen to fly to the United States to spend three days with us. He produced a short video about us. In that video, I said we probably had family in Finland but didn’t know how to contact them. As soon as the piece aired on Finnish television, we started getting emails. Most of them were along the lines of “I’m not related to you, but when you come to Finland, you stay with us.“ But one was from a relative who named my brothers, sisters, mother and grandmother. That brought us to Finland in 2010 to meet my family. I held my grandmother’s letters from America in my hands and could hear her longing for Finland. We’ve always been treated so well when we’re in Finland. My grandmother left Finland for America when she was nineteen and never saw it again. When the plane was landing in Helsinki for the first time, I felt like I was bringing her home. Culture, language, and tradition are important.
((c) Mark Munger, 2025. This interview first appeared in the July edition of the Finnish American Reporter.)