Festival of Nations: What the Miners Brought With Them
Near Red Lodge, Montana
The immigrant communities that built Red Lodge in the coal era did not disappear when the mines closed. They stayed, and their American-born children and grandchildren stayed with them, and the ethnic neighborhoods that had once been economically necessary became culturally valued. In the mid twentieth century, a group of civic leaders organized the first Festival of Nations in Red Lodge, a celebration of the immigrant cultures that had built the town.
The festival invited representatives of the Finnish, Italian, Scottish, Irish, Norwegian, German, Slavic, and other communities to present their traditional foods, music, costumes, and crafts in an event that was simultaneously a community reunion and a public declaration that these identities were worth celebrating rather than erasing.
The Festival of Nations has continued for decades. The event takes place in late summer and draws visitors from across the region who come for the diversity of food and performance that Red Lodge's mining immigration produced. The festival is, in some sense, a different kind of monument to the coal era than the official historical markers. It celebrates what the miners brought from their homelands and what they chose to keep across generations. Those things turn out to be considerable, and the festival is what kept them alive in this particular mountain town.
