black earth

(red currants near astotin lake, elk island)

(farm near star, ab, south of homestead)
(nettles & wildflowers, star, ab.)

Something that I've always wondered about why there seems to be so little written in the history books (by this, meaning books & museums & cultural centres, etc) about Ukrainian and First Nations interaction in Canada. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places, but there really seems to be a lacuna in the literature, in the documentation of this. I know Dr. Klymasz (Ukrainian-Canadian folklorist) has mentioned the need for people to research it... I don't even know where they'd look, though, anyone who wants to find out about it. I've poked around on the internet, the libraries... no luck thus far. All I could find was an Alberta heritage project with a page documenting 'Aboriginal and Ethnic Minority Women' -- it mostly just comments on how both Ukrainian settlements and Aboriginal communities were targets of missionary and government policy which were attempting to 'Christianize/civilize/Canadianize' both groups, as women in both groups were not seen as 'ideals of womanhood'. And in booklets and informational materials from Kalyna Country, they talk about Ukrainian culture, French Culture, Aboriginal Culture... but never mention the links, the cross-over, or any shared influences...


I have family members who were part of the second wave of immigrants from Western Ukraine, as well as an ancestor who was first Ukrainian to ever end up in Canada, back in the 1890s -- the one who started the exodus... The end of serf-dom in Ukraine meant lots of agrarian people wanting land & wood & employment... & he heard that Canada was running around then advertising free land! free land! so he went on a scouting mission with his friend & to make a longer story much shorter, he returned to Ukraine telling everyone they should go: "We’re coming back and we’re selling everything that we have. This is Heaven compared to what we have, we’ve got to go." The Austro-Hungarian government imprisoned him for six months, charging him with 'inciting people to emigrate' but he came the following year, to the Edna-Star settlement... & hundreds followed him there to North-Central Alberta, & then to Saskatchewan, & Manitoba...


Of course, the motives of the Canadian government were to use these settlers as colonial pawns, to populate the Western part of the country, to demonstrate their sovereignty over that land, the land inhabited by the Cree & Siksika & Anishinaabe & Tsuu T'ina & Dene Suliné & Dene Tha & Métis...


Huge tracts of that first bloc settlement at Star border Saddle Lake, stretch up to the Dene community at Cold Lake... why isn't there more documentation of the links between the communities? Or did they interact much at all? I know the bloc settlements kept ethnic groups together, mostly... but surely the general proximity would have encouraged some kind of interaction, whether amicable or hostile...


No one from that first wave of immigrants is alive anymore. I know about my own extended family's links with their Métis and Cree (& French & German neighbours), links of work & marriage, but as a cultural whole, I'm curious about patterns of interaction -- the Ukrainians & the First Nations (whose land they were now farming...) I know they were both socio-politically marginalized groups at the turn of the last century... was there cooperation, alliances formed? Or did they remain separate, internally isolated?


* * *


(fragments.)


what did they think
of that strange man,
arriving somewhere north
of amiskwaciy waskahigan


standing barefoot
at the train station,
hidden in a shaggy coat,
stamping like a buffalo,
snorting in the cold --


his face, holding his daughter,
steep cheekbones like riverbanks,
his breath hanging in a foggy
ravine


that autumn they built
the burdei, buried themselves
within black earth, seeded themselves
in their new land, hoped to sprout
for a foreign spring --


*


bright kalyna, dog-star red
the trees heavy with currant earrings;
my great-grandmother weaving
the rushes into floor-mats,
singing with miss irene
in french & cree


elle est comme l'hirondelle
she's like the swallow
yes


we sing about swallows too!