Lögberg-Heimskringla - 15.10.2018, Síða 5

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Lögberg-Heimskringla • 15. október 2018 • 5
I’m such a mix: Icelandic, English,
Irish – the Irish originally Scots. I like
being Icelandic, English, and Irish
with mysterious brothers coming from
the foggy hills of Scotland to Ireland.
An Icelandic great-great-grandfather
called Gottskálk the Greenlander. Who
wouldn’t like that? I even like being
Lutheran. However, as more than one
person has said to me, there wasn’t an
Icelandic Lutheran wedding that they
wouldn’t pass up for a Ukrainian one
at the Communist Hall on the way to
Fraserwood, Manitoba.
I agree. When my mother was
combing my hair, making sure that my
clothes were clean and my shoes shined,
I was already vibrating at the idea of
going to a Ukrainian wedding reception.
Nobody but nobody left their kids at
home when they attended a Ukrainian
wedding.
Ukrainian wedding receptions
started at the front door of the community
hall. The band was playing the wedding
greeting – a fiddle, accordion, and guitar
pounding out the beat – and we’d search
in our pockets for change to tip the band.
The music was wild, high, keening and
my blood flowed twice as fast as normal.
There was food. Ukrainians said
they came to Manitoba to eat. They
came poor, they brought the metal parts
of tools, seeds, gritty determination.
They were axe men and they cleared
land, and their wives planted vegetables
around the stumps too big to move. They
built outdoor ovens and baked bread in
them on cabbage leaves. They built log
houses and plastered them with mud and
whitewashed them, made thatched roofs.
They grew grain and cut it by hand, took
it to the nearest gristmill to be ground
into flour and cream of wheat. They grew
oats, rye, barley.
By the time I was attending
Ukrainian weddings, there was lots to
eat. The miracle of having food to share
had come to pass. The tables were loaded
with ham, perogies, holopchis, potatoes,
and vegetables. We ate borscht with sour
cream and dill. When we didn’t think
we could eat anymore, we still managed
poppy seed cake with white icing.
Friends and relatives went around
the floor filling glasses with beer and
homebrew. We kids got red fruit juice.
Everybody talked, all at once.
Ukrainian, Polish, German, Icelandic,
English. Conversation flowing like
warm water. When the dancing
started, we danced – that is, we kids
danced, too. Dancing wasn’t just for
the adults. We learned the polka, the
butterfly, the schottische, the waltz.
We danced with our moms, our aunts,
our grandmas, our cousins, our friends,
strangers. We swooned, even before
adolescence, at girls in embroidered
dresses with flowers in their hair.
The music guided the evening. It let
everyone know that the presentation
was going to start. The bride and groom
behind a table with a white tablecloth.
The guests lining up, kissing the bride
and groom, tossing money onto the table
until there was a mound of bills, and
when the line ended, the best man taking
all the money in a bag made from the
table cloth and disappearing with it.
We danced and we talked and we ate
and we gave and when the evening was
over, we fell asleep in the back seat of the
car before we made it home.
There was something about the
music, its wildness, the spontaneous
emotion, the defiance, the insistence on
living, on having a good time, that hid
secrets – dark, terrible secrets that I knew
nothing about until I went to Ukraine.
It was here that I saw the black
houses, the houses Ukrainian prisoners
were forced to build and when they
finished were killed. It was here that I saw
the cathedral with the cannonballs that
struck it hung in chains for punishment.
Here was the triumph of life over death.
The men in sheepskin coats came
to fill up Western Canada, to keep the
American expansionists at bay, to create
crops to feed a nation, crops that would
provide freight for the CPR, farms that
would need equipment brought by the
CPR. If you build a railway, you need
people to use it and if they aren’t there,
you bring them.
They came by the hundreds and then
by the thousands, often taking up poor
land, land that others had not wanted or
had tried and abandoned.
The English, the Scots, the Irish had
come. Many were city people, book
binders, factory workers, domestics who
didn’t know how to break land, how to
shoe a horse, how to hitch up a team.
However, the Ukrainians who
settled in the Interlake of Manitoba,
like the Icelanders who settled before
them, stayed, farmed land that was
poor, much of it only good for grazing,
stubbornly wresting a living from land
so filled with stone that the stone boat
has become an icon, the piles of stone at
the sides of fields still silent testimony
to backbreaking labour. (See The
Landscape Of Ukrainian Settlement In
The Canadian West by John C. Lehr,
1982.)
As hard as the stones was the
prejudice. Even in the 1950s and
1960s, I heard Ukrainians referred to
contemptuously as DPs, although they
were no more Displaced Persons than
the Scots driven from their crofts, or the
Icelanders driven from their indentured
poverty by hunger and exploitation, or
the English by poverty and brutal living
conditions. DP was used as an insult.
Originally, it meant someone displaced
by World War II, people fleeing from war-
torn Europe, as if having been bombed,
shot, your home destroyed, raped,
imprisoned, tortured, was somehow their
fault. It was an insult usually hurled by
those who had comfortably remained in
Canada during the war, well away from
any danger, often benefiting from the
conflict.
The Ukrainians had already been in
Manitoba from 1891. Yet, many were
interned as enemy aliens.
In the short run, it caused hardship.
In the long run, it made little difference.
The stone piles at the sides of the fields
can be counted, one by one, as the
pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, saved,
as the dollars gradually amassed that
sent their children to school. Saying
dis for this, dat for that, didn’t keep
Ukrainian kids from earning high grades,
the kind of grades that opened the doors
of colleges and universities. Thank
God for provincial exams so that the
prejudice of the community, the ignorant
stereotyping by the ignorant, couldn’t
steal accomplishment.
I have walked Kreschatik Street. I
have seen the horse chestnut trees. I’ve
stood on a hill and seen the golden domes
of the churches. I’ve waited for a train at
the Lviv train station with the ghosts of
hundreds of thousands who boarded trains
that would take them to North America
Ukrainians came to eat. They tilled hard
land. They cultivated crops. They sat in
the same classrooms as me and became
my friends. They passed the same
exams. Went to the same university. Fish
helped pay for my degree. Grain and
vegetables, eggs, helped pay their way.
The first time I went to Iceland, I had
lunch with a man who had lived in
Manitoba for a time. During lunch, he
said, “And how are the Galicians doing?”
“The Galicians are doing very
well,” I said and, as I sat there, in my
mind, I heard the music of a bandura,
the greeting song at all the wedding
receptions I’d attended, of the meals with
our Ukrainian friends where we shared
a table of holopchi, perogies, borscht,
kutya – a table laden with vegetables,
where we raised our glasses and said skál
and dybosyia together. “They prosper.”
I thought of my step-grandmother,
Katherine Cook (Koch), from Ukraine
but German and Polish. It would have
been hard to find a better grandmother.
Becoming Canadian has not been
easy. Is not easy. But I wouldn’t trade it
for anything else. Icelandic, Ukrainian,
Polish, German, English, Scots, Irish,
East Indian, Icelandic, Norwegian,
Danish, Balinese, Russian, Aboriginal.
And more. All just in my extended
family. Canadian. Some people say
we have no history, no culture. They
should know better. Canadian. It is
called being Canadian.
STONE PILES
W.D. Valgardson
Victoria, BC
PHOTO: ASHLEIGH KOBEVKO, EUROVISIONARY / CC BY SA 4.0
“Ukrainian Feast”
PHOTO: LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA
Galician immigrants in Quebec, 1911