Ivan Pylypiw and Vasyl Eleniak came from Nebyliv, a village in Galicia, and they landed in 1891. Sources put it at September and at the seventh of December, which tells you how closely anybody was watching at the time. They were a peasant with some capital and a man who had worked for him, and they had come to see whether the land Canada was advertising actually existed.
It did, and they went back with the news, and what followed was one of the largest deliberate population transfers in Canadian history.
The deliberate part matters. In 1896 Clifford Sifton became Minister of the Interior in Laurier's new government, and he set out to fill the prairie with people who could already farm it. Britain was not supplying them in the numbers required. So Sifton went to central and eastern Europe, and specifically to the Austrian crownlands of Galicia and Bukovyna, where there were a great many experienced farmers on land that could no longer hold them.
The first permanent settlement went in at Edna-Star, east of Edmonton, in the early 1890s. It became the first and then the largest Ukrainian block settlement in the country. The block is what made it work. Families settled next to families from the same district, so the language held and the church held. The first winter was survivable because somebody three miles away had also just arrived.
What they took on was the parkland — aspen bluff and brush, north of the open prairie the Anglo-Canadian settlers had taken. It was harder to break and it was chosen for them. It also turned out to have the better soil and the water. Clearing it was done by hand over years, and the standard account of that labour is a woman with an axe and a team of oxen while the man of the house was off earning cash on a railway gang.
Not everyone was pleased. There were loud Anglo-Canadian objections to filling the West with peasants from somewhere nobody could place. They ran in the newspapers and in Parliament, in the plain language of the period. Sifton's answer is the most quoted sentence he ever produced. "I think a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half-dozen children, is good quality."
That's a defence, and it's offered entirely in terms of what the man can produce. Sifton wasn't making an argument about pluralism. He was making an argument about yield, to people who objected on grounds of race, and he won it on those terms because those were the terms available. Canada got the settlers. The reasoning was never upgraded.
Which is the context for what happened next, and it is the part of the Ukrainian story this country took longest to face.
When war came in 1914, the people Canada had recruited from Galicia and Bukovyna held, on paper, Austro-Hungarian citizenship. Their nationality was Ukrainian. Their papers said the enemy. Under the War Measures Act they became enemy aliens. The Canadian War Museum describes what followed as the confinement of "enemy aliens in Canada during and for two years after the end of the First World War" — and that second clause is the one to hold onto. Between 1914 and 1920, two full years past the armistice, 8,579 people were interned in two dozen camps across the country. Of those, 5,954 were classified as Austro-Hungarian, and most of them were ethnic Ukrainians. A further eighty thousand or so were required to register and report regularly to the authorities, around seventy thousand of them Ukrainians.
They were put to work. Roads, clearing, labour in the national parks. Some of what they built is still being walked on by people who have no idea.
None of that was a response to anything they'd done. It was a response to the stamp in a document issued by an empire they had left precisely because it was not theirs.
The pattern underneath is the same one that runs through the Chinese story on the other side of the country, and this paper is going to keep pointing at it, because it is the thing that recurs. We recruited people for their labour, we got the labour, and then — when the political weather turned — we treated the invitation as something we'd never quite issued. The railway was finished and the head tax arrived the same year. The parkland was broken and the camps opened twenty years later.
The Ukrainians stayed anyway. There are something over a million and a quarter Canadians of Ukrainian descent now, among the largest such populations anywhere outside Ukraine and Russia. The church domes on the prairie east of Edmonton are visible from a long way off, which is what they were built for.
We did eventually say something about the camps, and like the head tax the recognition came very late. The better measure is not the apology. It is that the grandchildren of people this country interned spent the last several years organising its response to the invasion of the place their families came from, and nobody in Ottawa thought it worth remarking on.
This is the second piece in Who Broke the Prairie, a series on the peoples who settled it.
