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Nine: An International Community

The Peoples of the Region

"A man is all sorts of baggage, the most difficult to be transported," wrote Scotland’s Adam Smith in the 18th century. Yet, as history indicates, between 1880 and 1914, millions of people left their homelands in search of greater economic opportunity, freedom and peace. The migration from Europe to North America in that period has been described as "the mightiest movement of people in modem history." Western Canada be-came the destination of several million immigrants, not only from Europe but from other parts of the world, who were attracted by the promises of a better life in the "Last Best West." The result was a unique model of ethno-cultural cooperation without assimilation. As the years passed and the dust from arriving newcomers settled, and after often bitter experiences of adaptation, prejudice and discrimination, a truly international community has developed in the region.

The mosaic analogy is particularly apt for Western Canada because literally dozens of ethnic groups today resemble inlays of differing size, distribution and colour in a larger design. Their diversity of language, dress, culture and custom has created a kaleidoscope in our West and North. The term ‘mosaic’ itself was first applied to Canada by an American writer, Victoria Hayward, who wrote of our Prairies in 1922, "The New Canadians, representing many lands and widely separated sections of Old Europe, have contributed to the prairie provinces a variety in the way of Church architecture. Cupolas and domes distinctly Eastern, almost Turkish, startle one above the tops of Manitoba maples or the bush of the river banks.... Here and there in the corner of a wheat field, at the cross-section of a prairie highway, one sees, as in Quebec, the tall, uplifted Crucifix set up. It is indeed a mosaic of vast dimensions and great breadth, essayed of the Prairie."

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Western Canada has continued to develop its culturally pluralistic, multi-political and multi-religious form. This is partly because no cultural community is numerically dominant; there are several large groups, including the English, German, Ukrainian, Scottish, Irish and French-Canadians. Members of every cultural community, including the larger ones, believe people are of equal worth and that all should have the freedom to choose their own life-style. A pattern of permissive differentiation, whether in religion, political ideology or language, instead of assimilation, emerged early in the West and set very firmly. More than in any other region of Canada, multiculturalism began as an acknowledged reality here and flourished as the decades went by.

The prairie population grew from about 400,000 in 1901 to 2.4 million by 1931. A passenger on a CPR train disembarking in Winnipeg in 1914 would encounter on Main Street languages and people from virtually every corner of the earth. As the historian Gerald Friesen points Out, "almost half of all prairie residents at the start of the First World War had been born in another country, and the proportion was still one in three as late as 1931. Those who were British by ‘origin’ (a census term defined by the ancestral roots of a family’s male line) had similarly declined to about 50% of the prairie total (of this group, half were English, one-quarter Scots) while the various Eastern European groups (Ukrainian, Austro-Hungarian, Polish and Russian) numbered about 20%, and Western Europeans (German, Dutch, French, including French Canadians) also numbered about 20%."

Five separate waves of immigrants swept over Western Canada. The first, resulting from the fur trade, created the French-and English-speaking Métis. The second, occurring during the final years of the nineteenth century after Confederation, consisted mainly of British Canadian families, although there were also Icelanders, Mennonites, Jews and others. The largest wave swept in between 1897 and 1913, bringing roughly equal numbers of settlers from other provinces of Canada, Britain, America and Continental Europe together with a few Chinese and Japanese. The fourth, arriving during the 1920s, was essentially an extension of the third in terms of points of origin. The fifth, persons arriving since World War II, included Europeans displaced by the war and, after 1962, immigrants from Asia and the Pacific Rim nations.

Clifford Sifton and his belief in the potential of the West deserve much credit for the diversity and vigour of the immigrants who came between 1897 and 1930. As immigration minister from 1896 to 1905, he spent large sums of public money attracting farmers from Europe, Britain and America. Although he personally believed in the assimilation of newcomers to Anglo-Canadian norms, no one can fault him for not casting his net to include farm communities virtually everywhere, most notably in Central and Eastern Europe. His successor as immigration minister, Edmonton’s Frank Oliver, reduced recruiting in Europe and increased it in the United Kingdom. In consequence, more British immigrants came after 1905, including an astonishing 80,000 children from English slums whose passages were assisted by British charities. Robert Borden’s Conservative government kept the immigration door open to unskilled English immigrants after 1911 but continued a Laurier regulation measure of 1908 which in practice excluded most Asians and Arabs. In 1925, Prime Minister Mackenzie King allowed the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways again to recruit farmers in Central and Eastern Europe; as a result, almost 370,000 Europeans arrived in Canada during the following six years. Between 1931 and 1941, the immigration gates were all but closed to everyone as a reaction to the huge unemployment created by the Great Depression.

By the time of the 1986 national census, the population mix of the four western provinces was significantly different from that of Canada as a whole. In all three prairie provinces less than forty percent of the residents claim a single country of family origin from Britain or France. British Columbia is slightly over forty percent, whereas in Ontario and all four Atlantic provinces well over forty percent of the residents assert a single family origin from the British Isles. In three of them (Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland) that proportion is over sixty percent. In the profiles which follow, I will highlight the diversity of Western Canadians through glances at a number of ethnocultural communities. The sketches feature some of those who have arrived relatively recently but are already making a major contribution to the West, along with groups of longer standing. All have had to meet in some measure the challenges of pioneering and all have responded in their own "Western" way.

More than seventy distinct ethno-cultural groups can now be identified’ in Western Canada. To tell their respective stories within a framework of one chapter is thus impossible. While attempting to provide an overview of the almost infinite variety of the region, I am forced to focus on only some representative groups which in my opinion reflect well the essence of the other Western Canadian communities today. The singular history of the Métis people in Western Canada was recorded in an earlier chapter. In addition to the Métis, those groups chosen for discussion here appear to me to capture the pioneering spirit of all the first westbound settlers who came, or are coming, to start their lives anew. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of bilingualism in a multicultural region.

Scandinavians

Our region is home to almost 80% of all Canadians who claim Scandinavian ancestry: 130,000 Westerners are descended entirely from Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, or Icelanders, while another 380,000 have some Scandinavian forebears. Most Canadian Westerners of Scandinavian origin came to the West as American immigrants between 1893 and 1914, when nearly a hundred thousand moved to the Canadian Prairies. Many of them settled in fertile parts of central Alberta and Saskatchewan, where they became major players in the formation of the dairy industry. From the beginning, Anglo-Westerners viewed all Scandinavians as close cousins. This was encouraged by such familiar images as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Relations between the historical monarchs of Norway and Scotland were so close that Scotland’s Hebrides held the tombs of eight Norwegian kings. And Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales were as dear to Anglo-Canadian children as to Scandinavian ones.

Scandinavians were among the first settlers who ventured into the North-West at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The earliest Norwegians were brought by Lord Selkirk in 1815 to build a portage for his Selkirk colony on the Red River. At the north end of Lake Winnipeg they established Norway House, which remains a commercial centre to this day. One Norwegian, Peter Dahl, stayed to homestead. During the mid-l9th century, the Hudson’s Bay Company continued to recruit boatmen from Norway, but the first large influx came later from the south. Between 1871 and 1895, 660,000 Swedes, 330,000 Norwegians and 160,000 Danes reached the United States. Most of them settled in the Midwest, although many had arrived first in Montreal by steamship.

When the price of American farmland later began to rise, the promise of free homesteads in the Canadian West brought many Scandinavians northwards. The first group were Swedes who settled near Minnedosa, Manitoba, and Stockholm, Saskatchewan, in the 1880s. Norwegians in turn founded Numedal in southern Manitoba, and New Norway, Camrose, Olds, Lacombe, Wetaskiwin, Sundre and other centres in Alberta in the mid-1890s. Calgary’s first major industry, a sawmill run by a predominantly Norwegian crew, was founded in 1886. Another group of Norwegian fisherman founded Hagensborg in 1893 near Bella Coola on the British Columbia coast. Most Scandinavians settled in Saskatchewan during the early twentieth century. Their practical experience in the American Midwest proved an excellent training for success in the age of wheat.

Icelanders began to arrive in Manitoba in the last quarter of the nineteenth century from an island homeland where entire villages had been swept away by volcanoes. In 1875, a group of them chose to settle in Gimli ("paradise") on the shores of Lake Winnipeg for various reasons, including freedom from prairie grasshoppers, an easy waterway to Winnipeg, an abundance of fish in the lake and the availability of a large tract of land. The new settlement, with its own administration and Icelandic law, was called "New Iceland," and about 1,200 people moved there. They founded a school, churches and an Icelandic-language newspaper. A few years later, Governor General Lord Dufferin visited Gimli and in praising the Icelanders noted that each one of the new homes he had entered contained "a library of twenty or thirty volumes; and I am informed that there is scarcely a child amongst you who cannot read and write." In time, many Icelanders moved to Winnipeg; that city and the province of Manitoba remain the centre of their settlement in Canada. By 1986, still about half of all Icelandic Canadians continued to live in Manitoba, and Vancouver attracted a good portion of those who left.

The first Danes in Canada reached Hudson’s Bay in 1619 when their ship captain, Jens Munck, was looking for the Northwest Passage to the Orient. His attempt to found New Denmark at what is now Churchill, Manitoba, expired when 61 crew members died of scurvy, although Munck and two others somehow managed to sail back to Denmark. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Danish settlers reached the Prairies in response to the call of Canadian Pacific Railway land agents and publicity in Denmark by the Canadian government. In 1903, Danish immigration from Nebraska began when two Danes, Jens and Henry Larsen, returned from the Canadian prairies to report rich forests and grazing lands. Danish settlers were equally successful on the Prairies and transposed from Denmark both their system of agricultural cooperation and training in Danish Folk High Schools. In the 1950s, a number of Danish professionals came to settle in Western Canadian cities. Difficulties arose in maintaining the Danish language and culture beyond the first generation because of the scattered nature of the Danish population, intermarriages with other cultural communities, and the fact that so many of them had begun in the United States to adapt to the North American way of life.

Swedish immigration to Central Canada began in the 1850’s because of famines and land shortages in Sweden, but most immigrants soon left for the milder climate and readily available farmland in the United States. Later, many re-crossed the frontier, some to work as miners and lumberjacks and others to help build the Canadian Pacific Railway line westward. Upon the railway’s completion in 1885, Winnipeg became the centre of Swedish immigration for all of Canada. By 1911, however, Alberta also had significant Swedish populations in Strathcona, Red Deer and Medicine Hat. Saskatchewan became the most popular western province for Swedes and by 1931 a quarter of all Swedes in Canada lived in the wheat province. With the outbreak of World War II, many prairie Swedes relocated to British Columbia to work in its war industries. Today 62,000 Canadians with Swedish origins live in British Columbia.

The Norwegian settlement in Western Canada was prompted by mounting debts and a lack of land in the American Midwest. The Canadian Prairies offered a second chance and many thousands moved to Alberta and Saskatchewan. In 1912, some of these moved to Alberta’s Peace River district around Valhalla and were later joined by others from further south during the crop failure of the 1930s. Many Norwegian-Canadians on the Prairies remained in farming occupations until much of the prairie topsoil simply blew away in the 1930s. Many were then forced to move to other parts of Canada or to return to Norway. A number moved to the lower mainland of British Columbia, and by the 1986 census, British Columbia had 54,000 part-origin and 20,000 sole-origin Norwegian-Canadians, the highest number for any province in the country.

The Scandinavians of Western Canada adapted readily to their surroundings and quickly became part of rural and later urban Western Canada conditions. Today, they are still playing vital roles in the growth and development of the region.

South Asians

Western Canadian South Asians include people from India; Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, but also many whose families were established, often for generations, in Africa and the Caribbean, though having South Asian roots. According to the 1986 census, Western Canada contains approximately 110,000 sole-origin South Asians and another 21,000 who claim part South Asian family beginnings.

The cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds of these communities are probably even more diverse than the heritage of their fellow residents from Western and Eastern Europe. India alone has fifteen official languages and a hundred or so minor ones, several hundred million Hindus, three times more Muslims than there are Canadians, and millions of Sikhs and Christians.

Until the 1960s, few South Asians lived anywhere in Canada beyond British Columbia. The first to arrive in the lower mainland in 1904 were a group of self-reliant Sikhs from the Punjab in Northern India who had learned of the province from Indian soldiers passing through Canada on their way to the coronation of King Edward VII in Britain. Relying on the then well-established principle that immigration within the British Empire must be unimpeded, other Sikhs attempted to follow. Future prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, at that time deputy minister of labour, quickly devised a way to get around this: his 1908 order-in-council prescribed that any immigrant from India must reach Canada on a "continuous voyage." Since there was at the time no direct steamship connection between Canada and India, Sikh immigration immediately ended.

In 1914, a wealthy British Columbia Sikh, Gurdit Singh, challenged the regulation by chartering the Komagata Maru to bring about 400 Sikhs and Muslim Punjabis to Canada. The ship was forbidden by Canadian officials to land in Vancouver and the passengers were forced to remain on board for two months while the lawyers argued that King’s regulation violated both the Magna Carta and the British North America Act. This effort ultimately failed, and the arrival of a Canadian naval cruiser alongside compelled the would-be immigrants to return to India. The measure would bar virtually all South Asians immigrants to Canada until it was rescinded in 1947.

In 1951, under pressure from newly-independent India, Pakistan and Ceylon, the Louis St Laurent cabinet agreed to some token immigration from each of the three countries. In 1967, under the government of Prime Minister Lester Pearson, the quota system was finally replaced by a point system which admitted newcomers on the basis of skills, education and economic criteria. In consequence, large numbers of South Asian teachers, professors, medical doctors and other professionals settled in major western cities during the 1960s and 1970s.

Strong family, religious and cultural practices remain a distinctive feature for South Asian Westerners regardless of their particular country of origin. Marriages often occur within the same community and partners of both sexes may come from the Indian subcontinent. Most marriages arranged by parents seem to prove remarkably durable and happy. Many South Asian young people in the West have adopted the general lifestyle of other urbanites, but also maintain their traditional culture and worship.

South Asians are the most varied of all ethno-cultural communities in the West. Many are first-generation Canadians and some worry with good reason that discrimination can deny them employment opportunities commensurate with their efforts and abilities. On the optimistic side, the passing of each year provides a larger proportion of South Asian Westerners who arc long-term residents of the region. The immigration policies and practices which kept a talented community tiny for decades are now gone or going. The chain migration of family and friends is growing, and carries with it a range of positive consequences.

Scots

According to the 1986 census, almost 300,000 Westerners claimed Scotland as their only place of family origin and another 1.2 million persons included it as one of their origins. Scots are thus, along with the English, Germans, Ukrainians, French-Canadians and Irish, among the largest communities in the West. For the 1971 census, Statistics Canada ignored centuries of distinct Scottish history to group them with the English, Irish and Welsh as "British." But Western Canadians of Scottish origin felt entitled to a separate treatment of their ethnicity, settlement and immigration, largely because of their history of antipathy toward England. True, Scotland finally disappeared as an independent nation in 1707, but few Scots altered their coolness toward London thereafter and many maintained close ties with Europe, most notably France.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, moreover, had not Scottish thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith completely reshaped English thought in economics, philosophy, and science? As the Manitoba historian, J.M. Bumsted, puts it, the "English might have had the political power, but Scots dominated the life of the mind." A major reason was the superiority of Scotland’s educational institutions and the insistence of its reformers on achieving both a fully literate population and a curriculum which stressed contemporary needs. Scotland’s most important gift to Western Canada and civilization as a whole was probably the concept of the "democratic intellect" based on ability rather than family financial resources.

Another Scottish gift to the world was hundreds of thousands of "surplus" people from both the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland who helped to populate many corners of the world while romanticizing their former homeland. The first to reach Western Canada arrived in Red River in 1812 through Hudson Bay, under the sponsorship of Lord Selkirk, to lay the foundation of a new colony. It grew until by 1820 it was firmly rooted as the first farming settlement in the West. The Highland clearances at the end of the 18th century by absentee landlords, who concluded that cattle and sheep were more profitable than tenant farmers, produced thousands of immigrants for Canada. Crofters, whose homes had been burned to ensure their departure, responded particularly well to advertisements for free passage, free land on arrival and free provisions for a year.

Once in Central Canada, the Scots quickly established a reputation for mutual support in religion, politics, business and education, and earnestness and honesty in personal conduct. The Scottish presence in the West has been lengthy and highly significant. Scots such as Alexander Mackenzie, Roderick Mackenzie, Simon Fraser and James Macleod tapped the West’s fur resources, explored and mapped waterways, and established many forts and trading posts which later became permanent settlements.

Approximately 240,000 Scots were among the newcomers who arrived in Canada during the first fifteen years of the 20th century. Another 200,000 came to Canada between 1919 and 1930; 147,000 more arrived between 1946 and 1960. Many came directly to farms and cities of the West; some stopped for a generation in Atlantic or Central Canada before moving to Western Canada. Once here, most western Scots gravitated to cities and non-agricultural employment. There has been a good deal of assimilation of Scots within the greater Western Canadian community. The use of Highland Gaelic has all but disappeared; memories of the "old country" have faded for all but the most recently arrived. On the other hand, most Scots in the West today still consider themselves to be a distinctive tile in the western mosaic. Among themselves, perhaps at the annual Robbie Burns suppers, some will even argue they have dominated the economic, cultural and political life of Western Canada. Others will quickly reply that Burns, that most revered of Scots, would mock such vain boasting!

Chinese

Immigration to the West was largely a movement from Europe -- through the ports of Eastern and Central Canada, but many people came through British Columbia from the nations of the Far East. Among these are numbered the Chinese, a group which has participated in the building of Western Canada since the mid-19th century.

Western Canada in 1986 had approximately 170,000 persons of solely Chinese origin and about 22,000 more of partly Chinese descent. Seven in ten single-origin Chinese Western Canadians live in British Columbia, and fully 100,000 of these reside in the Vancouver area. A little less than half of all Canadians of single Chinese origin live in the four western provinces, the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

Chinese Canadians born outside Canada have come from many countries. The 1981 census shows that in this group 24% were born in Taiwan; 23% in China; 9% in Vietnam; 4% in Malaysia or Singapore; and 34% elsewhere, primarily Hong Kong. Eighty-seven percent of those born outside Canada entered Canada during the 1965-81 period and in recent years approximately 13,000 have entered Canada, many from Hong Kong, as entrepreneurs. The unemployment rate for both Chinese men and women was at the time of the 1981 census less than that for Canadian men and women as a whole. Considerably more Chinese Canadians (28%) than all Canadians (16%) have some university education.

Western Canadians of Chinese origin are part of the huge diaspora of more than eight million "overseas Chinese" who have prospered from South Asia to the Caribbean. As late as the sixteenth century, China had the highest standard of living on earth. During the eighteenth century, its population more than doubled, reaching 430 million by 1850. When Europeans forcibly opened China’s markets in the 19th century, its cottage cloth industry was all but destroyed by machine-made foreign cloth. A migration of young men became necessary to help feed their closely-knit families who were left at home.

The first of these men from China came to British Columbia in 1858, lured by the Fraser River gold rush, and by 1860 approximately 4,000 of them lived in the lower mainland of the colony. Some mined, others sold vegetables or wood, or operated restaurants and laundries. The legal equality in the workplace of those who stayed after the gold rush was removed by the B.C. provincial legislature in 1878 when it unanimously resolved that persons of origin in China could no longer be hired on provincial public works -- a rule which astonishingly remained in effect until after World War II. The franchise was denied to them in 1872.

Nonetheless, as many as 17,000 Chinese came to B.C. between 1881 and 1884 to assume a Herculean part in the completion of the Canadian Pacific rail line between the Fraser Canyon and Vancouver. As the project neared completion, the B.C. provincial government encouraged them to leave the region through such measures as a $10 head tax on all Chinese, banning the removal of dead bodies back to China, denying Chinese the right to buy provincial Crown land, and prohibiting further immigration from China. Prime Minister Macdonald’s government in Ottawa played its part by imposing a $50 head tax on all Chinese entering Canada after 1886. In 1900, Prime Minister Laurier raised the head tax to $100, and in 1904 to $500. In 1923, the government of Mackenzie King barred all Chinese immigration, and it did not begin again until the legislation was finally repealed in 1947.

The combination of legislated and other discrimination against the Chinese in British Columbia and better opportunities to establish small businesses elsewhere in Canada, by 1921 had caused an estimated 40% of the 40,000 Chinese then resident in Canada to move eastward, some as far as Newfoundland. Virtually every prairie town soon had a Chinese restaurant and laundry. The three prairie legislatures proved not immune to anti-Chinese propaganda seeping over the mountains. The Saskatchewan assembly disenfranchised Chinese as early as 1908, which meant in practice that they could not vote in federal elections either or join professions whose associations required members to be registered voters. The prairie fever here reached a sufficiently high temperature that the Saskatchewan and Manitoba governments, even before British Columbia’s, barred Chinese restaurants from hiring white women out of a preposterous fear that they would be introduced to opium and sold into white slavery.

Between 1924 and 1946, only eight Chinese immigrants entered Canada because of Mackenzie King’s Chinese exclusion law of 1923. Many of the Chinese men already resident in Canada thus aged without families in Canada. Ironically, events of World War II helped the Canadian Chinese cause because white Canadian sympathy for China grew markedly as a result of the Japanese aggression there. As the historians Jin Tan and Patricia Roy point out, "[During the war,] racial prejudice be-came unfashionable." The Vancouver Parks Board, for example, repealed its rule that Chinese persons could swim at a public pool only during a specified two-hour period once weekly. The legislature of Saskatchewan restored the franchise in 1944 and in 1945 British Columbia enfranchised everyone who had served in either World War, including the Chinese but not the Japanese. The public on the coast generally welcomed the repeal of Ottawa’s Chinese Immigration Act in 1947.

In fact, many Chinese Westerners continued to face real difficulty in entering Canada after 1947. With the violent events accompanying the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, some quite understandably entered Canada illegally. In 1962, a federal amnesty was offered to illegal immigrants of "good sound character," and by the time the program ended in 1973 more than 12,000 had changed their status. Racial discrimination in immigration officially disappeared in 1967 when new regulations began to screen potential immigrants on a "point system" which reflected their prospective economic contribution to Canada. This put the Chinese on an equal footing with other immigrants. Between 1972 and 1978, almost 80% of our Chinese immigrants came from Hong Kong, most choosing to live in suburbs rather than in Chinatowns. The so-called boat people of 1979 and the early 1980’s included Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians as well as Chinese, and among them, Tan and Roy note, "were urban professionals, both men and women, once-wealthy businessmen and persons of influence in their own countries as well as poor illiterate peasants and fisherfolk." The warm response by Western Canadians and Canadians generally contrasted markedly with that given to Chinese newcomers earlier.

Today, a large number of Western Canadians of Chinese origin are entrepreneurs and professionals. A majority of them are in sales, services and other white-collar work. Most of them think of themselves as Canadians first and Chinese second. Alone among all cultural groups in Canada, however, they know that their families were forced to pay an entry fee (1885-1923) and were effectively barred from immigration by legislation (1923-1947). Attitudes have finally changed throughout Canada and institutionalized racism is gone. No longer do whites expect them or anyone to be "assimilated." They can now preserve and celebrate their cultural identity and remain both Canadian and Chinese in whatever proportion they choose.

Ukrainians

The four western provinces hold 300,000, or approximately three quarters, of all Canadians who give their sole origin as Ukrainian and 370,000, or 68% of those who give it as one of their family origins. Most Westerners originating in Ukraine came in one of three waves. The largest by far was the 1891-1914 migration of farmers from Galicia and Bukovina, provinces in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who sought to escape poverty, malnutrition, shrinking landholdings, primitive farming practices and growing indebtedness. Thousands of them took 160-acre homesteads in Western Canada on paying a $10 registration fee. Clifford Sifton was genuinely enthusiastic about immigrants from Ukraine, and most of the estimated 170,000 Ukrainians who came before World War I settled in the Canadian Prairies. By 1921, Manitoba had the largest Ukrainian population in Canada, followed by Saskatchewan and Alberta. The hardships were great: virgin land to break and frequently forests to cut by hand, a new language, few roads or local improvements, mammoth distances and farm isolation, mosquitoes in summer and bitter cold in winter, nonexistent or rare medical and social services. Immigrants from Ukraine were among the first settlers who broke the land and helped lay the foundation of the region’s wealth. Therefore, they are one of our founding peoples, central to the West’s beginnings.

The 1914-1918 period was complicated for Ukrainians in Western Canada because of prejudice and discrimination on the part of the dominant Anglo-Celtic population. The federal government enacted a number of measures to segregate and monitor the activities of immigrants-from enemy countries. Public hostility and official sanctions were directed at Germans and Ukrainians, who were now considered "enemy aliens." The 1914 War Measures Act led to the internment in concentration camps of about 6,000 Austro--Hungarians, the overwhelming majority of whom were Ukrainians. As Vera Lysenko notes in Men In Sheepskin Coats, during World War I, "One repressive measure followed another, directed against bewildered Ukrainians. Thousands of harmless ‘Galicians’ were rounded up by the police and herded into concentration camps.... The slightest criticism on the part of a Ukrainian and he was dragged from home, factory or hotel and placed in an internment camp."

There were other forms of suppression. English-Ukrainian bilingual classrooms on the Prairies were abolished during the war. Some Ukrainian publications were censored or banned. Most outrageous was the Wartime Elections Act of 1917, which disenfranchised every enemy alien naturalized since 1902.

In 1918, an independent Ukrainian state was proclaimed; it survived only until 1920. In 1922, most Ukrainian territory was incorporated into the Soviet Union, with substantial segments of population falling under Polish, Czechoslovakian or Romanian rule.

Almost 68,000 persons came to Canada between the two world wars, most from Galicia and Bukovina as they had earlier. In contrast to the first wave of immigrants, the inter-war Ukrainians were better educated and more nationally conscious. This group had a much easier time in Western Canada because immigrant aid societies of the Ukrainian community already present assisted both financially and morally. Tragically, Ukrainians were dropped to a "non-preferred" status by Ottawa during the 1930s; this may have prevented the escape to Canada of at least some of the estimated seven million who were deliberately starved to death by Stalin during that period. Very few Ukrainians managed to reach this country until after World War II.

During the Great Depression, Ukrainians suffered at least as much as any other group in Canadian society. As jobs became scarce, discrimination against "foreigners" became a fearful reality. The western historian James Gray catches in his Winter Years what many non-Anglo-Saxon Westerners faced during the 1930’s in addition to the Great Depression: "For them [Ukrainians, Poles and Jews] Winnipeg was far from being a city of 250,000 in which they too were free to search for work. As much as two-thirds of it was barred and bolted against them.... Anyone with a Ukrainian or Polish name had almost no chance of employment except rough manual labour. The oil companies, banks, mortgage companies, financial and stock brokers, and most retail and mercantile companies except the Hudson’s Bay Company discriminated against all non-Anglo-Saxons. For the young Ukrainians and Poles there was a possible solution if they could beat the accent handicap. They could change their names. So they changed their names, sometimes formally and legally, but mostly informally and casually."

During World War II, an estimated 40,000 Ukrainians, or more than ten percent of the entire community in Canada, enlisted in the Canadian armed forces despite the fact that one of our allies (the USSR) had oppressed their people for centuries. After the war, many thousands of Ukrainians who had been deported to labour farms, concentration camps or German factories in Western Europe simply refused to return to Ukraine, which was then entirely part of the Soviet Union. A tragic repatriation of many thousands was finally stopped, and the remaining refugees from Ukraine were granted "displaced person" status and resettled abroad. The Ukrainian Canadian Committee urged the King and St. Laurent governments to accept refugees. Between 1947 and 1953, approximately 34,000 Ukrainians came to Canada, many well-educated professionals.

A major problem for Ukrainians in Western Canada since World War II has been the declining use of their language. Between 1951 and 1971, the use of Ukrainian as a mother tongue in the 0-9 age group dropped from 61 to 21 percent. In the 10-19 group, the drop was even worse, from 85 to 30%. Finally, the community pushed successfully to have Ukrainian restored as a language of study in prairie schools. In Alberta this was achieved in 1959; in Manitoba, in 1961. By the 1970s, all three prairie provinces allowed Ukrainian as a language of instruction for up to half of the school day. The community also advocated a multicultural Canada to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the early 1960s. By 1971, in large measure because of pressure created by Western Canadians of a non-British, non-French background and led by the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, Canada became for the first time a nation with two official languages, but no official culture. A fuller recognition of the culturally diverse nature of Canada is still needed, argue Ukrainian Canadians, who as a group face the possibility of assimilation in Canada and russification in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Canadian Committee, a coalition dedicated to democratic principles, to promoting Ukrainian cultural goals in Canada and to supporting the aspirations of Ukrainians in the USSR, has led the successful campaign to ensure that their community is not assimilated in Canada.

During 1988, Ukrainian communities around the world are celebrating the Millennium of the official adoption of Christianity in Ukraine. In 988, Volodymyr, the Grand Prince of Kievan-Rus (modern day Ukraine) had the inhabitants of Kiev baptised, thus bringing his country into the Christian fold. A thousand years later, Christianity continues to enrich the lives of the people of Ukraine dispersed throughout the world. During the past 300 years, Ukraine lost its independence and there have been difficult periods of government repression in the Soviet Ukraine, but the Ukrainian Church still exists there, although clandestinely.

Having survived against all conceivable odds, Christianity would appear yet to sustain the hopes of the Ukrainian nation and to serve as a source of strength for millions of Ukrainians living abroad. Pope John Paul II observed in a letter to the late Ukrainian Catholic Cardinal Josyf Slipyi: "...When Ukrainian sons and daughters leave their own country, they remain always, even as immigrant settlers, bound with their church, which with its tradition, language and liturgy, is for them a spiritual legacy that continually refreshes and nurtures the soul."

Japanese

Of the 54,000 Canadians wholly or partly of Japanese origin, 31,000, or about 57%, lived in Western Canada at the time of the 1986 census. Many Japanese Canadians are found in the major western cities, with over 15,000 in Vancouver. This shows a significant dispersal, since in 1941 95% of Canada’s 23,450 Japanese lived in British Columbia.

Immigration from Japan began in 1877, nine years after the Emperor Meiji ascended the Japanese throne. He actively encouraged trade and travel with the West. The first immigrant, Manzo Nagano, settled in British Columbia. By 1896, approximately 1,000 Japanese, mostly males, were working in British Columbia in fishing, mining, logging, railway construction and farming. By 1911, the community had grown to about 9,000.

Active discrimination against Japanese began in 1895 when the British Columbia legislature took away the vote from Japanese Canadians. They remained disenfranchised for over fifty years. In 1907, at Ottawa’s insistence, the Japanese government agreed to limit the number of male immigrants to 400 pen year. In the same year, a mob fired up by anti-Asian agitators who wanted to keep British Columbia white, attacked the Japanese and Chinese parts of Vancouver. In 1928, Japan agreed to reduce the how of immigrants even further to 150 persons yearly. Japanese Canadians, whether immigrants called Issei or Canadian born called Nisei, were also excluded by provincial law from most professions, the provincial public service and teaching. The minimum wage law of the province authorized a substantially smaller wage for Asian Canadians.

British Columbia remained essentially a ghetto for Japanese Canadians throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Even those who had fought for Canada in World War I were denied the vote. Ottawa exacerbated the already poor conditions in the 1920’s, as historian Ann Sunahara points out, "[by limiting] the number of fishing licences to Japanese Canadians, thus denying many Japanese Canadians their traditional livelihood. During the Great Depression, Japanese Canadians received only a fraction of the social assistance that white applicants received and medical facilities were segregated." Second-generation Japanese Canadians with university degrees found themselves unemployable on the coast except as store clerks within the Japanese community or as labourers in sawmills and pulp mills.

The meagre economic gains of Japanese Canadians, won through 40 years of hard labour, vanished swiftly after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour in late 1941. Pushed by the scapegoat-seeking and profoundly racist Ian Mackenzie, British Columbia’s representative in the Mackenzie King cabinet, the federal cabinet twelve weeks later ordered 20,881 Japanese Canadians removed from all locations within 160 kilometers of the Pacific coast. The pretext was "national security." The decision was opposed, as Sunahara puts it, "by Canada’s senior military and police officers and by senior civil servants. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, aware that Japanese Canadians were controlled from within by their own leaders, was confident that they presented no danger of sabotage. The military in Ottawa were equally confident, having long recognized the practical impossibility of an invasion of Canada’s Pacific Coast."

First, thousands of women and children, most born in Canada, were held in the barns of Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition while the men were sent to road camps. Later, 12,000 were confined in detention camps in the British Columbia interior. Some kept their families together by volunteering to work as sugar beet labourers in Alberta and Manitoba. In 1943, the cabinet authorized the Custodian of Enemy Property to sell Japanese Canadian farms, homes and fishing boats for fire sale prices, to deduct a disposal fee, and retain from what was left whatever had been paid to the detainees to buy necessities in the camps. In the spring of 1945, the inmates of detention camps were offered a choice by Ottawa: immediate resettlement in Central Canada or repatriation to a then-starving Japan at an unspecified date. In despair, and to keep their poorly paying jobs in the detention camps, almost 7,000 Japanese Canadians over sixteen signed repatriation forms. With their 3,500 dependents they represented 43% of Canada’s citizens of Japanese origin. In November 1945, well after Japan’s surrender and six weeks after refusal by the House of Commons to give the Cabinet the authority to deport any resident of Canada, the King cabinet ordered the deportation of 10,000 Japanese Canadians. While lawyers argued the matter in the courts and the Canadian public strongly protested, 2,000 Japanese with an equal number of dependents despaired of reestablishing themselves in Canada and sailed for Japan. Another 4,700 chose resettlement cast of Alberta. By 1947, when Ottawa finally withdrew the deportation threat, only about 6,800 Japanese Canadians were left in British Columbia. The social and career losses, humiliation and shame could never be removed. Only in 1949 were the remaining restrictions lifted from Japanese Canadians and full voting rights obtained.

Since the Second World War, Japanese Canadians have become Canada’s third most highly educated and prosperous minority after the Jews and the Chinese. Their restraint, perseverance, hard work and educational achievements allowed the Canadian-born Nisei, in the 1950s, to win their rightful place in all fields of Western Canada society. Today they are notable in the professions, trade, businesses and the arts. In 1981, 20% of Japanese Canadians had some university education compared with only 16% of the Canadian population as a whole.

In 1988, after years of lobbying, Japanese Canadians won from the Mulroney government a long overdue apology on behalf of their fellow citizens and a compensation package for internment survivors. One of the worst periods in our national history had finally been addressed.

Jews

Approximately 35,000 of the 246,000 Canadians who indicated a solely Jewish origin in the 1986 census live in Western Canada. Virtually all of them live in larger cities, especially Vancouver and Winnipeg. Mother 27,000 of part Jewish origin live in the West. As most demographers define Jewishness as essentially a religious identity, Canadian Jews should probably not be described as an ethno-cultural community at all. Fully a quarter of respondents to the 1961 national census giving Jewish as their religion refused to designate it as their cultural origin as well. On the other hand, most of the Jewish community across Canada today was formed by immigration between 1880 and 1930 of families from Eastern Europe who shared a common orthodox Jewish faith. Later immigrants also shared a fairly homogeneous cultural origin.

Jewish immigration to Western Canada before 1930, when the Great Depression all but ended immigration from anywhere, originated largely in the Pale of Settlement located on the western extremities of the Russian empire. It had been established in the late eighteenth century to prevent Polish and White Russian Jews from moving into the heartland of Russia. Punitive taxation, a system of permanent military conscription for Jewish sons, the sudden expulsion of Jews from Moscow, and the pogroms (attacks on Jewish persons and property) by officials of the Czar left approximately 100,000 Russian Jews homeless in the years 1881-82 alone. World War I and the 1917 Russian Revolution proved even more calamitous because most East European Jews then lived in the Pale at the centre of the German-Russian slaughter. As many as 250,000 Jewish civilians were killed or starved or froze to death between 1914 and 1918.

Between 1933 and 1939, anti-semitism in Ottawa’s political and bureaucratic circles barred all but about 4,000 Jews from entering Canada from Hitler’s Europe. Bernard Vigod, the historian, reminds us that Canada’s performance here "compares most unfavourably with that of other countries in the Western Hemisphere." After 1948, a wave of displaced persons, including Jews who miraculously survived the Holocaust, were allowed into Canada. Nearly 7,000 Hungarian Jews arrived after the 1956 Hungarian uprising and another 8,000 have come from the Soviet Union. Thousands more came during the 1960’s from Islamic countries.

In Western Canada, as Stuart Rosenberg points out in his book, The Jewish Community in Canada, "Western Jews in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia feel themselves to be part of a single, closely knit regional family. No matter where they go or how far from home they wander, these Western Canadian Jews always remain ‘Westerners’.... Canadian Jews in the West usually do not suffer from problems of ‘Jewish identity’."

Their settlement in the West began in 1883 when 1,300 attempted to farm at New Jerusalem near Moosomin, Saskatchewan. It became a nightmare because of bad luck, poor organization and lack of farming experience