I Feel Soiled

By Lubomyr Luciuk

I feel soiled. I have never been robbed but friends who have tell me it takes a long time to get over the feeling of having your sanctum violated, of knowing strangers were where they had no right to be, of them taking away something that can never be replaced.

In 1995 I helped unveil a bronze plaque  and a statue at the base of Castle Mountain, in Banff National Park. Even though the location is somewhat remote, the installation ceremony was an occasion. A few hundred people gathered as priests blessed the site, hallowing the memory of those Ukrainians and other Europeans held there during Canada’s first national internment operations of 1914-1920.

The internees had been forced to do heavy labour for the profit of their gaolers, everything from road construction and bridge building to improving the Banff Springs Hotel’s golf course. Nearby, you can still find the remains of the concentration camp where men were held captive, not because of anything they had done but because of where they had come from and who they were. Of course, as they huddled in tents behind Canadian barbed wire, they had a remarkable view of the mountains. Yet, could they have enjoyed that vista? These “enemy aliens” were inmates, unjustly deprived of their freedoms, transported far from their loved ones and communities. It is the rare prisoner who finds his jail attractive.

Two plaques were unveiled. The larger provides a basic statement about what happened. You can’t squeeze much text onto a plaque in three languages. So we hoped it would be the smaller plaque that would challenge passers-bys to wonder. It asks, simply: “Why?” The very question the men at Castle Mountain, and later at Cave and Basin, must often have asked: ‘Why were we rounded up when we did nothing wrong? Why are we forced to labour for others when prisoners of war do not have to work for their keepers? Why has this happened, when they invited us to come and help build up the Dominion? Why do they treat us as enemies when we are not, and never were?’

As a scholar I have asked myself these questions for nearly two decades. To this day I do not have satisfactory answers. We may never discern them, for the records of this dark chapter in our nation’s history were erased from the national archives, deliberately, years ago. But I do know that at least some of those who have driven along Highway 1A, on the old road from Banff to Lake Louise, a roadway these prisoners were forced to build, have appreciated our efforts to recover this little-known episode in Canadian history. Flowers, and sometimes coins, have been left behind. We have wondered who these anonymous well-wishers were. We have collected those coins, taking this bounty into Banff, leaving it in churches to help others, in memory of the internees.

 But a few weeks ago some miscreant, or perhaps hooligans, went out to the Castle Mountain site. There they etched an obscenity onto one plaque and scratched the letters BS, meaning bullshit, onto the other. A foul word can, of course, be dismissed as the effluence of an immature imbecile. But whoever did this went further, challenging the message of the plaques, disputing what makes the place where they stand so unique, as compared to any other place within the park. In doing so these still-at-large morons crossed a line. They defamed an entire community. That constitutes a hate crime.

That the perpetrators were yobs, without conviction, drug and alcohol addled to boot, is probable. Perhaps they are too stupid to know that they are guilty of a hate crime and that, if caught–and the Mounties claim they always get their man –we will be insisting they be prosecuted. The Castle Mountain site was not sacred for them. It is for us.

 Our statue and plaques recall an episode of state-sanctioned xenophobia and prejudice that many wanted us to forget, that some denied had even happened. So, just as no one would expect anyone to ignore the sort of scum who scrawl a swastika onto a synagogue, so too we will insist on the punishment of the Banff Park punks. 

Of course the plaques themselves must be repaired or replaced. That will take time and money. But what do we do about the bigots of Banff?

Lubomyr Luciuk, PhD, is director of research for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association.