Ukrainian Canadian Nationalism

By Volodymyr Kish

Over the past year, I have written a number of articles extolling the need for Ukrainian organizations here in Canada as well as the broader Ukrainian community to focus more of their attention on the history of our people here in Canada.  Ukrainians have played a huge role in making Canada what it is today, yet very little of that is passed on to our successive generations. 

It is little wonder then that so many of the descendants of our original immigrants to this country have disappeared from the community, succumbing to the powerful seductions of assimilation.  They have been given too little Canadian-based historical and cultural stimulus to foster their ethnic pride and too few heroes to look up to.  The nostalgic memories and cultural legacy of a long-gone Ukraine that sustained and motivated our immigrant parents and grandparents have had minimal impact on their progeny.  As hard as it may be for die-hard Ukrainian nationalists to accept, Bohdan Khmelnitsky and Taras Shevchenko hold little relevance to most of our youth born here in Canada.  Yet we continue to try and force-feed anachronistic ideals and traditions to our children with the naïve notion that you can force an individual to love something deeply that they have little understanding of or is completely foreign to their daily life or environment.

It is time we replaced Ukrainian nationalism in this country with Ukrainian Canadian nationalism.  We are a vital part of Canada’s make-up.  We have played a significant role in its history and development over the past century.  Ukrainians in Canada have excelled in every field of endeavour, far beyond our numerical proportion of the country’s population.  There have been Ukrainian Canadian heroes galore. Yet by and large too little of this has been written about, too little of this has been taught in our Ridna Shkolas, too little of this is remembered and commemorated to the extent it deserves. 

While Ukraine was under the heel of the Soviet Union and its people were waging a life and death struggle for survival, one could make the case that Ukrainians who were lucky enough to live in countries where freedom and democracy prevailed were justified in making the independence of Ukraine their top priority.  It was a worthy cause and the torch had been passed and accepted.  In 1991, circumstances changed and regardless of the political turmoil that exists in Ukraine currently, the torch has been passed back to the native inhabitants of our ancestral country.  It is now their responsibility to make the most of their freedom, independence and opportunities.  We will continue to provide our moral support, but our priorities here must now turn inward and focus on the health and future development of the Ukrainian community in Canada, a community whose strength and motivation has eroded considerably. 

The most important challenge of course is to re-engage the million or so Canadians of Ukrainian heritage who have disappeared into the Canadian mainstream.  They disappeared because we did not try to engage them on their terms.  We insisted that they were not true Ukrainians unless they spoke Ukrainian perfectly.  We discouraged them from developing new idioms and styles of Ukrainian music, arts, culture and thought, insisting on strict adherence to established traditional forms.  It is a wonder that so many individuals did succeed in doing just that, though invariably outside of the mainstream Ukrainian organizations that ironically professed to be the guardians of Ukrainian culture.  We tried to impose a right-wing political ideology on a generation weaned on liberal and sometimes radical social activism.  And worst of all, we did little to help them relate to and identify with the tremendous accomplishments of Ukrainians in Canada.  We succeeded in alienating them from most of the positive elements of what it means to be a Ukrainian in Canada.

Fortunately, there is time to change course.  Though most Ukrainian organizations in Canada today are but a shadow of their former selves in terms of membership, they still own significant assets.  One should also remember that Ukrainians are now also well represented in the more affluent middle and upper classes of Canadian society.  We have no shortage of Ukrainian millionaires.  It is time to forge a new “raison d’etre” for the Ukrainian community and its organizational structures, one more focused on our own well-being here.  It is time to consolidate our assets and co-operate more as one community rather than the fragmented contentious factions that have dominated it for the past five or six decades.  If we make a determined effort to do this, to put history aside and concentrate on the future, I am sure that we will engender both the interest and support of a significant part of the 1.2 million Canadians of Ukrainian heritage.