UNF Then and Now

By Volodymyr Kish

Those of you who read my last column will know that I made a little pilgrimage this past week to Rouyn-Noranda in Northern Quebec, the town where I was born and spent a good chunk of my youth.  For several decades after World War II, fuelled by a post-war wave of immigrants from the DP Camps of Europe and a booming local mining industry, the town boasted of an active and thriving Ukrainian community.  Much of this was centred around a branch of the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada (UNF) which had come into being on the foundations of an earlier Prosvita cultural/educational society that had been formed there in the late thirties.

As I was able to confirm this past week, very little of that community remains - a small handful of the original immigrants, now elderly, and but a few of their descendants, of which only a few individuals have maintained any active interest in things Ukrainian.  The building that used to be the UNF Hall still exists, though it looks like it’s been converted into low income apartments and is in a fairly decrepit condition. It was particularly sad for me to see it in this state, as in my youth, in many ways, it was the centre of most of the social and cultural aspects of my life.  It ceased to exist sometime in the late seventies in the face of the exodus of most Ukrainians to a more comfortable life much further south.

The fate of this UNF Branch is not untypical of many others that once dotted the Ukrainian Canadian landscape.  At the peak of the UNF’s existence, it counted some 91 branches, 30 in Ontario alone.  There were branches in such diverse places as Espanola, Leamington, Kapuskasing, Galt, Welland, Woodstock and Geraldton.  They suffered a similar fate to that of the branch in Rouyn-Noranda.  Currently, only a dozen or so UNF Branches remain in all of Canada.

The reason for the significant decline of the UNF (and it should be noted that the same holds true for almost all other Ukrainian organizations in Canada) has been a subject of much analysis and debate in recent decades, though the essential driving forces are not hard to discern.  The original Ukrainian immigrants to Canada (and it matters little from which wave) formed organizations to fulfil a very real need for community and mutual support in the face of prejudice, limited language skills, lack of any real economic and financial clout, and a strong desire to preserve their culture and identity which had been forged through fierce nationalistic struggles through most of the 20^th Century.  It was essentially a matter of survival and self-defence.  The “Ukrainian Hall”, whether it was run by the UNF, SUM or other Ukrainian organization, was the centre of cultural, educational and community life for those immigrants.  They invested a lot of time, effort and much of their limited financial resources into the Hall and its activities.

As succeeding generations of their descendants here in Canada achieved increasing degrees of education, financial, political and professional success, those initial reasons for banding together became less relevant.  The current Canadian-born generations of self-assured and materialistically well off Ukrainians no longer depend on the “Ukrainian Hall” to support their cultural or community needs.  In fact, we can assume that most of them have dropped the Ukrainian part of their Ukrainian Canadian identity.  They now belong to a wider spectrum of “communities” based on professional, political, neighbourhood, business, sports, hobby or other interests.  If they still have any kind of active interest in their Ukrainian roots, it is usually but one of many aspects of their social or cultural lives. As such, their relationship with Ukrainian organizations is casual at best and shows little of the loyalty and commitment of the original founders.

This is one of the realities that organizations like the UNF face as they strive to re-invent themselves in order to remain relevant and viable in today’s Canada.  Fortunately, the UNF still has a sufficient number of activist leaders that are committed to ensuring that it remains a strong force for the future of the Ukrainian community in Canada.  That future must obviously be focused on revitalizing and re-energizing the youth sector, and that is precisely where the UNF has chosen to put its priorities and investment of time and financial resources over the past decade.

In addition, new and creative ways must be developed to persuade today’s young Ukrainian Canadians that their culture, history and identity are something worth preserving.  In particular, we need to show them that being Ukrainian is more than just eating pyrohy and dancing the Hopak.

For too many Ukrainians in Canada, being Ukrainian is relegated to the domain of nostalgia.  We need to persuade them that there is real value and a real future to being Ukrainian.