IN MEMORIAM: Mary Manko Haskett, 1908-2007

The Ukrainian Canadian community mourns the passing of the last known survivor of Canada’s first national internment operations, Mary Ann Manko Haskett, who, in her 99^th year, died peacefully from complications due to pneumonia at a long-term care facility in Mississauga, Ontario, on July 14, 2007. She was born in Montreal on August 10, 1908, to a Ukrainian immigrant family. Her parents, Andrij and Kateryna Manko, arrived in Canada in the early 1900’s from the part of Western Ukraine that was ruled under the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

When World War I broke out against Imperial Germany, Austria, Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe, her family and thousands of others like them were regarded as enemy aliens. Starting in 1914, internment camps and worksites were set up and racist attitudes of the day pushed most of the Ukrainian detainees to the backwoods of Northern Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta. In April 1915, the federal government rounded up the Manko and several other Ukrainian families from a parish in Montreal’s Point St. Charles area.  Mary was just six years old when she was transported by train hundreds of kilometres away to an internment camp at Spirit Lake (La Ferme) known today as Lac Beauchamp in Quebec’s Abitibi region. With her parents, brother John and her sisters Annie and Carolka, they all lived in a bunkhouse in the woods. Interned as “enemy aliens”, it did not matter that Mary and two of her siblings were born in Canada. Her younger sister, Nellie (Carolka), died in camp before her third birthday and is buried there in an unmarked grave.  Thousands of Ukrainians and other Europeans were unjustly imprisoned, not because of anything they had done but only because of who they were and where they came from. 

Mary Manko remembered very little of her time at Sprit Lake camp except for images of soldiers with bayonets standing guard and, her father returning home nearly frozen from spending the day cutting firewood and clearing forests. The first internees had to clear the bush and create “an experimental farm carved out of the woods.” Forced to do heavy labour for the profit of their jailers, what little wealth they had was confiscated, and they were subjected to many other state-sanctioned censures, including disenfranchisement.

The Manko family was released on June 14, 1916 and eventually made their way to Toronto and opened a grocery store in the Cabbagetown neighbourhood. Mary Manko worked for a while a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company plant. In 1930, she married Frank Haskett. They had five children, losing infant son Ronald to a heart defect. Mary Manko Haskett spent the majority of her life in Mississauga, raising her children and taking care of the family home.  

Mary Manko Haskett served as the honorary chairperson of the National Redress Council of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Mary Manko never asked for, nor wanted, an apology from the Government of Canada, nor did she favour compensation to victims of the internment operations, or their descendants. She asked only that what happened to her, and so many others, be remembered and that the contemporary value of the internee’s confiscated wealth and labour be placed into a community-administered endowment fund and used for commemorative and educational initiatives that would help make sure that no other Canadian ethnic, religious or racial minority ever suffered as Ukrainian Canadians once did. The fair and honourable position Mary took became that of the Ukrainian Canadian community.

Despite the Royal Assent given to Bill C 331 - The Internment of Persons of Ukrainian Origin Recognition Act (25 November 2005), and the Honourable Stephen Harper’s endorsement of that private member’s Bill in the House of Commons, on March 24, 2005, the Government of Canada has yet to fulfill its legal obligation to negotiate a Ukrainian Canadian Redress and Reconciliation Settlement with the designated representatives of the Ukrainian Canadian community.

The community through the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Ukrainian Canadian Congress and Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko promised Mary Manko that, sooner or later, we would see justice done.  We regret that she will not now be a witness to the righting of the historical injustice done to her and so many other innocents.

Mary Manko Haskett is survived by her son John and by daughters Frances and Dianne. She was predeceased by her husband Frank, and by sons Ronald and Paul. A funeral mass was held at St. Christopher’s Catholic Church in Mississauga on July 18, 2007 with interment at St. Mary’s Cemetery.