Immigration

By Volodymyr Kish

This year marks the official 120^th Anniversary of Ukrainian Settlement in Canada. Although some historians have pointed out that individual Ukrainians had made their way to Canada long before 1891, this was the year when Ivan Pylypiw and Wasyl Eleniak started a wave that would see several hundred thousand Ukrainians, primarily from Bukovyna and Halychyna, make the difficult journey to Canada over the next several decades.

That of course, was what is now known as the First Wave, followed by a smaller Second Wave after the Bolshevik Revolution, another large wave following the Second World War, and the final most recent Fourth Wave in the aftermath of Ukraine gaining is independence in 1991, a century after the first immigrants arrived on Canadian shores.  The end result of all this is that some 1.2 million Canadians now claim some Ukrainian ancestry.

Immigration is never an easy process.  People are usually driven to emigrate from their homeland because of dire circumstances – political turmoil, war, poverty, oppression or lack of hope for ones future.  It is usually a traumatic experience for those involved.  For Ukrainians immigrating to Canada, it was a particularly trying challenge as they were moving to a country where they did not speak the native language, where the political and social systems were completely different from those they had grown up in, where the culture and history were totally foreign to their own, and where the majority populations tended to look down upon them as being uncivilized and somehow lesser humans.

Their experiences had a profound effect on their mindset and values, an effect that often impacted following generations born in Canada as well.  I can speak to that based on personal experience, being the son of immigrant parents.  

My father was part of the Second Wave arriving in Canada in 1928, while my mother was one of the DP’s that came over in the large Third Wave after World War II. Although they had both come to Canada for different reasons and under different circumstances, they did it more as a matter of necessity than desire. They did not “abandon” Ukraine as much as they were virtually forced to leave by grim circumstance.

My father was the youngest son of a large peasant family, which in the economic turmoil that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, could offer no real prospects or future for a minimally educated boy.  Facing either starvation or a life of drudgery he chose to leave Ukraine and try and seek his fortune elsewhere.  My mother was taken into forced labour in Germany after the outbreak of the War, and wound up in a refugee camp in the British Zone after the end of hostilities.  Going back to Ukraine meant either certain death or exile to Siberia, so when the opportunity to immigrate to Canada under a work contract presented itself, she leapt at the chance.

Because of the circumstances of how they wound up in Canada, their generation always continued to harbour a strong cultural if not spiritual attachment to the land of their birth.  Coupled with some of the prejudicial antagonism they experienced from the established Canadian society and population, this prompted them to establish strong Ukrainian community associations, organizations and church parishes as both a matter of self-defence as well as to mitigate the cultural dislocation that they were experiencing.

This, of course, had a profound influence on the first generation of their offspring born in Canada, of which I am a member and typical example.  Although I faced much less prejudice and anti-immigrant bias than had my parents, I was made acutely conscious throughout most of my youth, that within the broader Canadian society, I was not exactly perceived as being a full blooded 100% Canadian.  In some ways, this was not necessarily always a bad thing, as it provided those like myself with a strong motivation to succeed and prove our detractors wrong.

Most second or third generation Canadian-born Ukrainians fortunately did not have to face similar cultural biases.  My kids grew up fluent in English and as “Canadian” as most of their peers.  Their values, perceptions, and mindset are closer to being a typical “Canadian” than they are to being “Ukrainian” or even a “Ukrainian Canadian”.  Correspondingly, they also do not have the same attachment to their Ukrainian roots that I do. 

Regardless of how we may feel towards these developments, that is the reality that we face within the Ukrainian Canadian community in Canada today.  If we are to preserve the Ukrainian cultural legacies that our immigrant parents left us, then we must accept the fact that the dynamics and mindset of the majority of the Ukrainian community are different than what they were when we were growing up within the immigrant community, and we must adjust our strategies and activities accordingly.