Communities

By Volodymyr Kish

 
Those of you who read this column regularly, know that I often write about the state of the Ukrainian community here in Canada.  The Ukrainian Credit Union, where I serve as a member of the Board of Directors, has as its slogan “Building Community”.  The Ukrainian Canadian Congress has “Leading the Community” as the banner on its Internet Web home page.  Virtually all the Ukrainian organizations currently still active in Canada constantly promote community development as one of their primary goals.

But what exactly is the Ukrainian “community”? If we were to go back a century or two to our origins in the Ukrainian homeland, we would realize that it was not hard to define who and what the Ukrainian community was.  In the small towns and villages where most of our ancestors came from, there was no ambiguity about who you were. 

Had I lived there in those times, all of my friends and neighbours would have been Ukrainian and spoken the same language.  We all would have gone to the same church.  We all would have gone to the same schools.  We all would have sung the same songs and danced the same dances.  We all would have been engaged in the same type of work, and with a few exceptions, we all would have been part of the same economic class and shared similar political and philosophical views.  There, may have been other ethnic folk sharing the same geographic space with us – the Poles, the Russians, the Jews, and perhaps others – but by and large, they would stick with their own kind in their own neighbourhoods of the towns and cities, and we would stick to ours.  The social, cultural and economic demarcation lines were well defined, and the Ukrainian community as such, was quite homogenous.

To some extent, this reality persisted with the first generation of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada, where because of low economic status, lack of language skills and overt discrimination, Ukrainians banded together in fairly tight-knit and self sufficient communities.  However, with each passing generation, the boundaries of those communities started to disappear, and the forces of assimilation began to have a profound effect on our sense of self-identity and community.

Today, in a practical sense, I belong to many communities and most, frankly, have little to do with my being Ukrainian.  The immediate neighbourhood I live in has no other Ukrainians and I mix daily with a broad cross-section of nationalities and ethnicities that have come to characterize many Canadian cities and towns.  The same can be said of the office where I work.  In a recent survey within my department in the Ontario government where I work, we were not particularly surprised to find close to thirty different nationalities and as many different language capabilities represented.  Although I have a lot of Ukrainian friends and acquaintances, I have just as many who are non-Ukrainian in terms of background. Further, regardless of whether they are Ukrainian or not, they all cover a broad spectrum of political beliefs, religious affiliations, cultural preferences and tastes, as well as occupations and educational levels.  I would hasten to add that they also represent a good cross-section of the capitalistic spectrum from the unemployed and blue collar labourers, to the professional and well-to-do millionaire classes.

In short, Ukrainians are no longer a well-defined, homogeneous community.  True, I still see myself as a Ukrainian, but I am also a lot of other things and belong to a wide range of other “communities” that I also identify with.  And herein lies the challenge for any Ukrainian organization that seeks to strengthen and develop the Ukrainian “community”. 

It is likely futile to try and recreate the type of tight-knit physical communities that existed with the first generation of every wave of Ukrainian immigration to Canada.   Our aims and goals must fundamentally change and adapt to the reality within which we live.  Our communities must of necessity become much more virtual and capitalize on the capabilities and technologies that Canada and modern society has to offer.  Further, we must restrain our natural impulses to preserve our cultural traditions and forms in a frozen, static state, and instead, using them as a base, adapt them and build on them to create our own distinctive Ukrainian Canadian culture.  Art, music and cultural forms of all kinds are dynamic growing entities that need to evolve and develop in creative ways if they are to stay relevant.

Our view of what the Ukrainian community is must correspondingly change and with it, the priorities and methods which we employ to keep the Ukrainian identity strong and vibrant within this great country of Canada.