Aspects of Ukrainian Canadian Culture

By Robert Klymacz

The following is an abridged version of a speech given in October 2006 at the Kule Centre for Ukrainian and Canadian Folklore at the University of Alberta by Dr. Robert Bohdan Klymasz. He is a retired curator for the East European collections of the Canadian Museum of Civilization and a leading scholar in the field of Ukrainian-Canadian folklore.

 While researching Ukrainian cultural phenomena in Canada, I have encountered some interesting findings.

Let me begin with some observations on Ukrainian Easter eggs, or pysanky. In 1965, I interviewed a woman in Edmonton who had gained some fame as an Easter egg maker (or “writer”, from the Ukrainian pysaty).  When she showed me her pysanky, I was taken aback. Their dominant colours were gray and pink, and some of the motifs seemed untraditional and not Ukrainian. When I asked whether anyone had criticized her work, she replied, “I tell them that that is the way they did them in my village, and that usually shuts them up. They assume I was born in Ukraine, and if that is the way they did them there, it must be Ukrainian.”  The village where she was born was, I believe, Mundare, Alberta.

Two years later, up came the big egg at Vegreville, a four-season aberration, but a great gimmick for tourists. By then, the pysanka had taken on a new role as a visual symbol of Ukrainian pride, not limited to Easter. Vegreville’s annual Pysanka festival, which only nominally celebrates the Ukrainian Easter egg, is never held at Easter. And, when some artisans began to mount pysanky on velvet and frame them, they became gifts for any occasion.

About 20 years later, Ann Harbuz, a Saskatchewan artist, painted a work that I felt was a true reflection of the pysanka tradition. The colours were right on and so were the motifs.  About the same time, in Manitoba, I saw a print called “Ukrainian Experience” by artist Tony Tascona. His pysanka was gray, unconventional and abstract. Yet, he assured me that this, too, was a Ukrainian Easter egg.

My Easter egg experiences show how elements of cultural expression can change and mutate. Those of us engaged in research on the Ukrainian Canadian experience are acutely aware of this process, but some of us do not like it. My feeling is that we need to accept the fact that departures from perceived models of correctness are part and parcel of cultural continuity.

Let me give you an example in the world of oral expression. In the 1960s, I collected and recorded Ukrainian folksongs brought to Canada by the pioneering settlers. I discovered that people deemed some songs as Ukrainian, even if their lyrics were based on those of popular English-language songs. For instance, “Ce Nashe Pole, Ce Nasha Zemlja,” had lyrics similar to “For This is Your Land, This is My Land.” The latter became one of the all-time favourites of Ukrainian Canadian zabava dance bands.   What does this mean? A quick answer is that Ukrainian culture in Canada is resilient, and that change is a two-way street: with loss comes gain.

Over the years the dominant physical markers of the Ukrainian community on the prairies have changed. Formerly, they were the white-washed peasant cottages on homesteads and onion-domed Ukrainian churches in towns and villages. Their place has been taken by varenyky (or perogies) and kolbassa. Both have been honoured by larger-than-life monuments, like the pysanka in Vegreville.  Furthermore, many restaurants on the West Coast, across the prairies and into northern Ontario, offer “perogies” and grocery stores stock frozen ones. In Manitoba, one restaurant offers a “perogy sandwich” and Boston Pizza, a perogy pizza.

Speaking of loss, once the Ukrainian language lost its viability in Canada, one of the leading markers of being Ukrainian in Canada disappeared.  If the average Ukrainian in Canada has lost his language skills, has a compensatory mechanism stepped in to fill the gap?

My answer is yes. Certainly there is integration and mutation, but not total assimilation. There has been an evolution of a new kind of language—one with no linguistic or ethnic barriers. I am referring to dance, specifically, the language of Ukrainian folk dance. It is a vehicle of cultural expression that has come to express, in a productive manner, everything that constitutes Ukrainianness–its body and soul.  This is a phenomenon that exhibits all the prerequisites for cultural continuity: predictability, repetition, cyclic patterning.

ccasionally, elements break away from the canon. But culture, like a biological organism, has its own rules. It can tolerate, discard or absorb innovations and then move on.

But, perhaps my take on language loss is too rosy because there is a downside. There are increasingly fewer people who can read, interpret or evaluate documents written in Ukrainian. As a result, a major segment of the Ukrainian experience in Canada is cast away into oblivion. The memory bank is gradually reduced to English material only. Primary research materials are lost or destroyed, not intentionally, but because their preservation is not a priority. And, in the field of Ukrainian Canadian literature and literary criticism there is a tendency to ignore non-English language-writings,

Therefore, we in Canada, particularly scholars and researchers, need to keep up our Ukrainian-language skills. They lend credence and substance to any interpretation or analysis of Ukrainian Canadian culture.