My late father, Marsh Forchuk, who died in November, would have turned 94 tomorrow. This is a photo of him when he was about 12. He’s the one with the glasses, holding onto that bike.
Dad had to quit school at age 12 because his father was no longer able to run their Alberta farm because of injuries he’d sustained while interned as an “enemy alien” in Canada in WWI had caught up to him.
So because of my grandfather’s internment, my father’s future was forever changed.
CBC Ideas interviewed me and other descendants of internees about this. Here’s the link.
My Ukrainian grandparents homesteaded in Alberta in the early 1900s and they never would have survived had it not been for the friendship and kindness of the Indigenous peoples who were already there.
In WWI, Ukrainian immigrants and other new immigrants were scapegoated by our government and labeled as enemies of their adopted country. Thousands were interned in camps across the country and forced into back-breaking work.
My two novels set during the WWI internment operations both reference the interaction between Indigenous people and Ukrainian immigrants. Why? Because the internment camps were often built on the hunting grounds of an Indigenous community, so while Ukrainians and other immigrants were unjustly interned by the federal government, Indigenous communities lost their traditions and their source of food. A double slap of intolerance.
Here’s more about those two books:
Dance of the Banished is partly set in the Kapuskasing internment camp, a complex that destroyed a Cree hunting area. There is interaction between the internees and the Cree community.
Prisoners in the Promised Land is set in Spirit Lake Quebec with the internment camp on the destroyed hunting area of the Pikogan community. Anya encounters members of the community.
My WWII novel Stolen Girl also has a Ukrainian-Indigenous connection. That novel, about orphaned Nadia who settles into Brantford Ontario with her adoptive refugee parents after the war. The neighbourhood they move into is mostly refugees and Indigenous people because my research bore that out. Nadia’s best friend at school is an Indigenous girl.
Do you know of other books that explore this Ukrainian-Indigenous connection? Please let me know if you do and I will list them on this page.
Within weeks of Canada entering World War I against Germany and Austria-Hungary on August 6, 1914, our federal government brought into force the War Measures Act, tightening the grip on immigrants from enemy countries. Federal officials were given sweeping powers to decide whom to arrest, deport or incarcerate, and whose property they would expropriate and sell.Continue reading “Parish Internees”
It makes sense because we both write and care about history–particularly stories where there has been injustice. I believe that we are humanitarians, who hope that our stories of the past will resonate with the present, bringing awareness about people who have for–one reason or another–been silenced. Continue reading “Melanie Fishbane’s Dance of the Banished interview”
