PWAC Victoria: Frances Backhouse, Writing Sample

The Reading Room

Time Travellers

by Frances Backhouse © 1999

At this unique Alberta summer camp, kids discover what life was like for Ukrainian immigrants in the early 1900s. Originally published in Canadian Living, June 1999.

It's lunch time at the Slemkos'. On this scorching July day, Mrs. Slemko decides that it's too hot and smoky in the family's chimneyless, one-room house to eat indoors. She sets up a table outside in the shade of the granary, serves the children their soup and pyrohy (perogies) and returns to the kitchen to check the biscuits baking in the clay oven she calls a pich. Just then, visitors arrive. "Dobriy den´," the youngsters call out, leaping up with offers to show the guests around the farm. Looking at these fresh-faced girls dressed in knee-length calico shifts with khustky (kerchiefs) modestly covering their heads, it's easy for visitors to believe they've suddenly stepped back 80 years into the past.

The truth is, however, we're in the middle of a 1990s summer day camp. The Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, about 60 kilometres east of Edmonton, is one of a handful of places across Canada offering summer programs through which children can journey back in time and explore the past. At the village, participants in the Historical Children's Program are immersed in the world of the Ukrainian immigrants who flocked to east-central Alberta around the turn of the century. Combining role-playing, crafts, games and a taste of rural living, the program is always a hit with the approximately 160 children who sign up for the five-day sessions each summer.

Monday, the first day of camp, is Immigration Day, when the participants shed their modern identities and become the children their grandparents or great-grandparents might have been. The boys don long-sleeved shirts and denim overalls. The girls trade their shorts and T-shirts for bloomers, slips and loosely-fitted cotton dresses. With earrings and contemporary hairstyles hidden by khustky or straw hats for the girls and flat caps for the boys, the transformation is complete. Only their shoes -- a luxury many Ukrainian immigrant children did without -- give them away. In addition to their old-fashioned outfits, which they will wear all week long, the campers also get Ukrainian names: Keith becomes Khrystophor, Ian is Ivanko, Sherri is Savellia. Now they are ready to leave the Old Country for the New World.

The camp leaders set the historical scene for their imaginary journey, explaining that between 1892 and 1930, a quarter of a million people immigrated to the Canadian prairies from the western Ukrainian provinces of Galicia and Bukovyna, driven by poverty and political oppression. Immigrants require travel papers, so each child gets to make his or her own passport, complete with fingerprints and a black-and-white photograph. The thrilling moment of arrival is recreated at the railway station as a Stetson-wearing provincial police constable signs each passport and welcomes the children to the Dominion of Canada.

Then the campers set off on a tour of the Village farmsteads, where the hard reality of the challenges settlers faced soon becomes evident. Their first stop is the burdei, a cramped hut that has been hollowed out of the ground and roofed with sod. This would have been home, the leaders tell their incredulous charges, for months or even years, while the homesteaders cleared their land and planted crops. Parents and children slept together on the bed that occupies one corner of the humble one-room dwelling, and when it rained, the roof leaked.

The three middle days of the week -- Town Day, School Day and Farm Day -- focus on different sectors within the Village and different facets of immigrant life. Through it all, the campers are surrounded by the sights, smells and sounds of history: onion-domed churches, a horse-drawn plow, the pungent odour of manure, the sweet scent of clover in the ditches along the road, crowing roosters, the clang of iron farm tools being fashioned at the blacksmith's shop, the staccato rhythms of a telegraph message being sent by the station agent. This total-immersion experience is part of what brings many participants back year after year. As 10-year-old Amy Wiltzen explains when asked why she has returned three summers in a row, "I just enjoy it because it reminds me of the olden days." Twelve-year-old Keith Lacey, also a third-year camper, says he finds it interesting to be around the old buildings. "It would be nice," he adds, "if we still used horses and carriages, instead of all these cars that pollute the atmosphere."

Another aspect of the program that appeals to many of the children is the opportunity to use their imaginations in a sustained game of make-believe. The Ukrainian Village presents the past as living history, with costumed role-players carrying on all their conversations and activities in keeping with the time period. For much of the week, the campers follow their example. At school they do their sums on slates and sing "God Save the King" as the teacher raises the Union Jack. On the farm they draw water from the well with a hand pump, collect eggs from the henhouse and carry buckets of slop down to the pigpen. After a day or two, they start slipping into character automatically when they encounter members of the public who are touring the site.

"It's fun," declares Ian Helm, an 11-year-old veteran of the program who has cultivated a reasonably convincing Ukrainian accent over the four years he has been attending. "I feel like an actor and I love acting, but we don't have drama at my school." It's also better than studying history in the classroom, he continues, "because you're acting it out, not reading it and going 'Oh yeah, that's nice'."

Although there's no requirement that participants in the Historical Children's Program have Ukrainian roots, many of them do. Often their parents cannot speak Ukrainian and their grandparents only use their mother tongue occasionally. "My grandma speaks quite a bit of Ukrainian," says Amy, "but she likes speaking English because they had to speak it at school. When they spoke Ukrainian they'd get the strap." In a reversal of the archaic Anglicization policy that once supported such suppression of immigrant languages and cultures, the camp gives second- and third-generation Ukrainian-Canadians a renewed appreciation of their past. By the time the week is over, says program coordinator Laurel Cooper, many of the other camp participants are asking "How can I become Ukrainian?"

One of the highlights of the final day of camp is decorating pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs). Along with their passports and the other crafts the campers have made during the week, these will be a tangible reminder of their journey back in time. Other memories -- from standing with arms outstretched while the teacher checks for scrubbed hands and clean nails at the beginning of the school day to rolling out stretchy pyrohy dough on an oilcloth-covered table -- will be carried with them in their minds. "Dopobachennia," they shout as they climb on the bus that will take them back to the city. "Good-bye." But for many of them it is only temporary -- until they return the following summer.

It has been said that the past is a foreign country, but for these children it's now a little bit more like home.

Frances Backhouse
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Last updated: April 21, 2002 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/backho01.html