Professors discuss marginalization of Ukrainians in North America (02/07/93)

Professors discuss marginalization of Ukrainians in North America

by Nestor Gula
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

TORONTO - The apparent marginalization of Ukrainians and their concerns in North America was the focus of presentations by a Canadian and an American speaker at a dinner meeting sponsored by the Ukrainian Professional and Business Club of Toronto on Saturday, January 30.

Although the topic for the evening's panel discussion was billed as "Growing Up Ukrainian in North America - Canadian and American Perspectives," Dr. Myron Kuropas of Chicago and Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk of Kingston, expounded on their deep concern about the marginalization of "the Ukrainian question" by American and Canadian governments and societies.

Their approaches to the subject matter differed, however, as Dr. Kuropas, attempted to deal with the effects of this marginalization, while Dr. Luciuk tried to get at the reason for Ukrainian marginalization in North American society.

The speech by Dr. Kuropas, an adjunct professor at Northern Illinois University and a columnist for The Ukrainian Weekly, centered on his boyhood memories of growing up Ukrainian in Chicago during the Depression. He said a great influence for him was his father, who "was able to take the best of what is Ukrainian and the best of what is American and meld it so his son was able to understand that to be a Ukrainian did not necessarily mean you had to negate being an American, and vice-versa."

Dr. Kuropas also mentioned how he got beaten up while attending elementary school during World War II for calling Joseph Stalin, an ally of the United States at that time, "a bum." His father had told him about what "Uncle Joe" had done to Ukraine.

Since his father belonged to an American Ukrainian organization that supported the Melnyk faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Dr. Kuropas said his experience was that being Ukrainian was not always pleasant - and not only when dealing with non-Ukrainians but also when dealing with fellow Ukrainians. This experience was supplied by the various warring factions of the Ukrainian nationalist movement which came over with the Ukrainian displaced persons who started arriving in America in the 1950s.

He also mentioned that he went through his first identity crisis at Soyuzivka when he met Ukrainian DPs. "We are newcomers and you were born 'here.' After a while I got the feeling that being born 'here' was not the thing to be. Some people were even insensitive enough to whisper behind my back 'to baniak' (an idiom meaning dimwit). I suddenly got the feeling that I was not a 100 percent Ukrainian."

What Dr. Kuropas said he remembers most about growing up Ukrainian in North America is that he had to always explain what he was. "'Are you Ukrainian?' 'Yes.' 'What's that, a breakfast cereal?' There was a time when I had a little map."

With the Ukrainian question always being ignored by the Western powers, Dr. Kuropas saw that "being Ukrainian was always being politically incorrect. Always being on the margin. Always being, not in the mainstream, not really there." He mentioned that his son has had the same problems.

Dr. Kuropas summed up his experience of growing up Ukrainian in America as a series of ups and downs. The low moments, of being marginalized, ignored and even attacked by the society at large, are balanced by the "glorious moments and moments of achievement. And these are the moments that I cherish."

The presentation by Dr. Luciuk, professor of political geography at Royal Military College in Kingston and director of research at the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, was much more somber in tone. He went directly to what he perceives as the essence of being a Ukrainian in Canada.

Dr. Luciuk admitted that he joined the Ukrainian community late in life, when he was a university student and was confronted with questions like, "Who are you?" He found that, "in my context, my parents were not just strange beings called Ukrainians, but Ukrainian nationalists that were equivalent to Nazis."

Dr. Luciuk briefly summarized his work and said he was trying to come to grips with what it means to be a Ukrainian Canadian. He noted, "The cost of being involved (in the community) is really high." The cost is the frustration of dealing with a community that he feels has "organizations, for the most part, with a few exceptions, that are very provincial, very marginal, very unrepresentative, very ineffective and very out of date."

Dr. Luciuk delved into a history of Ukrainian Canadian organizations and dealt mainly with the Central Ukrainian Relief Bureau (CURB), the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), and the Civil Liberties Committee (CLC). He said that he was an acquaintance of the late Bohdan Panchuk and Stanley Frolic who established CURB to help Ukrainian DPs settle in the West and avoid repatriation to the USSR. These important figures in Ukrainian Canadian organizational life, according to Dr. Luciuk, were first forced to resign, then were ignored and later maligned by, what Dr. Luciuk called "the Winnipeg UCC Mafia." Dr. Luciuk was quick to point out that this is not an attack against any individual but "on the nature of that organization, on the nature of the beast."

He then went on to describe his trials and tribulations with the UCC, especially as an active member of the CLC, which worked on defending Ukrainians' name in Canada's war crimes inquiry, known as the Deschenes Commission, and the acknowledgment and redress campaign for Ukrainians who were interned in Canada during World War I.

According to Dr. Luciuk, the CLC's "work was undercut many times during the Deschenes Commission. ...Frequent attempts by the national executive to micro-manage the war crimes issue from Winnipeg constantly undercut, undermined and hurt our efforts." He drew a parallel between the UCC's actions toward the CURB and the CLC.

He said he does not foresee any change in the UCC, either organizationally or philosophically. He attributed this, again, to "the nature of the beast."

"Doing things the UCC's way seems to me, frankly, to be a prescription for doing nothing much at all, for a long time." He said he feels the UCC might have outlived its usefulness because it has not changed in any meaningful way since it was founded during World War II.

"We have grown up in Canada. We are Ukrainian Canadians. We have grown. But our committee structures have not. Mostly, our committee structures remain wedded to old-country methods of doing things: patronage, nepotism and antidemocratic tendencies. I think the time has come for us to seriously consider whether we do not need a new national organization, one that will be truly representative, democratic, effective and professional," he concluded.

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