CANADA COURIER: Survival of the species (03/10/96)

CANADA COURIER

by Christopher Guly

Survival of the species

One recent evening, while driving along Ottawa's wintry streets, I heard listeners of a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. radio item react to a report on the extinction of a small species of snail. Apparently, the segment was irreverent enough that all the calls from CBC's audience were critical of the network's audacity to make light of the disappearance of one of God's creatures. The outpouring of emotion made me think metaphorically about this newspaper's mandate to prevent a similar fate from befalling Ukrainian culture.

In Canada, major government budget-slashing exercises and massive corporate layoffs have threatened not only jobs, pocketbooks and, ultimately, livelihoods, but have imperiled the very fabric of this society. Such cultural institutions as the CBC are among those facing the chopping block with less public funding. Perhaps, some ponder, the influx of more U.S. programming, with its more guaranteed advertising revenue base, wouldn't be such a bad idea.

In the multicultural arena, such groups as the Ukrainian Canadian Congress also are preparing for fiscal inevitabilities. When Ottawa increasingly hints that the UCC's reliance on government assistance may soon be over, the UCC will soon have to become self-sufficient. Multicultural groups abstaining themselves from fund-raising activities may then have to rely on a form of group memory.

In my lifetime, the Ukrainian Canadian community has excelled in remembering events and people from its past. Growing up in Winnipeg, I can recall numerous anniversaries for choirs, priestly ordinations, the Great Famine and even the 1984 death of Cardinal Josyf Slipyj. Now, I realize that sometimes this isn't such a bad thing. Certainly, it gives events and people today context and maybe, with some vision, direction.

This year, my parents, Frank and Ollie (Olya), will mark their 40th wedding anniversary. Naturally, that's my context. But it's more than just their involvement in bringing me to this planet that situates me within the Ukrainian Canadian community.

Though I probably speak better French than Ukrainian these days, my mother tongue, literally, is Ukrainian. My mother taught me to speak Ukrainian before she introduced me to English. In fact, she was even more multicultural than that - giving me a 45 rpm recording of a Japanese singer that I memorized, undoubtedly to the chagrin of those who visited the Guly household in the early 1960s.

But since both my parents' parents had arrived in Canada as early as 1907, I was born a second-generation Ukrainian Canadian. Dad and mom grew up, as I did, in the North End of Winnipeg. We didn't follow the Julian calendar for religious events, nor did we speak much Ukrainian at home. I never attended Ukrainian dance classes, though I went to a school run by the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate in which Ukrainian language instruction was mandatory.

My maternal grandmother, Agatha Sahan - who was 6 when she arrived in 1907 - mostly spoke English at home, or at least a forum of "Ukrainenglish." She did, as most of us North-Enders did, understand a blend of other tongues, including German, Polish and Yiddish. In fact, it took me a few years to understand the differences with some words.

But since Baba Sahan lived the longest of my grandparents, she offered me a glimpse through the window of her Galician origins. I still remember hearing about the crystal-clear, frog-filled pond near her parents' home in western Ukraine, orchard trees brimming with fruit, her mother, Anastasia, feeding soldiers lunch as they tromped through the Dowhanyk homestead during their training exercises.

Baba never lived to see her homeland again. But she never forgot it. Nor did I.

Today, I wonder what subsequent generations of Ukrainian Canadians have experienced as their babas have replaced their babuhskas with designer hats and look little different from their daughters, as former multicultural ghettos are scattered, or broadened, as in Toronto and Montreal, to include new multicultural dynamics.

Needless to say, these differences come with their own richness. But, as we scramble to stay afloat in our jobs and with our finances, the risk is that the jewels of this experience may be unappreciated - or worse: forgotten.

I became fascinated with remembering and learning about history as a boy. Chubby and an only child, I was never the athlete my father was in his youth.

As a young man, he played semi-professional baseball and could throw a mean curve. I typically hid in my room with books and my imagination. But, if my memory serves me right, the books were my dad's curveball to me.

Dad loved to read, and still does. He even kept his own newspaper clippings scrapbook of world events. Perhaps his recent coverage of Saskatoon Bishop Cornelius Pasichny's consecration (which appeared in The Weekly) was the fulfillment of a dream to be a journalist. Maybe that was my curveball back to him.

As publicly supported Ukrainian cultural events slip into becoming relics of the past, memories and voices from our collective heritage can never fade or be silenced. As long as we remember, we will never become extinct.

Too bad the snail's friends didn't come to his rescue earlier.

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