NEWS AND VIEWS: A mournful journey to Spirit Lake, Quebec (09/12/99)

NEWS AND VIEWS

A mournful journey to Spirit Lake, Quebec

by Katharine Wowk

My journey began with a sob. Not my own, but that of a farmer from southwestern Ontario. He read we were going to Spirit Lake, Quebec, to unveil a memorial plaque to the Ukrainians once unjustly imprisoned there as "enemy aliens." He tried to say thanks, but it was hard for him. He was crying.

His father had been one of the prisoners, along with over 1,000 other men. There were also some women and children. Spirit Lake was one of two camps in Canada where families were jailed, where children died.

One of them was Carolka Manko, known as Nellie. She and her sister, Canadian-born British subjects when they were hauled from Montreal to the remote Abitibi, spent nearly two years in confinement. Nellie stayed there. She is buried in Amos. Her sister, Mary, one of the last known survivors of Canada's first national internment operations, turned 91 this week. What was done to her family and others was remembered, finally, on the 85th anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war. More remarkably, perhaps, Mary has outlived her jailers.

The Abitibi region is not as desolate as it was when children were shipped here. I found its landscapes and people inviting. Then I got to the internees' cemetery, hidden deep in the woods at La Ferme. Nineteen broken wooden crosses, cobbled-together railway ties, mark the final resting places of 19 souls lured to Canada by promises of free land and freedom. Instead they found themselves in a concentration camp, where death caught up with them. Diseases brought on by fatigue from hard work under trying conditions took most of their lives.

But not all. Ivan Hryhoryschuk lies here, somewhere. A farmer shot him dead when he braved an escape, on June 7, 1915. I couldn't find his grave. Whatever inscriptions adorned these forlorn markers have disappeared. The cement cross that dominates the graveyard is plain, save for where it is desecrated by bullet holes.

As a Canadian of Ukrainian, Scottish and German ancestry, witnessing priests from the Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox Churches reconsecrating this hallowed ground, I wondered why any of these people were ever interned. I know that, officially, they were "enemy aliens" because most emigrated from Halychyna and Bukovyna, crownlands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But, by January 1915, the British government let Ottawa know that these immigrants were actually "friendly aliens" who should be given "preferential treatment." There is no evidence that any Ukrainian Canadians were treasonous.

Fundamentally it was wartime xenophobia and racism that fueled the internment operations. And, as Sir William Otter, the general commanding, noted, there was "a tendency on the part of municipalities to unload their indigent poor, the cause of the confinement of more than a few." Internees provided the government and big business with exploitable labor. You paid a pittance, and they were yours to command.

More than just brawn was stolen. What little wealth some settlers had was looted, officially. A portion remains to this day in the Bank of Canada. Besides the 5,000 civilians jailed, an additional 80,000 "enemy aliens" were forced to regularly report to police, their freedom of movement, association and speech curtailed. Other indignities followed. In 1917 most were disenfranchised by the War Time Elections Act, so odious a censure that even the editor of Kingston's Daily British Whig presently observed, "it is very probable that ... the 'alleged' foreigners and hitherto 'naturalized' Canadians will bear their reproach meekly, but they will have sown in their hearts the seeds of a bitterness that can never be extirpated ... sooner or later it will have to be atoned for."

As I stood on the well-kept lawn of the St. Viateur Roman Catholic Church, on the very grounds where Canadian barbed wire once encircled innocents, I thought how the lessons of this dark time in our country's history had been repeatedly ignored. Passage of the War Measures Act provided for the internment of Ukrainians in 1914-1920. The same act was used against our fellow Japanese Canadians in the second world war. It was deployed yet again against the Quebecois in 1970. The predominantly French Canadian crowd at the Spirit Lake unveiling didn't miss that point. The rest of Canada is still feeling the consequences.

I also thought of what a pity it was that our prime minister was not present. Jean Chrétien was invited, but he did not come. Neither did Mary Manko. Her absence was understandable. She is old and frail. Perhaps the prime minister didn't show because he would have been reminded of his 1993 pledge to support the Ukrainian Canadian community's requests for acknowledgment and restitution. He hasn't kept that promise.

After the ceremony we walked from the archaeological dig where the recovery of this once-buried episode in Canadian history is being managed to the internees' cemetery. Most plots are invisible, overgrown by blueberry bushes.

The children whose parents brought them from Montreal to participate in this ceremony naturally delighted themselves feasting on berries. They didn't sense the presence of little Nellie Manko, or of her sister Mary, who were once brought to these same woods by soldiers with bayonets on their guns. I don't fault today's children for their innocence. Eighty-five years ago Mary, maybe even little Nellie, may have enjoyed these blueberries, too.

But the good taste of these fruits of the earth did nothing to ease the bad taste I had in my mouth as I thought about how forked the tongue of a politician can be. So this journey ended with me standing in a ravaged cemetery, vowing to remind others of a tragedy that Mr. Chrétien seems desperate to have Canadians forget.

Katharine Wowk is a teacher from Kingston, Ontario.

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