Doukhobor Life in Canada

Read Melissa’s accompanying story:

My Story: A child of a New Denver survivor

By Melissa Ruth

71 years ago, the first Doukhobor children were taken from their homes by the government of British Columbia. At the time of his removal by RCMP officers from his family home, winter 1955, my father was sent on a two-day trip North to live in a former tuberculosis sanatorium, a forced education facility, in New Denver, British Columbia, Canada. He was six years old. Hundreds of other “school-aged” children–including his twin sister and eventually his older sister–were also removed from their homes and put into this residential facility. It would appear that the goal of “Operation Snatch” was to assimilate the children and break the cultural back of the Sons of Freedom Doukhobor people.

In February of this year, the government of British Columbia issued a public apology for this action. Their first public apology in 71 years.

I wish I was there to see it myself. 

I grew up in a culture that was mostly white, blue-collar people. Mill workers, back-to-the landers, English speaking non-Doukhobors, and Doukhobor/Sons of Freedom people. The Sons of Freedom people were the most radical of the three primary Doukhobor groups and were in many ways ostracized by the broader Doukhobor communities and even sequestered themselves from those communities. Years of Sons of Freedom resistances based on their devotion to what they considered Doukhoborism created a rift between them and the broader Doukhobor communities. Even after the Sons of Freedom protests and demonstrations had quieted down, a chasm remained. At least among the adults it did.

But I don’t think we felt that as kids, the chasm. We all just had babas and dedas and ate borscht and varenyky on special occasions. We all loved bread with butter and homemade tarts. Our babas were funny and big-hearted and our aunties were shooing us out of the kitchen when they weren’t inviting us in for some pyrahi and a hug. The pain of my dad and my baba and my aunties reached us through story. It was told over and over and over again in ways large and small, directly and indirectly, throughout my entire life up to the conversation that I had with my dad just last week. That’s 42 years and counting. 42 years of knowing about the pain and suffering of my father’s people; the loss of their language as the children of New Denver were forbidden to speak their home language. The loss of their culture as my father did not pass along any lessons of its significance to me or my siblings. The loss of heritage. They burned it all down.

Where I grew up, my name, Jmaeff, was as common as the names Johnson or Martinez in my new community in Oregon. There were many Russian names that made up our little phone book, our little community. I remember spending a few afternoons as a child leafing through that phonebook, reading all the Russian names: Abrosimoff, Barisoff, Conkin, Dutoff, Evdokimoff, Fominoff, Hlookoff…. And yet somehow I don’t know if we could have been any more invisible. Here’s what I mean. When I was a kid, I don’t remember a single lesson in school about the Doukhobor people. I don’t remember anyone’s baba coming in with her loaves of bread to teach us about our own culture. I don’t remember a single non-Doukhobor person acknowledging that many of us spoke or were in close proximity to a second language. I do remember a number of insults being muttered under the breaths of the other kids now and then about how stupid the Russian kids were. But even that was just as quotidian as the erasure itself.

Perhaps the only memorable acknowledgment of the Doukhobor student population at our elementary school was that, for a few years, there was a Russian class that was offered to us instead of French. When it was time for the class’s French lesson, a few of us would head out to the portable where Mr. Verigin, would teach us our Russian names and the names of things: Cat, cow, mum, book. We would count and put labels on items around the classroom and learn to read cyrillic–even though we didn’t yet know what all of the words meant. He would give us M&Ms when we got something right. And also when we got something wrong. We would go back to our regular class with fistfulls of candy and a renewed sense of self and some of our peers would give us furtive glances and say things like those dumb Russian kids don’t even learn anything, they just get candy. Nevertheless, it was a singularly empowering experience. But Mr. Verigin only taught for a few years and by the 6th grade we all were back to learning French with our classmates. As far as I can remember, that was the last time I really learned about any sort of Russian culture at my school.

My community’s identity centered a certain kind of whiteness or preferred whiteness. (English speaking, non-Doukhobor). In my memory, the queens of this community were thin, Earth-mother types, accepting of all (unless you were different in some way.) By the time I was in my early teens, aside from the obviousness of not belonging to the dominant culture, I also began to feel something changing between me and my Russian peers but I didn’t know if I was imagining things, what I was imagining, or why. I didn’t understand any of it. 

But more than my own awkwardness and growing self-awareness in this culture of English-speakers, I realize now that I never heard a word about one of the most devastating atrocities to ever happen in our community from the mouth of an adult that was not a Doukhobor. Despite the obvious tear in the fabric of the Doukhobor community, there was always ever only stony silence from the non-Doukhobor people. No teacher ever said: Read this poem. It’s about New Denver. No friend’s mom ever said: How are things at the house? Seems like things have been a bit hard. There was no outreach into the sphere of what it was like to be a survivor of New Denver, what it was like to be a survivor of the survivors. There was no exploration or consideration that I was aware of as to why there was a rift in the Doukhobor community. Why anger, depression, and alcoholism was rampant. But also brilliant storytellers and joke-sayers and how Doukhobor people could out-work anyone, could throw their shovels over their shoulders after 10 hours of digging Earth and smile.  

Why did all of the understanding and discussion have to come from only us, through the fog of our own trauma, and once realized or vocalized, have it shut down like it never happened, or like it wasn’t as bad as all that. Why were all of the advocates self-advocates? What about the Earth-mothers who claimed to believe so deeply in inclusion? I know that there wasn’t language for this conversation back then and I know that the Doukhobors were and remain insular in many ways, mainly for survival, but where was my non-Doukhobor community then? Where were the teachers and other advocates for social justice? Where were those that lived as neighbors to Doukhobors, the Sons of Freedom people? And where is that community now? Does it remain the one of my remembering? The one that forever held me and people like me on the very edges of it? Has it, prayerfully, evolved? I truly wonder.

The apology has affected me in ways that were unanticipated. I realized that one of the ways in which it has affected me was when I was discussing the apology with my dad. This is a conversation I wish for no human on Earth and yet I will remember it as one of the most important conversations I’ve ever had with my dad. I realized that, until now, until the apology, I hadn’t ever heard a non-doukhobor person of influence or power acknowledge what happened. I have never, in my 42 years on this Earth–immersed, no, drowning in this history–ever heard a non-Doukhobor speak of this history in this way. Not once. And somehow, simply hearing it from a non-Doukhobor made it real. It was like the gaslight was immediately extinguished. It is real. It is real and it happened. It happened to my dad. It happened to my aunties. It happened to my baba and deda and uncles. It happened to my cousins. It happened to my sisters. It happened to me. Because a non-Doukhobor person held up the mirror, I could actually see, for the first time, that the picture is real. And I also resent that it took a non-Doukhobor person acknowledging that it happened in order to make it feel completely real. Afterall, shouldn’t our history as told by our own be enough? Turns out that for me, somehow it wasn’t.

When someone outside of the culture allows themselves to hear a story that does not belong to them, to absorb it, and to retell it justly, somehow there is power in that. I think that this is a true acknowledgement of another’s experience, a byproduct of understanding. I feel that the apology gets us as close to this as we’ve ever been, to non-Doukhobors acknowledging and understanding Doukhobor people. I can only imagine if my community of non-Doukhobor people had done it 10, 20, 30 years ago, had listened, absorbed, and understood the experiences of the Sons of Freedom children and their children, that things could have been different. What would my life have been like as a little girl just coming up, too Russian for an English world, too English for a Russian one? I can only dream of a childhood in which I felt seen and accepted, acknowledged and understood, a childhood in which my family’s pain was not designated a dark shadow just outside of the community’s walls. What would a childhood have been like in which the history of my family, of many local families, was woven into the fabric of the greater culture? Not only would we have been accepted but our stories would have been an integral part of the broader community and the diverse members of our community would be 10, 20, 30 years closer to reaching a mutual acknowledgment and understanding of one another. What if this had happened in the 1940s and 1950s? Would my father have ever been torn from the bosom of his loving family to cry alone, one of 200 children crying alone, designated a shadow outside of the walls of his community? The soft underbelly? The other side of a chain linked fence, the chain linked fence that is forever burned into the collective memory of all survivors and survivors of survivors?

There is no conclusion here. I am just sitting with the fact that the Canadian government knows and acknowledges its own history, that a non-Doukhobor told this history to all of us, and how we must now endure their telling of our truth, a truth that we have always known. A truth that it seemed that no one but us listened to when it was just ours. But they are listening now and I am both thankful for and infuriated by it. I am learning that all of it, no matter how confusing, comforting, or maddening, is necessary, at least for me, in order to move forward.