Ukrainian exodus to North America
Editor’s Note: Ever since the first Ukrainian soldier left for America in 1608 on an English ship to establish the first permanent English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, immigration has loomed large in the Ukrainian consciousness. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have left their homeland over the centuries in search of better lives, particularly from the territory that comprises today’s western Ukraine.Some ventured for short periods of time and returned home with a bit of wealth; others departed for good. Those who left permanently established new Ukrainian communities in their adopted homelands. Canada and the United States, with their vast agricultural lands and mining towns, proved to be magnets for Ukrainian migrants. Today each coutnry can boast fourth- and fifth-generation Ukrainians.Canada, which this year celebrated 120 years of Ukrainian immigration to its shores, is home to 1.2 million Ukrainians. The U.S. has about 1 million Ukrainian-Americans. The Kyiv Post today begins a series that explores where and how Ukrainian diaspora communities developed, what challenges lie ahead and how they feel about their ancestral homeland. This first explores the origins of Ukrainians in Canada.
TORONTO – Although other people had traveled to Canada before him, Iwan Pylypiw from the village of Nebiliv in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast became one of the first officially recorded migrants in 1891.
He played a critical role in the mass migration of Ukrainians to Canada by practicing the best advertisement possible in his era – getting in trouble with the law.
After an arduous journey to the new land, Pylypiw returned to his home village a year later and eagerly touted a Canadian land giveaway, as well as individual freedoms enjoyed by residents. Urging others to settle in Canada, his glowing reports reached neighboring villages.
As many families gave in to his tales about fairy lands, Pylypiw was arrested by police in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which then included western Ukraine.
Pylypiw was arrested “for agitation among the country folk to leave the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which meant the loss of cheap labor and young men for service in the military force,” the late Paul Yuzyk, a senator in Canada’s Manitoba province, wrote in a 1952 article describing the early years of Ukrainian migration to Canada.“The trial turned out to be a public advertisement by which news of the wonderful opportunities in Canada spread to all corners of the Ukrainian lands under Austria.”
While North America was the primary destination for Ukrainian migrants, Canada and the U.S. offered them two very different types of lives.
It was those early years that set the stage for not only how the Ukrainian communities would develop in each country, but the impact they would have on their respective societies.The politics of each country also played an important role in shaping the settlers’ life.
Almost from the very beginning, Ukrainians maintained a larger presence in Canada than in the U.S.In the last 120 years, Canada has experienced four great waves of Ukrainian immigration – 1896-1914, 1922-1939, 1946-1954 and 1991 onward.
Agriculture was the main carrot the country dangled before potential immigrants. Desperate for people who would farm its vast agricultural lands, Canada in its early years parceled out free 160-acre homesteads to anyone willing to work it.It was more property than many Ukrainians, confined to small land plots sometimes divided by growing families at home, could ever imagine owning.
When Mykhailo Zubrytskyi, a priest and a renowned ethnographer, wrote in 1906 about the business of immigration that was taking place in the Starosambir region, he was describing a scene that was duplicated in countless other towns and villages throughout western Ukraine.
First Ukrainian settlers came to Canada 120 years ago.
“Money for the trip they borrow from other gazdiv [owners of village homes]…He who has money does not travel across the ocean, because he himself needs workers,” Zubrytskyi wrote.“They take 150 zrinskies [the regional currency] and promise to send within the year, and they borrow it at 15 percent a year.
The first monies made they send to pay off the money borrowed. At first they take money only to get to the water (ocean) to Hamburg, and then, arriving there, call to have more money sent to them for the further journey.”
By the time Zubrytskyi’s article was published in Dilo, the region’s most renowned Ukrainian newspaper, emigration by Ukrainians to Canada and the U.S. was well under way. For nearly two decades, migrants had boarded ships bound for North America, lured by the promise of a better future.
Many of these migrants were country folk escaping crushing poverty rampant in the villages of Halychyna, which today encompasses part of western Ukraine.Throngs eagerly responded to the advertisements regularly placed in Dilo by major European shipping companies, as well as word of mouth.
Ukrainian leaders also helped spur the migration process. In 1895, ostensibly concerned about the growing exodus to Canada and the fate of the Ukrainians there, the educational Prosvita Society commissioned Josef Oleskiw, a professor of agriculture at a teachers’ seminary in Lviv, to embark on a fact-finding mission.
His report from the trip commended the benefits of life in Canada which Pylypiw had voiced.
“Everything points to the fact that in a few years our farmer will build himself a good livelihood, although at present in the hardships of pioneering, he does not resemble the image of God-ragged and pitiful, his appearance does not harmonize with the free lands where he has settled,” he wrote.
Establishing farms was not an easy endeavor.To make ends meet, many men were forced to lay railroad tracks across the prairies while their wives and children worked the land.
“It does not seem that fine ploughed lands and pastures could belong to such poverty-stricken people. If some of our intelligentsia were to take to heart the fate of our people and go to Canada, they could serve as their leaders, and prevent them from being swindled. I shall be happy to show them on the map where our people have settled, and will tell them many practical things which could help them,” Oleskiw noted.
Wasyl Eleniak, Dr. Josef Oleskiw, Iwan Pylypiw
By 1914, around 170,000 Ukrainians had settled in Canada, comprising as a group between 10 and 12 percent of all immigrating Europeans to the country.
The second wave of migrants was more educated and politically-oriented then those who had arrived before them.
All had lived through the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and subsequent struggle to win Ukrainian independence. The bulk of these migrants also headed west to work the land, but others stayed in the east to work as farmers and in industry.
It is this group of immigrants that laid the foundation for Ukrainians to take part in business and politics and become professionals.Their children began to enter Canadian universities, formed Ukrainian organizations and were more active in all spheres of Canadian life.
The wave of immigrants who entered Canada after World War II beginning in 1946 were the most politically-conscious and active.More than others, they were the ones who solidified the place of Ukrainians in Canada.
Political rather than economic refugees, many had fled the Soviet occupation of their homeland, while others had been forced laborers in Germany.
“Very quickly they entered the Canadian life by renewing their professions, establishing businesses and educating their young,” noted Zorianna Sokolsky, who has been studying the history of Ukrainians in Canada for many years.
“The influx of some 40,000 Ukrainians greatly strengthened the Ukrainian urban center where a whole new string of cultural, educational, financial, commercial, religious and political institutions mushroomed.”
It is within this post-World War II migration that the Ukrainian communities in Canada and the U.S. found their greatest commonality.
Natalia A. Feduschak
