Zhorna: Material Culture of the Ukrainian Pioneers (review)

Roman Paul Fodchuk’s preface and an introduction by Robert Klymasz and John Lehr, both authorities on Eastern European immigration to Canada in the early years of the twentieth century, set in place the double framework upon which this memoir and study of Ukrainian material culture will be centred. The author’s first-person narrative is anchored in the context of family, informants, and boyhood memories organized chronologically and further situated by his more recent role as the owner of a consulting company responsible for the master plan study for the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village project now located not far from Edmonton in east central Alberta.

The two academics, Klymasz and Lehr, provide a historical perspective upon the objects of material culture studies and the Ukrainian experience of settlement in a new country, summarized by Lehr as a record of and testament to the character and situation of the immigrants, a demonstration of how folk culture interacts with environment to create aesthetically satisfying artifacts, and the creation of an inventory of the material culture of Ukrainian agricultural life in Western Canada.

The main body of the text follows the ‘Journey,’ ‘Surviving,’ ‘Building a Little House on the Prairies,’ ‘One Hundred and Sixty Acres,’ ‘Other Tasks,’ and ‘Food/Celebrations’ to a brief conclusion and hortatory epilogue. The first three chapters present the historical and material aspects of Ukrainian emigration, with the content of chapters 2 and 3 as the principal focus on material culture. The second half of the main text can be more properly described as folkways or folk life, since it brings to the fore the agricultural activities, customs, and social celebrations of the community. This two-phase study of what came to be known as the Ukrainian Bloc is further organized and titled internally in a progressive series of contents, conditions, activities, and events that thicken the narrative as it proceeds, supported by lengthy quotations and illustrations from archival sources such as the Svarich Collection in the Provincial Archives of Alberta and interviews conducted by the author with homesteaders and the first Canadian-born generation of settlers.

The Svarich Collection of technical illustrations including maps, agricultural implements, tools, plans for various objects (a wagon, loom, etc.) among which the eponymous ‘zhorna’ symbolizes the character values of the community, also contains sketches of the central green in Tulova, hometown of many of the settlers in Ukraine.

All these documents from the old country provide the source material and context against which the inevitable traditional, adaptive, and assimilative processes that accompanied Ukrainian pioneer settlement in Canada are measured. While the natural environment plays a large role in this study, the social mainstream is almost entirely missing from the picture. Such an absence is perhaps endemic to the situation and in the nature of the isolation lived and felt by this and immigrant communities elsewhere. Although physical isolation and material circumstances require adaptive strategies, it is suggested that in this case strong religious, family, and social traditions supplied the reassuring familiar forms of life and custom that made survival possible. Chapters 2 and 3 describe both sides of the situation by listing the meagre effects the settlers brought with them – clothing, tools, utensils, a few personal items, packed in travel trunks – and the evolution of makeshift dwellings from the first primitive sod structures to the eventual replication of the vernacular house styles and the onion-domed churches of the old country. Crisp black line drawings of clothing, tools, agricultural implements, farm buildings, and techniques such as the thatching of roofs, along with explanatory captions, alternate with old photographs in an attractive and rhythmic visual flow that parallels the textual memoir of the author and the anecdotes of his informants. Two appendices, a glossary of terms translated from Ukrainian, an index, colour photographs of selected utensils and family members in traditional dress, complete the technical and documentary content of this closely focused and committed study. At the same time the universal conditions of exile, survival, and adaptation and...