The Politics of Multiculturalism: A Ukrainian-Canadian Memoir

Manoly Lupul’s book shows what many have known — that history would not exist if it were not written down, and also that the detail of history is often written in memoirs. Lupul’s memoir tells us much about the policy of multiculturalism in Canada, particularly its early years, as Lupul was intimately connected with the policy’s implementation through his work on the Canadian Consultative Council on Multiculturalism. He deals with the shifts in multicultural policy under the different political parties in power, with the efforts to entrench multiculturalism in the repatriated Canadian constitution in the early eighties, with multiculturalism, on the provincial and urban levels, with the political backlash against multiculturalism, and multiculturalism’s decline, beginning in the late eighties and into the nineties. The discussion is, of course, in terms of Lupul’s personal experience, but it contains much detail, the kind that one would not find anywhere else in the literature on the history of multiculturalism.

As Roman Petryshyn, himself a veteran multiculturalist, points out in his succinct foreword to the book, for Lupul, the key to ethnocultural justice was a school curriculum that gave students a linguistic choice. The student could choose to learn as the second language the language of his or her ancestors. At the same time, the curriculum would portray Canada’s cultural diversity. Lupul points out that in spite of the manifest statements on Canada as a multicultural society, the federal government considered multiculturalism to be second in importance to bilingualism and often showed resistance to a “substantive” multicultural program. The suggestions made by the Canadian Consultative Council on Multiculturalism, the federal government’s own creation that Lupul chaired for a time, were often not followed. The attempts to bring together the federal and provincial multicultural bodies for any joint action were continuously resisted.

Lupul points out how little power government advisory bodies have. He also shows how difficult it is to bring together different ethnic groups for common political action and what kind of ethnic leaders are most successful in gaining public assistance for their group’s objectives.

One of Lupul’s most significant accomplishments was the establishment in 1976 of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. The memoir provides much of the nitty-gritty detail of the process of founding the Institute, the persons involved in its creation, the arguments that were presented for, as well as against, its establishment and its final success, not just as a regional, but also as a Ukrainian Canadian national institution. Likewise, Lupul describes the role he, as well as the main protagonists, played in the establishment of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. He gives the history of the early stages of producing the English language Encyclopedia of Ukraine. He also says much about the introduction of bilingual programs in schools in Alberta and Manitoba, about the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (now Congress), and many other community efforts.

The memoir, however, is much more than a treatise on the history of multicul-turalism, Ukrainian studies, and the Ukrainian community in Canada. Lupul says much about the development of his own, personal identity. In fact, from the point of view of sociology, the memoir can also be considered as a case study of the identity development of members of an ethnic group’s third generation. Lupul grew up in a village that was part of the Ukrainian rural community block. In a vivid description that represents the book’s style, Lupul provides a visual document of the village that can be instructive for both the students of childhood education and the students of the early settlement of Ukrainians in Canada, especially those who tend to glorify the pioneering era.

Willington was a wonderful place in which to grow up. One either did not see or simply ignored many things, like the dust raised by the traffic around our corner lot that so exasperated mother; the numerous unpainted shacks that passed for homes and places of business; the empty lots that left gaps like missing teeth on most streets; the smelly outhouses; the kitchen slops simply thrown out in winter into the nearest empty space; the foul body odours and bad breath that no amount of cheap perfume or Sen-Sen could alleviate; the credence given to rumour and gossip; and the insularity that bred credulity, envy, suspicion, mistrust, superstition and ignorance. Even so, to the young, the village was paradise, because all of it was one’s playground and all of its children were one’s playmates, qualified only by gender and age

(10–11).

As the village community was mainly Ukrainian-speaking but the school program was exclusively in English, Lupul describes how he grew up bicultural and developed an ambivalent attitude toward things Ukrainian that persisted throughout his life. In his youth, Ukrainian issues were far removed from his greatest concerns. For a long time, he tried to keep the university and the outside world separate from the Ukrainian world. Yet, the more he tried to keep these worlds apart, the more they converged on each other. As Lupul puts it, “I was often athwart two worlds, balancing their interests and needs as best I could, not always, I fear, too successfully.” Reading his memoir, we can say that at the end Lupul successfully combined the two worlds in a creative way. He did so by building Ukrainian interests into Canadian institutions, as represented by the establishment of the Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta and by his helping to forge the policy of multi-culturalism that injected ethnic minority issues into national concerns.

All those seriously interested in the history of multiculturalism in Canada should read Lupul’s memoir. They will find in it the detail, which they will not be able to find anywhere else. Social scientists will find in the book a frank personal statement of the problems that consecutive ethnic generations face.