Community and Frontier: A Ukrainian Settlement in the Canadian Parkland by John C. Lehr (review)

In the late nineteenth century, when large-scale Ukrainian immigration to Canada began, the new arrivals were directed by federal government agents to available homestead lands across western Canada. The mostly homogenous colonies, or bloc settlements, formed by ethnic Ukrainians soon stretched in a discontinuous arc through parkland terrain (a mixture of prairie and woodland) from the southeast corner of Manitoba to the Edmonton-area in Alberta. John Lehr’s Community and Frontier: A Ukrainian Settlement in the Canadian Parkland examines the evolution of one of these colonies, situated southeast of Winnipeg in the Stuartburn district along the Manitoba-Minnesota border, from its inception in the early 1890s to roughly the middle of the twentieth century. While reported on over the years in various period sources, and written up in several memoirs as well as local, family, and narrative Ukrainian Canadian histories, Lehr’s book is the first detailed and comprehensive analysis of the Stuartburn colony to be produced by a scholar and one of the few such academic studies to be undertaken so far.

Having travelled throughout the Stuartburn area on numerous occasions since the mid-1960s, and being a specialist in Ukrainian Canadian history, I read Lehr’s book with keen interest. It is obvious that it is a cumulative effort based on decades of the author’s in-depth investigations of the region and his extensive research into Ukrainian Canadian and Ukrainian immigration history. This is reflected in the footnotes and bibliography of the book, which draw on an impressive array of sources, both primary and secondary, along with essays that Lehr previously published on specific aspects of the Stuartburn colony in books and in journals such as Canadian Geographer, Prairie Forum, and Canadian Ethnic Studies.

The great value of Community and Frontier is that it casts a geographer’seye view on the development of a Ukrainian rural settlement on the Canadian prairies, a perspective that sheds new light on the dynamics that shaped the destiny of the region, its settlers, and their descendants. In an accessibly written and systematic way, Lehr lays bare a whole range of factors – natural, economic, social, institutional, cultural, educational, and geopolitical – which influenced not only the inner workings of the colony, but the slow pace of its integration into larger provincial structures. Many of Lehr’s insights are revealing because they look at the community through different prisms from those usually applied in local histories. He does a particularly good job of showing how improved communications and the gradual penetration of the wider world eventually enabled the region to overcome some of its disadvantages, such as its marginal location and challenging landscape.

The weakest link in the book is its chapter titled ‘Colonizing Stuartburn: Religion, Culture and Identity,’ which discusses how religious and organizational rivalries effectively undermined the unity of the community and thereby had a detrimental effect on its sociocultural development. While the basic premise and thrust of Lehr’s argument is sound, several factual mistakes and misleading statements raise doubts about his grasp of some of his sources. These include identifying Bishop Seraphim of the Independent Greek Church as a Bukovynian; describing the Russian Orthodox Church as having been ‘designated’ exclusive missionary rights in North America, when this was simply claimed by the formation; and characterizing the infamous struggle over the Star Church in Alberta as involving Ukrainian Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic believers, when the sanctuary’s ownership was actually contested by Ukrainian Catholic loyalists and Russophile Galicians sympathetic to the Russian Orthodox Mission. Given the complexity of Ukrainian religious history in Canada in the formative years of the community, the faux pas are understandable and perhaps forgivable for a geographer. However, they easily could have been caught in the editing if someone knowledgeable about the subject had been consulted to do a fact-check, several such experts being available in Winnipeg.

Nevertheless, the one questionable chapter does not negate the many strengths of Lehr’s...