CANADA COURIER: Canada's scholarly Oliver Stone (02/11/96)

CANADA COURIER

by Christopher Guly

Canada's scholarly Oliver Stone

Revisionism is an important tool in interpreting history. Just ask Oliver Stone. His recent films, "JFK" and "Nixon," scream that notion.

In some ways, Stella Hryniuk has become the Oliver Stone of the Ukrainian Canadian community. She laughs at the suggestion.

Of course, unlike Mr. Stone, Dr. Hryniuk's work is intended to educate, not necessarily entertain. (Though anyone who has ever taken one of her University of Manitoba history courses will attest to the fact that the native Manitoban has the gift to enthral a classroom with her historical anecdotes and colorful descriptions of long-gone characters.) But like Mr. Stone, Dr. Hryniuk does not sidestep controversy.

Her research into the career of Canada's first Ukrainian Catholic bishop, Nicetas Budka, for example, revealed a man largely misunderstood by several Ukrainian Canadians.

When World War I broke, ultra-nationalist Canadians accused him of being a traitor by initially calling on Ukrainian Canadians to defend their native Austro-Hungarian homeland (he later told the community that Canada was their new country), and ultra-nationalist Ukrainian Canadians accused him of splintering the Church into a breakaway Orthodox unit. By carefully reading Bishop Budka's correspondence and surveying writings about him, Dr. Hryniuk determined the bishop - now touted as a potential martyr saint in the Church - was misunderstood.

So was she. "I became an apologist for Bishop Budka," she said recently in a telephone interview from her home in Winnipeg.

And all she wants to do is help people know more about their history.

Similarly, Dr. Hryniuk tried to dispel the notion that late 19th century eastern Galicia was rife with alcoholism. After looking at consumption and production figures, the University of Manitoba historian found the accusations were exaggerated.

Dr. Hryniuk's historical research, largely in western Ukraine's Galicia region, has even challenged her own Ukrainian mythology. "I have learned Ukrainians had such richness in their educational background. I always had the impression that nobody went to school. But I found that everybody was getting schooling," she explained.

Actually, Dr. Hryniuk's career is in some ways a surprise in itself. She admits to being a "lazy kid" in Shoal Lake - a community northwest of Winnipeg in the Riding Mountain district of Manitoba. Dr. Hryniuk dreamed of being a world traveler; her parents wanted her to be like her brother and sister, who maintained top-of-the-class standings in their primary schooling.

However, as she proudly points out, she obtained her doctorate. They didn't.

In fact, getting her Ph.D. in history was somewhat of a feat in itself.

Dr. Hryniuk completed her thesis on "Peasant Society in Transitions: A Case Study of Five East Galician Counties, 1880-1900" in 1984. But she never obtained access to Galician archives until 1987.

"The Soviets wouldn't let me in to see the records [in 1984], so I had to use those in Poland," explained Dr. Hryniuk. "But it was such an innocuous topic, and getting there at the time would have given me a much more grounded thesis."

Nevertheless, when she finally made the trip to western Ukraine three years post-thesis, Dr. Hryniuk discovered how much her thesis was reinforced and supported by the archives in Galicia.

Former collaborator Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk, a political geographer at Kingston's Royal Military College of Canada, credits Dr. Hryniuk as one of Canada's best Ukrainian Canadian historians. "She is a competent researcher and writer, and a solid academic," he said.

An associate professor at the University of Manitoba's departments of history and Slavic studies, Dr. Hryniuk has taught Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian history since 1978. This year, her course load includes looking at the Ukrainian civilization, the history of minorities in the modern world, and examining the role of women in Russian writing. The energetic academic is also studying the Ukrainian community in Brazil in what spare time she has.

A winner of the Winnipeg YM-YWCA Women of Distinction Award in 1993, she has written and edited eight books. The most recent, "The Land They Left Behind: Canada's Ukrainians in the Homeland," which features the late 19th century Galician photographs of Czech photographer Frantizek Rehor.

When Dr. Hryniuk is not writing, she's teaching. And when she's doing neither, she's off either in Ukraine - about 15 times so far in eight years - or whisking off to such faraway places as Honolulu (via Vienna, no less) and Atlanta, to deliver presentations at scholarly conferences.

Last September, Dr. Hryniuk even involved her 16-year lifemate, Dr. Fred Stambrook, a former dean of arts at the University of Manitoba and currently acting head of its political studies department, in a joint presentation in Brandon. Their topic: "Reflections on East European Immigrants to Manitoba before 1914."

For the record, Dr. Stambrook is a historian who specializes in West European history. That fact is no small one, and offers symmetry to Dr. Hryniuk's world.

Along with revisionism, symmetry in interpretion is a vital element in Dr. Hryniuk's historical studies.

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