Plaque in southern Alberta to recall internment camp (06/30/02)

Plaque in southern Alberta to recall internment camp

CALGARY - Another plaque recalling Canada's first national internment operations and their impact on the Ukrainian Canadian community will be unveiled on August 5 of this year, near a camp once located in the Eaton-Munson-Drumheller region of southern Alberta. In operation from October 13, 1918, to March 21, 1919, with internees being housed in railway box cars, this was one of the 24 Canadian concentration camps where Ukrainians and other Europeans categorized as "enemy aliens" were held and forced to do heavy labor for the profit of the government and various business concerns.

Those held around Drumheller worked in the nearby coal mines and were also deployed to assist local farmers in collecting their harvests.

Borys Sydoruk, UCCLA's director of special projects, visited Drumheller in late March and confirmed that a plaque will be placed at the Badlands Historical Center. The acting manager of this downtown Center, Sheresse Thompson, announced this arrangement in an article published in The Drumheller Mail and said, "There is a possibility that we will expand on [the placing of the plaque] by doing an educational program on the history of the event."

Commenting, Mr. Sydoruk observed that UCCLA "is certainly very much in favor of the Badlands Historical Center developing an interpretive display about Canada's first national internment operations and the Ukrainian Canadians. Doing so will ensure that visitors to the center will be better able to understand what happened during this unfortunate episode in our national history."

This will be the 18th trilingual historical marker placed by UCCLA and its supporters since 1994, many of them with the assistance of the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko.

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