NEWS AND VIEWS: Shostak painting of internment operation donated to Royal Military College in Kingston (10/10/04)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Shostak painting of internment operation donated to Royal Military College in Kingston

by Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk

It is the only one of its kind. And the painting "Where Could We Escape To?" by Peter Shostak is now in Kingston, Ontario.

My hope is that it will be well-placed, on the memorial stairway that leads into Currie Hall, the most venerable of venues at the Royal Military College of Canada. Those who served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the "Great War for Civilization" are hallowed there, fittingly.

A floor below are photographs of "The Old Eighteen," the first graduating class, forefathers of the thousands who have since passed through our arch to serve with distinction.

Duncan MacPherson was No. 18. In November 1880 he started work with the Canada Central Railway, later Canadian Pacific. By 1886 he was division engineer, responsible for the main track and branch-line construction throughout north-central Ontario, a post he held until promotion took him to Montreal. Later he was assistant chief engineer for the Transcontinental Railway Commission. Not surprisingly, a railroad siding came to bear his name, MacPherson Station.

A small party was sent there on December 14, 1914 - 12 were soldiers; 56 were internees. Many of the latter were Ukrainians, lured into the Dominion with promises of freedom and free land, then branded "enemy aliens" at war's outbreak. Not because of anything they had done, only because of where they had come from, who they were.

Under the command of Major F. F. Clarke they built six bunkhouses and a soldiers' barracks despite deep snow, sub-zero temperatures, and "heads bruised by falling trees and hands and feet chopped and frozen." They cleared 100 acres, cut 800 cords of pulpwood and 400,000 feet of saw logs. By summertime they had "slashed and stumped roads around and across a block of land six miles long by two miles wide." Developing Ontario's Clay Belt was official policy. Having forced laborers create an Experimental Farm made it economical. You don't pay slaves.

By the end of 1915, 1,259 prisoners and 256 guards were at MacPherson Station, a "model town of the North." In 1917, however, its Soldiers and Sailors Settlement Board, annoyed army mail kept being misdirected to a western Canadian town of the same name, changed theirs to Kapuskasing, "bend in the river." Unintentionally, its motto is ironic, "Oppidum Ex Silvis," Latin for town out of the forest. Those who carved it out of the spruce weren't recognized.

While Kingston's Fort Henry was the first of 24 concentration camps set up during Canada's first national internment operations, Kapuskasing was the last to close its gates, on February 24, 1920. It was always a hard place, for internees and guards alike. The former resented their enslavement and exploitation. In the spring of 1916 a group relocated from Petawawa refused to work on a Ukrainian religious day. Guards wielding bayonets forced them to, reportedly injuring a dozen men. Another strike, in the fall of 1917, paralyzed the camp for some three months. While many internees would be paroled - labor shortages precipitated by the slaughters of the Western Front forcing Ottawa's hand - Kapuskasing remained a barbed wire cage for allegedly "dangerous aliens" and "radical foreigners," many slated for deportation "whence they came" without any right to appeal.

Decades passed until on August 4, 1994, a trilingual marker recalling this relatively unknown episode in Canadian history was consecrated at Fort Henry. Nearly two dozen more, and several statues, have since been erected across Canada, including Kapuskasing. Just a few days ago, thanks to public subscription, a memorial was placed near Eaton, Saskatchewan, a temporary work site for internees shipped in on boxcars from Munson, Alberta. Later this month the Niagara Falls Armory, a receiving station from which "enemy aliens" were funneled elsewhere, gets its plaque.

When this campaign began many scoffed - including a minister of multiculturalism who insisted these internment operations never happened. Books, films, plays and other commemorative programs have silenced most such deniers. Perhaps these educational efforts will also ensure that no other Canadian ethnic, religious or racial minority ever suffers as Ukrainian Canadians once did.

On October 2 an RMC graduate, who followed in No. 18's footsteps, the late Cmdr. Yaromyr ("Yarko") Borys Koropecky, No. 6263, was honored by his widow, Motria, and the Class of '64. The painting "Where Could We Escape To?" by Mr. Shostak of British Columbia is being donated to the college.

The painting portrays internees under guard, marching into a dark forest. Those men had nowhere to run. Many thousands of others of their kind, not herded away, were made to carry "enemy alien" identity cards. Some were imprisoned even after proving their loyalty by serving in the trenches. Unsurprisingly, many Ukrainians lied about where they had been born, passing themselves off as allied "Russians" rather than admitting they came from western Ukrainian lands under Austro-Hungarian rule. Such "liars" can still be detected. At least one such name was carved, posthumously, on the Vimy Memorial, on the very ridge where it is said modern Canada was forged. That Canadian Ukrainian soldier has no other grave.

The Canada Cmdr. Koropecky grew up in was different from the one MacPherson knew. Before 1914 some would not accept "bohunks" as "white men." Such prejudices were withered by the time he enrolled, but Yarko knew history, was aware of how fragile civil liberties become in times of domestic and international crisis. Now an image he valued is with us. Those who follow in Koropecky's path, and Mac Pherson's, are reminded of the sacred trust our soldiers shoulder. They stand on guard for all Canadians. No man could ask for a more fitting memorial.

Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College and author of "In Fear of The Barbed Wire Fence: Canada's First National Internment Operations and the Ukrainian Canadians, 1914-1920."

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