NEWS AND VIEWS: An internment plaque is defaced and its message is questioned (04/16/06)

NEWS AND VIEWS

An internment plaque is defaced and its message is questioned

by Lubomyr Luciuk

I feel soiled. I have never been robbed, but friends who have been tell me it takes a long time to get over the feeling of having your sanctum violated, of knowing strangers were where they had no right to be, of them taking away something intangible that can never be replaced.

In 1995, working with friends from across Canada, I helped unveil a trilingual bronze plaque, and a statue by the Kingston sculptor John Boxtel, at the base of Castle Mountain in Banff National Park.

Even though the location is somewhat remote, the installation ceremony was an occasion. A few hundred people gathered to bear witness as priests from the Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox Churches in Canada blessed the site, hallowing the memory of those Ukrainians and other Europeans held there during Canada's first national internment operations of 1914-1920.

The internees had been forced to do heavy labor for the profit of their jailers, everything from road construction and bridge-building to improving the Banff Springs Hotel's golf course. Nearby you can still find the remains of the far-less exclusive concentration camp where they were herded. There are relics, bits and pieces of the barbed wire and fence posts that once kept those men captive - not because of anything they had done, but only because of where they had come from, who they were.

Of course, as they huddled in tents behind Canadian barbed wire, they had a remarkable view of the mountain's ramparts above. Yet could any of them have enjoyed that vista? These "enemy aliens" were inmates, unjustly deprived of their freedoms, transported far from their loved ones and communities. It is the rare prisoner who finds his jail attractive.

Two plaques were actually unveiled. The larger provides a basic statement about what happened. You can't squeeze much text onto a plaque when what you want to say must appear in three languages. So we hoped it would be the smaller plaque that would challenge passers-by to wonder.

It asks, simply "Why?" - the very question the men at Castle Mountain, and later at Cave and Basin, must often have asked. Why were we rounded up when we did nothing wrong? Why are we forced to labor for others when prisoners of war do not have to work for their keepers? Why has this happened, when they invited us to come and help build up the Dominion? Why do they treat us as enemies when we are not, and never were?

As a scholar I have asked myself these questions for nearly two decades. To this day I do not have entirely satisfactory answers. We may never discern them, for the records of this dark chapter in our nation's history were erased from the national archives, deliberately, years ago.

But I do know that at least some of those who have driven along Highway 1A, on the old road from Banff to Lake Louise, a roadway these prisoners were forced to help build, have appreciated our efforts to recover this little-known episode in Canadian history. Flowers, and sometimes coins, have been left behind by stoppers-by. We have wondered who these anonymous well-wishers were. We have collected those coins, taking this bounty into Banff, leaving it in churches to help others, in memory of the internees.

But a few days ago - or perhaps it was a few weeks ago - some miscreant, or perhaps a gaggle of hooligans, went out to the Castle Mountain site. There they etched an obscenity onto one plaque and scratched the letters "BS," meaning bullshit, onto the other.

A foul word can, of course, be dismissed as the effluence of an immature imbecile. But whoever did this went further, challenging the message of the plaques, disputing what makes the place where they stand so unique, as compared to any other place within the park.

In doing so, these still-at-large morons crossed a line. They defamed an entire community. That constitutes a hate crime.

That the perpetrators were yobs, night crawlers without conviction, drug and alcohol addled to boot, is probable. Perhaps they are too stupid to know that they are guilty of a hate crime and that, if caught - and the Mounties claim they always get their man - we will be insisting they be prosecuted for it. The Castle Mountain site was not sacred for them. Too bad for them, for it is for us.

Our statue and plaques recall an episode of state-sanctioned xenophobia and prejudice that many wanted us to forget, that some denied had even happened. So, just as no one would expect anyone to ignore the sort of scum who scrawl a swastika onto a synagogue, so too we will insist on the punishment of the Banff Park punks.

Of course the plaques themselves must be repaired, or replaced. That will take time and money. But what do we do about the bigots of Banff?

Lubomyr Luciuk, Ph.D., is director of research for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

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