BABA & KOKUM is a living storytelling project about Indigenous and Ukrainian lives on the Prairies since the 1890s, told through a printed floral scarf, family memory and sourced history.
We follow what is documented, mark what is remembered, and keep space for Indigenous co-authors to decide how their side of the story is told. No Indigenous community or organization has endorsed or partnered in this project yet.
Project illustrations. Archival sources are named in each chapter.
The project is the story. The archive, the scarf and the game are ways to enter it, question it and add to it.
Ukrainian newcomers and Indigenous peoples on the Prairies: neighbours, exchange, hard history and what survived in family memory.
Enter the story ↓ 02 · Archive
History chapters with a source under every claim, and a public page of corrections.
Read the archive → 03 · Scarf
One familiar cloth with two names and many memories. What is documented about it, and what is remembered.
Follow the scarf → 04 · Game
A tile game: guests come to the porch and you print their scarves square by square. One doorway into the story.
Play the game ↗
The neighbour stories carry warmth. Underneath them lies the colonial system that opened the Prairies to Ukrainian homesteads on land taken from Indigenous peoples. The project holds both.
Ukrainian families received their homesteads because the land had already been taken. Patty Krawec, an Anishinaabe-Ukrainian writer from Lac Seul First Nation: «The land they settled on, the 160 acres they were given on the plains, hadn’t been empty after all. It had been emptied.» (Rampant Magazine, 14 March 2022.)
Ukrainian families began building homesteads across the Prairies. Indigenous nations were already there, living through displacement, reserves and the permit system. Their histories meet inside an unequal system.
Read the sourced chapter →Neighbour stories tell of trade, gifts, food, plants and clothing. Some are documented; others survive as family memory, and the project labels which is which.
Browse the chronicle →The thin printed floral scarf belongs to Ukrainian family life and to many Prairie Indigenous families, where “kokum scarf” ties it to grandmothers. The project follows the object and leaves its origin as open as the sources leave it.
What is documented about the scarf →The Ukrainian-Canadian team built the digital work so far. The Indigenous side is for Indigenous co-authors and knowledge keepers to write, change, remove or refuse.
How co-authorship works →The scarf makes the story human at once: grandmothers, family photographs, clothing, gifts. From there it leads into the history underneath: land, policy, and whose voice is still missing.
Published evidence is linked. Family memory is marked as memory. Corrections from the communities described here outrank our copy. The goal is a living, accountable record of a shared and divided past.
We are looking for Indigenous co-authors, knowledge keepers, artists, families, educators and organizations who want to shape what BABA & KOKUM becomes. The first step is a cup of tea or a thirty-minute call.