The earth dwelling (Будзей / Бурдей)
Ivan Pylypiw and Wasyl Eleniak, farmers from the Galician village of Nebyliv, sailed on the Oregon, which left Liverpool on 28 August 1891 and landed at Montreal on 7 September. Pylypiw went back for his family and the Austrian authorities jailed him for inciting emigration; the first group left without him in June 1892 — seven families and one unmarried youth, from Nebyliv and the neighbouring village of Perehinsk. They founded the Edna-Star bloc east of Edmonton. (Yuzyk, MHS Transactions Series 3, 1951–52; Library and Archives Canada, "The Edna-Star Settlement"; Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine.)
A homestead was a 160-acre quarter-section for a ten-dollar filing fee under the Dominion Lands Act, and it came with conditions: three years' residence, at least six months in each year, a habitable house, and a breaking schedule of ten acres in the first year, fifteen more in the second, fifteen more in the third. A Homestead Inspector confirmed all of it before a patent issued. The Dominion immigration agent C. W. Speere described the country around Edna as "a very fine tract of fertile land," "also well wooded, although prairie fires have left a great deal of standing dry timber. The timber is principally poplar, with an occasional bluff of spruce." (Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, "Homesteading"; Speere's report in Library and Archives Canada.)
Andriy Nahachewsky documented seventy-two Alberta dugouts with structural data. The most frequent excavation depth was 0.75 to 1.29 m, with shallower and deeper cases recorded. Frames were vertical posts with horizontal rails. Walls were excavated earth, wattle-and-clay, logs or boards, plastered with clay mixed with chopped grass. Roofing runs across plastered rails, grass, sod, earth, growing vegetation and exterior wood — one photographed shelter was "covered with little more than poplar branches and leaves." Space was the hard number: twelve members of the Svarich family occupied an estimated twelve square metres, one each. (Nahachewsky, Ukrainian Dug-Out Dwellings in East Central Alberta, Alberta Culture, 1985.)
In a corner stood the fire. The common arrangement was a shparhat: a stove body of clay and chopped grass, hardening with use, topped by a metal plate brought from the old country or bought in Edmonton. A clay oven, the pich, was the larger and more elaborate option, and its mass mattered — "after preparing several meals in it, it remained warm for hours." Chimneys were either metal pipe pushed through a roof hole insulated with clay, ideally with one angular joint to hold heat and deaden sparks, or a woven column of willow saplings plastered inside and out in arm-length sections so the frame would not burn away. (Nahachewsky, 1985, §9–10.)
When the family finally moved into a house above ground, the dugout took a second job. The study's own careful sentence: the vacated burdei, "used as a dwelling place a few months earlier, may well have housed vegetables over the winter." (Nahachewsky, 1985.)
What the neighbours knew, and what nobody wrote down
The Ukrainian-Canadian author Myrna Kostash notes the absence, in the written histories, of the hospitality Indigenous communities extended to Ukrainian settlers — the times they "gave shelter in a storm, helped deliver babies, concocted medicinal brews, exchanged pelts for blankets." The Anishinaabe scholar Niigaan Sinclair writes that "Ukrainians relied on the knowledge of Indigenous communities to survive," and adds, on the same page, that "some Ukrainians also participated in racist acts, too, advocating for theft of our land in 1907." (Both quoted in Shtykalo & Legault, CJIS 1(1) 2025, 106, from Kostash 2018 and Sinclair 2024.)
Leah Hrycun, a Ukrainian settler scholar at the University of Alberta, warns about the genre itself: "There's a lot of really romantic stories about how [Ukrainian] folks were saved by Indigenous people, or how they relied on Indigenous people... These are lovely stories, but they're really a very romanticized, very ephemeral view of the relationships between Indigenous peoples and Ukrainian settlers." (The Breach, 9 March 2022.)
What was written down
Paul Yuzyk's 1951 history of the first Ukrainians in Manitoba is the community's own foundational account of this period. It mentions Indigenous people zero times. We searched the text: every match on that page falls inside the Manitoba Historical Society's present-day reconciliation statement in the footer, which forms no part of what Yuzyk wrote. That page stayed blank, and saying so is worth more than filling it. (Yuzyk, MHS Transactions Series 3, 1951–52.)