The Chronicle, 1891–2026

Before you read this chronicle

Ukrainian families received their homesteads because the land had already been taken. Patty Krawec, an Anishinaabe-Ukrainian writer from Lac Seul First Nation, puts it in one sentence: «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 settlement was part of a deliberate policy to fill the plains with European farmers, driven by Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior from 1896 to 1905, with an ambition to turn public land into productive private property. (Susan Dianne Brophy, Labour/Le Travail 77, 2016, 161–162.)

The law also restricted the exchanges this project describes. From 1881 a First Nations farmer needed an Indian agent's permit to sell grain or produce. Scholars of this history — the Ukrainian settler scholar Leah Hrycun at the University of Alberta, the Métis writer Chelsea Vowel, and Krawec — warn that warm stories of settler-Indigenous friendship can stand in for that fuller account. Both things are true at once: individual kindness between neighbours, and a national project of dispossession those same neighbours benefited from.

The phrase «shared and divided pasts» belongs to the Indigenous Ukrainian Relationship Initiative, a joint project of the Kule Folklore Centre at the University of Alberta and the Ukrainian Resource and Development Centre at MacEwan University, which has been working on this subject since 2020. Where a story is documented we say so; where it is memory or our own reconstruction, we say that too. See our sources.