Documented
- Ivan Pylypiw and Wasyl Eleniak sailed on the Oregon, which left Liverpool on 28 August 1891 and landed at Montreal on 7 September. Both farmed at Nebyliv in Galicia. Seven families and one unmarried youth followed from Nebyliv and Perehinsk in June 1892, and the Edna-Star bloc east of Edmonton grew from them. (Paul Yuzyk, "The First Ukrainians in Manitoba," MHS Transactions Series 3, 1951–52; Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies; Library and Archives Canada, "The Edna-Star Settlement".)
- Homesteads were 160-acre quarter-sections for a ten-dollar filing fee under the Dominion Lands Act, with three years' residence — at least six months in each year — a habitable house, and a staged breaking schedule of ten, then fifteen, then fifteen acres. (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine; Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, "Homesteading"; Indigenous Saskatchewan Encyclopedia, University of Saskatchewan.)
- From 1881 a First Nations person in Manitoba, Saskatchewan or Alberta needed an Indian agent's permit to sell cattle or other animals, grain, hay or root crops. The 1951 Indian Act extended it; the provision was repealed in 2014. (Bob Joseph, Indigenous Corporate Training, drawing on Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests.)
- From 1885 a pass system operated in selected areas of the prairie west. It had no basis in law, people ignored and openly defied it, and by the early 1890s passes were granted almost on demand. (F. Laurie Barron, "The Indian Pass System in the Canadian West, 1882–1935," Prairie Forum 13:1.)
- The kokum scarf is a thin printed cloth, florals on a bright ground, worn today as regalia, shawl and wrist-wrap and sold at Indigenous markets. Nobody has published where the Prairie scarves were made or by what route they arrived; the exchange between Cree and Ukrainian women is recorded as stories handed down. (Avery Shtykalo & Gabrielle Legault, "Rethreading Relations," Canadian Journal of Indigenous Studies 1(1), 2025, 103–125.)
- Naturalistic floral design was established in Métis material culture at Red River by the 1830s, alongside geometric work, and Cree makers had adopted Métis floral patterns by the late 1820s — roughly six decades before Ukrainian settlement began. Dakota and Cree people called the Métis "the flower beadwork people." (Patrick Young, "Métis Beadwork, Quillwork and Embroidery," Gabriel Dumont Institute.)
- In Plains Cree, kôhkom means "your grandmother" and nôhkom "my grandmother"; the possessor sits inside the word, and the English name "kokum scarf" carries a translation inside it. (itwêwina, Plains Cree Dictionary, University of Alberta, from Arok Wolvengrey; Chelsea Vowel via the Cree Literacy Network.)
- A #KokumScarfCampaign ran in Saskatchewan in 2018, created by Tala Tootoosis, four years before the Ukraine solidarity wave. (Ntawnis Piapot, CBC News Saskatoon, 1 December 2018.)
- In 2022, Indigenous people across Canada and the United States posted portraits of themselves in kokum scarves in solidarity with Ukraine. (NBC News, 1 March 2022; Kalle Benallie, ICT, 9 March 2022.)
- Canada interned 8,579 people classified as enemy aliens between 1914 and 1920, the majority of Ukrainian descent, paid $0.25 a day. (Canadian War Museum, Canada and the First World War.)
- In the winter of 1535–36 at Stadacona, Jacques Cartier's crew was treated for scurvy with annedda, a boiled decoction of the bark and leaves of an evergreen. Which tree it was is unresolved; eight candidates are on the table. (D. J. Durzan, "Arginine, scurvy and Cartier's 'tree of life'," Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 5:5, 2009.)
Contested, and worth reading
The only peer-reviewed article on the kokum scarf opens by stating how thin the scholarship is: "there is a distinct lack of formal research in this area." The same authors refuse a single origin story — "The notion of a single, authoritative history is itself a colonial construct, privileging written records over oral traditions and relational knowledge."
Three named writers have publicly challenged how the exchange story gets used. Patty Krawec (Anishinaabe-Ukrainian, Lac Seul First Nation) writes that the 2022 solidarity wave "glorifies Ukrainian settlers and erases the violence of colonization." Chelsea Vowel (Métis) draws a line between Indigenous generosity and settler self-absolution; the sentence we quote from her is a social-media post reported by The Breach. Leah Hrycun is a Ukrainian settler scholar, a doctoral student in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, and she calls the popular version "very romanticized, very ephemeral."
The wording this site now uses — «shared and divided pasts» — is the Indigenous Ukrainian Relationship Initiative's own description of its subject: a joint project of the Kule Folklore Centre at the University of Alberta and the Ukrainian Resource and Development Centre at MacEwan University, at work on this question since 2020. Citing them costs us nothing.
What we took down on 1 September 2026
An audit of all 51 pages against our own fact base found claims we could not stand behind. Four pages were withdrawn in place, and each URL now carries a notice:
- Sweetgrass — a page describing ceremony and protocol, with no source, on a plant this project had decided in writing to leave alone.
- Prairie sage and chaga — a page describing a practice and a health claim, with no source for either plant.
- The Living Loom — a collaboration with Cree makers that does not exist.
- Birch bark biting — a living Indigenous art practice written up with no source and no practitioner named.
Also removed across the site: the framing that counted the relationship in years; a claim that Edna-Star sits in Treaty 6 territory, which we could not source from a Nation or treaty organization; a scurvy epidemic among Ukrainian settlers, for which no source exists; three specific skills said to have been taught by Indigenous women, invented whole; a harvest-table scene and an intermarriage claim with nothing behind them; a manufacture-and-trade route for the scarves that our own file deleted as a misattributed citation; six harmony percentages produced by a scoring formula we have since measured and disproved; and every Indigenous-language word that does not resolve to a published dictionary. Two generated illustrations were being offered to journalists as archival photographs, and those labels are gone.
Where we failed our own standard
The standard was set before the site was: publish about Indigenous knowledge only what its holders have published, and name nobody as a partner before they say yes in writing. The site broke it. It described ceremony, made health claims, announced partnerships that did not exist and used Indigenous-language words with no dictionary behind them. Four pages came down on 1 September 2026 and roughly a dozen were rewritten; every remaining claim names its source in the page.
On 15 September 2026 the site was checked again before we showed it to Indigenous advisors. Two recipes built on Indigenous foods and presented as ours came down, together with an Indigenous grain in a borshch and three plant pages that had been held for review. Three generated illustrations came off the site: one drew an Indigenous woman beside a settler dugout, one drew two grandmothers together, and one laid a sage bundle on a workbench as decoration. Every promise of payment for review came off the site as well.
Our own reconstruction
Recipes, the 1923 sourdough crock, and the characters of our first game prototype are invention. The pioneer voice that used to appear on the 1891 page has been removed. This site records what published sources say about plants as food and as history; it gives no medical advice and describes no ceremony.
Found an error?
Tell us and we will fix it: info@uafest.ca. Corrections from the communities described here take precedence over anything we wrote.