The Ukrainians

This article is based back to just before the early 1900s and mainly explains the hardship that the Ukrainian people had before and during the time so many of the people immigrated to Canada for a chance at a better life. Before making the move to Canada so many Ukrainian people were discriminated against and not treated fairly. Once they arrived in Canada they still weren’t given any favours. Most of these people came in hope of free land which they did receive but by the time they arrived all the quality sections of land had been taken. The Ukrainian people got left with hardly any farmable land and the sections that were miles away from neighbours or civilization. The Ukrainian people had had 3 years to build a house, a garden and a building for livestock otherwise they would be forced to give up their land and leave. Luckily the Ukrainian people had a rich knowledge for farming as they’ve been doing it for many years before moving to Canada. By the year 1900 many of these farms have prospered under harsh conditions. A quote from Myrna Kostash “Without the men and women in sheepskin coats there would be no prairie economy outside the Hudson’s Bay Company, native hunters and trappers and the NWMP in their forts”. The men and women in sheepskin coats that this historian is speaking about it in this quote are the Ukrainian people that immigrated to Canada. Myrna Kostash is implying that without the Ukrainian people Canada wouldn’t have been able to succeed in being an independent country. Without the Ukrainian people, there is a good chance Canada would have been taken over by the United States. The Ukrainian people put together different unions to help make sure Ukrainian people can find jobs other than farming but also to make sure they are being paid equivalent to their co-workers. Also over the years, multiple bilingual schools were open for the Ukrainians and they even got a Ukrainian newspaper published. Although all of this good progress was working towards keeping in tack the Ukrainian rights and culture it didn’t last long. Anti-Ukrainian groups started becoming a more prevalent thing as they even made their own newspaper to show negative stereotypes of Ukrainian people. More and more books and articles came out with negative stereotypes of the Ukrainian people. Later in 1917, the Russian Revolution was starting and in Canada anything remotely connected to Russia was banned. This included many groups like the Ukrainians and these people got forced into concentration camps. Furthermore all Ukrainian language was banned for being in newspapers and being spoken in groups. After years of hard times for the Ukrainian people it got even worst, Ukrainian couldn’t sing or perform anything in their own language. Ukrainians got released from the camps at the end of the first world war in 1918 but not all of them. Ukrainian people only got release because they were needed to maintain labor shortages after the war. After everything was over and the Ukrainian people got released from the labor camps but still got abused from racial violence and in so many cases the cops would do nothing to help out the victims. Even Phillip Yasnowsky lost his job on the first page strictly because of his ethnic background. As the years went on the federal government slowly but surely removed racist restrictions put on Ukrainian and other people during the first world war. In 1919 someone tried to pass a domain act that wouldn’t allow Ukrainians to become citizens for at least 10 years after entry but this was quickly shot down. The Ukrainian people went through a lot of hardship as was displayed in this article and I am glad to see how everyone can work it out in the end.