Comparative Study: Ukrainian-Canadians and Black-Canadians

Note: See a mistake or inaccuracy? Let me know!

I’m not a historian. Never claimed to be one and most likely never will be one. But, in light of the recently re-ignited Black Lives Matter movements around the globe, beginning with the U.S., spilling over into Canada, I couldn’t help and think — I never really learned the Black history of Canada.

To be fair, it could’ve been due to the history of my middle school and high school education being less than regular (given my continuous travelling between Ukraine and Canada), or it could’ve been simply due to the large gap in Black history within the Canadian curriculum. The more I chatted with my close peers, the more the latter was confirmed as we pointed out the “highlights” like the Underground Railroad, or the Ontario Racial Discrimination Act of 1944, but never an in-depth timeline analysis that would explain how systemic racism grew with the structures of Canada and why so often it is now a taboo subject.

At the same time, the online and in-person conversations within some of my surrounding Ukrainian circles took a turn towards a “but what about us” narrative, one which has been widely addressed to-date. There was a need to prove who suffered more and at what time. There were also narratives and individuals who ignored just how politicized racial issues concerning Black folks have become (i.e. All lives matter). That said, this was also the approach that sparked an interesting idea for a project that no one asked for, but I committed more than enough time to.

This is what I now call — a merged timeline comparative analysis. Sounds smart, eh?

The below write-up is a comparative study of Ukrainian-Canadian and Black-Canadian history with the goal of visualizing how race impacted the two groups’ experiences in Canada.

Despite severe discrimination on the basis of skin colour, culture, and religion faced by the first waves of Slavic migrants and immigrants arriving in Canada, with time the groups learned how to withdraw their Ukrainianism and put forward their whiteness. This allowed the community to integrate within the North American cultures quite quickly, proving that this use of racial privilege mostly helped the community continue to build on their cultural and historical heritage, while remaining protected from further discrimination.

Amongst the colonized systems that historically preferred the White race over others (case and point mentioned above), the Black community did not have such a privilege, making for an altered experience of assimilation and establishment of self in Canada. For those and other reasons, long-lasting impacts of systemic racism towards Black-Canadians cannot and should not be compared to ethnic discrimination initially faced by Ukrainian-Canadians — this is the point that I’m hoping to equip parts of my Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora with (and anyone else who is interested).

Now that you have made it through the high-level overview of what I spent the last few weeks looking into, discussing, comparing, fact-checking and begging others to proof-read, you are well-equipped to jump into the in-depth dissertation in the making (kidding, I’m still not planning on becoming a historian).

The following write-up analyzes the progression through the stages that both the Ukrainian-Canadian and Black-Canadian communities had gone through when writing themselves into the pages of Canada’s history. From first arrivals, to community establishment, to education, and war-time treatment, the two groups witnessed the development of Canada as we know it today from very different perspectives, those largely based on — you guessed it — their race.

First Arrivals

The first known Black man to step on land that is now known as Canada, was Mathieu da Costa (1589–1619) in 1608. Employed as an interpreter for Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635), da Costa helped reduce the cultural gap between the early French settlers and the Indigenous. 20 years later, in 1628, the first enslaved person arrived on this same land — a 7-year-old boy born in Madagascar. The boy was sold and bought between the French colonizers. He was later baptized and given the name Olivier Le Jeune (1621–1654) — the first name of the colony’s clerk that purchased him in New France and the last name of the Jesuit priest that baptized him. The true name of the boy was never known.

In 1689, King Louis XIV authorized slavery in New France, allowing forced labour to be regularly used in the colony. Almost a century later, the Imperial Statute of 1790 allowed British Loyalists to enter lands then known as British North America and actively engage in the trade of humans often kidnapped and brought to the colonized lands. Two years later, in 1792, Upper Canada was established and later in 1793, the Abolition Act was introduced by John Graves Simcoe (1752–1806), Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. The aim of the Act was to end the trade of enslaved persons between Canadians and Americans, allowing those enslaved in the U.S. to enter Upper Canada. The Act did not free those already enslaved in Upper Canada, but rather forbade the introduction of new enslavements to occur. In 1833, the British Parliament abolished the selling and purchasing of human beings, ending slavery in most British colonies, including Canada.

In the meantime, serfdom — the use of feudal peasants for labour by the crown, the state, the church and landowners was common throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, persisted in the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1781 and the Russian Empire until 1861. Despite its abolition, the practice continued to exist until 1848 on the lands from which Ukrainians later emigrated. In 1891, almost 280 years after the first Black man arrived on the lands of Canada and 60 years after North American slavery had been abolished, the first documented Ukrainians landed in Montreal — Vasyl Eleniak (1859–1956) and Ivan Pylypiw (1859–1936), descendants of serfs. Important to note that despite their family history, the two men arrived as free men who were able to freely travel back and forth by ship between Canada and Ukraine.

Between 1891–1914, attracted by Canada’s policy of granting virtually free “homesteads” to settlers, the first 170,000 Ukrainian immigrants arrived in Canada. They were mostly peasants looking for lands to farm. Many went on to work in coal mines to supplement for the short agricultural seasons. These workers were engaged in what we now call — indentured servitude. They signed contracts with the government binding them to labour in exchange for shelter, transportation, food, etc. What’s important to note is that those contracts had an expiration date, at the end of which the individuals were allowed to walk away freely. In the meantime, slavery had no contractual attachment to it, no expiration date and did not end with the person’s death — carrying it over to their offspring.

What the Canadian Government did not anticipate was the radical exclusion of Ukrainian peoples within the settling communities of Canada. Many Eastern Europeans were not seen as White. They weren’t seen as “coloured” either, but rather as “others” who were often perceived as threatening competition within organized labour and became victims to political exploitation in elections. Regardless of the treatment though, one thing was agreed upon — Eastern Europeans had to assimilate with the British majority if they were to continue coming into Canada. Many were told to change their names to be more Anglo-sounding (i.e. from Starchynsky to Star). Others married within the French and English circles, making their status and next generations further assimilated.

The quick pace of the Ukrainian’s assimilation was largely possible due to their more European-like features. By appearing to be more white and later being legally seen as White, allowed for this culture to use its newly assimilated-into privilege to advocate for their own rights and community development. This strongly differentiated them from the Black community who continuously found themselves policed and “othered” from the rest based on their skin colour, historical association, and past systemic misassumptions. This, in spite of the Black community having already spent centuries living on Canadian lands as “free people”.

Community Establishments

In 1794, a petition known as “The Petition of Free Negroes” headed by Richard Pierpoint (1744–1837), a Black British soldier, and other Black veterans, asked the Government of Upper Canada to end the haphazard allocation of land to White and Black settlers. Instead, the Black settlers asked to be given adjacent land, so they could create a Black community where individuals and families could help and support each other. The Government of Upper Canada rejected the petition for unknown reasons. Through the centuries, segregation and limitations to community developments continued to limit community growth and support of Black people coming to Canada.

With the turn of the 20th century, more specifically with the Immigration Act of 1910, the Federal Government used the Act’s vagueness to their advantage, implementing numerous immigration restrictions. Section 38 of the 1910 Immigration Act permitted the entry of immigrants “belonging to any race deemed unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada, or of immigrants of any specified class, occupation or character.” Those made both Ukrainians (“other”) and Black people the “nonpreferred” individuals. Despite this, Ukrainian-Canadians began to establish churches in Alberta and Manitoba. Throughout the 20th century, Ukrainian immigrants and migrants began to develop strong Ukrainian communities across Canada which made survival easier, despite the harsh living conditions. Decades later, these bloc settlements also allowed for new waves of Ukrainian immigrants to better settle into their new life in Canada across the country, indicating that a segregated community for this cultural group was beneficial.

Meanwhile, the Black communities found themselves facing forced segregation that, rather than strengthening their communities, resulted in societal misinformation and systemic discrimination. In the 1920s, Calgary, Alberta city officials implemented restrictive covenants which prevented Black residents from being able to purchase homes outside railway yards — an area deemed less desirable, indicating lower status. A 1928–1965 Vancouver estate deed prevented Blacks, Chinese, Japanese and any other Asiatic or Indigenous individuals from purchasing, renting, or leasing residential property. Similarly, in 1946, a Lake Huron community in Sarnia, Ontario lived by a deed that specified the surrounding property could not be sold, inherited, gifted, rented, or licensed to any person wholly or partially Black, Asiatic, or of other non-white, or Semitic blood. In 1962, the City of Halifax demolished Africville — the historic Black neighbourhood of Halifax. What led to this was a combination of anti-Black racism and a drive for “urban renewal.” Residents were threatened with eviction if they did not voluntarily sell their rightfully owned properties and relocate. In 2010, the Mayor of Halifax expressed an apology on behalf of the City of Halifax for the destruction of Africville.

Community segregation can be used as a means of discrimination. It can cut off any connection to the outside world’s day-to-day activities. It can result in a long-term sense of being “othered”, as well as society’s lack of understanding of those who are being “othered”. Certainly, this was true of the Black-Canadian community experience. On the other hand, segregation can be used as a means of community development. It can enable a community to develop an internal infrastructure and can provide a basis for development. This was the outcome we note in the Ukrainian-Canadian community.

Education

When the public school structure was being formalized in Ontario (early 1840s), the school trustees created separate schools for Black children, particularly those in areas occupied by recently arrived freedom seekers. In 1850, the Common Schools Act was amended to include the Separate Schools Clause which allowed for the establishment of separate schools for Catholics, Protestants and Blacks. The official reasoning was to allow these separate communities to request their own schools, however, school trustees often used the clause to support the practice of racial segregation which further allowed for those with superior social status (Whites) to remain in those positions while keeping those less privileged (Blacks) below. The last racially segregated school impacting the Black communities was closed in Ontario (School Section №11) in 1965 and in 1983 in Nova Scotia.

The first Ukrainian-English bilingual public schools were founded in Manitoba and Saskatchewan in 1905, along with a training school for Ukrainian teachers in Winnipeg. The teachers in these schools were laypersons and clergymen who became the first authoritative community leaders. These schools were modelled after Galician and Bukovian models allowing them to maintain an interest in matters of their homeland and provided Ukrainians with another opportunity to strengthen their connection and embrace their cultural roots. To note, Manitoba’s schools were abolished by the government in 1916. These establishments did not prevent constant issues of dislocation which continued to regularly impact the often excluded Ukrainian interwar and post-war immigrants.

In higher education, Black students were particularly targeted within the medical fields of Canada. In 1918, the University Senate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario voted to ban Black students from being admitted to the university’s medical program. The reason — racial intolerance expressed by White residents of Kingston. The restriction remained in place until 1965 (although removed fully in 2018, despite no longer being enforced). In the 1920s, Black applicants were denied admission to the University of Toronto entirely, while McGill University adopted restrictions on admissions of Black students until the 1930s and then again from 1945 to the early 1960s. In Montreal, Black medical students were barred from completing internships across Montreal hospitals between 1930–1947. At the same time, in the late 1940s, Black women were denied nursing school admissions due to White patients not wanting to be attended to by Black nurses. Those who were admitted were allowed to treat Black patients only.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian community continued to develop and build out stand-alone university programs, institutions, cultural centres and more. In 1944, The Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre was established in Winnipeg; in 1976, the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) of the University of Alberta; and in 1981, the Centre for Ukrainian-Canadian Studies, established by the University of Manitoba and St. Andrew’s College of Winnipeg. From the 1950s to 1980s, Ukrainian-Canadians advocated for and obtained Ukrainian content university courses and degree programs which greatly continued to contribute to the survival of Ukrainian pre-independence history and culture. In 1999, the Prairie Centre for the Study of Ukrainian Heritage (University of Saskatchewan) was created with the mission to promote the study of various aspects of Ukrainian heritage in Canada. Many centres of this sort (cultural, documentation, museums, etc) followed.

On the other hand, fully developed Black Studies had a much later start. It wasn’t until 2016 that Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, launch the first minor on the subject of Black-Canadian Studies. Afua Cooper (b.1957), Chair of the Scholarly Panel on Lord Dalhousie’s Relationship to Race and Slavery, requested the program after being named to the James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black-Canadian Studies in 2011. The program went through three rounds of revisions of the administrative process before being finalized and approved for teaching. Despite decades of one-off university courses teaching Black-Canadian history across Canada, many of these courses and their scholars are found without an official home at most universities, falling under the “sociology” categories.

Once again we are seeing how segregation proved to be harmful for one community by “othering” it from the rest and allowed another to create their own schools within a publicly funded education system, which led to community growth and development. For Black-Canadians the early public education system racially segregated and monitored the students, which contributed to a sense of fear in broader society, which then led to further discrimination and misconceptions within higher education. On the other hand, Ukrainian-Canadians chose their seclusion and, as a result, remained less visible (therefore less threatening), which enabled them to preserve their Ukrainian history, culture, artifacts and often sought-after documents by the Soviet regime. This allowed for the culture to grow deep diaspora roots in Canada.

War-Time Treatment

The War of 1812 saw both Ukrainian and Black men join the ranks — Ukrainians as isolated mercenaries in the de Meurons and de Watteville Swiss regiments, and Blacks as volunteers residing in Canada. With the outbreak of World War I (1914–1918), Black men were routinely turned away from the “White Man’s War.” With time, they were accepted but only into the newly created racially segregated №2 Construction Battalion, stationed in Picton, Nova Scotia. Since White soldiers refused to fight alongside Black men, they were prevented from seeing a single day of combat. At the same time (1915), not too far from Nova Scotia, some theatres in Saint John, New Brunswick rejected all Black visitors.

During WWI, 10,000 Ukrainians enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces. This occurred, despite the fact that the Canadian Government classified Ukrainians as “enemy aliens” due to their Austro-Hungarian Empire origins. The new status required them to regularly report to the authorities who often confiscated their wages. They were required to always carry government-issued identity papers. In addition, over 8,500 Ukrainians were interned in labour camps in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Spirit Lake, Québec under the War Measures Act (1914). Most were recent immigrants, mainly from western Ukrainian regions, and some were Canadian-born naturalized British subjects. The Red Scare of the October Russian Revolution in 1917 led to even more arrests, confining individuals in prisons such as the Kingston Penitentiary. That same year, the War Time Elections Act took away the right to vote from those who arrived in Canada after March 1902. This applied to all “enemy aliens” as well, regardless of their residential timeline.

In 2005, the Government of Canada passed the Internment of Persons of Ukrainian Origin Recognition Act which acknowledged Canada’s responsibility for the internment of Ukrainians (together with Germans, Slovaks, Romanians, Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians). In 2008, the government established a $10 million endowment known as the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund aimed at financing projects that would educate Canadians on the subject.

World War II (1939–1945) brought more rejection of hundreds of Black volunteers who were later accepted into the military’s regular core because the army lacked personnel. It quickly became apparent that despite the community’s willingness to fight in the war, society’s view of Black-Canadians did not change. In 1943, Hugh Burnett (1918–1991), an African-Canadian civil rights activist and soldier, was refused service in a restaurant in Dresden, Ontario while wearing his military uniform. Although Burnett wrote a letter to Louis St. Laurent (1882–1973), Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, his complaint was rejected stating racial discrimination wasn’t against the law in Canada.

In Eastern Europe, Ukrainians were facing Communist threats, inspiring the creation of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee in 1940, later to be renamed to Ukrainian Canadian Congress in 1990 — an umbrella organization aimed at uniting non-communists in Canada, facilitating the entry of Ukrainian refugees after 1945 and supporting multiculturalism through various projects in Canada and Ukraine.

In 1944, Ontario passed the Racial Discrimination Act making it the first province to respond to fighting oppression by prohibiting publication and display of any symbol, sign, or notice that expressed ethnic, racial, or religious discrimination. This Act did not apply to other Canadian provinces. In 1946, Viola Desmond (1914–1965) was arrested at the New Glasgow, Nova Scotia Roseland Theater for sitting on the ground floor of the theatre, which was considered for “Whites only.” In 2016, Desmond became the first Black woman to appear on a Canadian currency bill issued by The Bank of Canada. Similarly, in 1947, West Indian Dennis St. Helene was not able to purchase a meal at a local restaurant in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, because “White customers would not come in.” That same year in 1947, Canada passed its first general law that prohibited discrimination — the Saskatchewan Bill of Rights Act.

Between 1947 and 1951, approximately 34,000 displaced Ukrainians arrived in Canada, seeking refuge outside their Soviet-occupied homeland — an effort that required aggressive lobbying by Ukrainians in Canada, the United States and South America who demanded the end to post-war repatriation and allowing their respective countries to admit the refugees as immigrants.

…at this point, I hope you get the picture and can draw your own conclusion.

SOURCES

Archive: Government of Canada: Who was Mathieu Da Costa

Canada: Immigration History: Ethno-Cultural Groups — Ukrainian

canada.ca: Key events in Black Canadian history

Culture.pl: Slavery vs. Serfdom, or Was Poland a Colonial Empire?

Education Historica Canada: Black History in Canada

Historica Canada: Black History in Canada: a select timeline

Human Rights: The story of slavery in Canadian history

“Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada: Historical Case Studies by James W. St. G. Walker

The Canadian Encyclopedia: John Graves Simcoe

The Canadian Encyclopedia: Racial Segregation of Black People in Canada

The Canadian Encyclopedia: Ukrainian Canadians

The Canadian Encyclopedia: Ukrainian Internment in Canada

Ukrainian Canadian Congress: Ukrainian Immigration and Settlement Patterns in Canada

University Affairs: The growing field of Black Canadian studies

Virtual Museum — First Wave of Ukrainian Immigration to Canada, 1891–1914