Canada, Here We Are! is being presented for free at the Royal BC Museum until January (photo by Royal BC Museum).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u201cIt wasn\u2019t easy history, it was tough but very fruitful journey for us, so we wanted to share that history with the wider community, with the Canadians and with the visitors to Canada,\u201d says Jatskevich. \u201cAlso, we wanted our new wave of immigration to know a little bit more about our history in Canada. Those 14 panels depict our lives, our steps of our long journey.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nJatskevich says that the Ukrainian community emerged in Canada in 1891, when Vasyl Eleniak and a few followers arrived in Montreal, and proceeded to carve out an arduous life in the harsh wildlands.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first people who came here, they were mostly farmers, and they came with one or two suitcases, they brought everything they had back in Ukraine and with high hopes that they will be continuing their farming jobs in Canada,\u201d she says. \u201cThe lands they got were quite difficult to work on, and many of the men that came, they had to go and work in different industries like mining, forestry, fishery, because they didn\u2019t have enough resources to work on such tough lands, and women were left behind with kids to survive and to start building the first settlement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jatskevich says the Ukrainian immigrants made a strong connection with the Cree tribes, and they shared each other\u2019s cultures.<\/p>\n
\u201c[The Ukrainian women] wouldn\u2019t survive if the First Nations people didn\u2019t help them, and that\u2019s a twist here, because the lands that Ukrainians were given, they were actually taken from First Nations people, who were displaced from those lands, but they didn\u2019t hold anything against those Ukrainians, and they were helping those women survive,\u201d Jatskevich says. \u201cIf you talk to First Nations Cree people, they will tell you many stories about how they did help each other, they offered each other\u2019s shoulder and hand to survive, how First Nations people were learning from Ukrainian women on how to cook, how to make clothes, and Ukrainian women and families were learning from First Nations people how to hunt, how to work on this hard land and how to survive in such a harsh climate that they hadn\u2019t encountered back in Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the recent refugees fleeing war back home, Jatskevich hopes that learning of the history of their forebearers in Canada will give them hope for a strong future of mutual support.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really hope that many newcomers who are coming with this fifth wave of immigration, they can learn a lot from this exhibit, and they can also see that through whatever hardship life offers you, we stay strong,\u201d says Jatskevich. \u201cCommunities stay strong, we survive, we support each other\u2026 and we are stronger together, and that\u2019s one of the messages this exhibit brings. We are always stronger together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Canada, Here We Are!
\n<\/i>Until Friday, January 6, 2023
\nFree, Royal BC Museum
\nrbcm.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2016, the Royal BC Museum partnered up with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and Honorary Consulate of Ukraine in Vancouver to produce Bread & Salt, an installation that celebrated 125 years of Ukrainian immigration to Canada. Now, the exhibit is once more being displayed, updated to honour the most recent wave of displaced Ukrainians driven […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22981,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,272],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-september-6-2022"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22982,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22980\/revisions\/22982"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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