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Seeking a Home: Entering and Leaving Manitoba
Almost 7,000 Mennonites arrived in Manitoba from Russia between 1874 and the end of the decade, among the first beneficiaries of Louis Riel’s( initiative to create a new province. [Riel was a prominent leader of the Metis in Manitoba.] During the 1890s and early 1900s, relatives of the first settlers and others from Russia joined them in Manitoba, or continued on westward to pioneer in the Northwest.
The areas reserved for bloc settlement by Mennonites in Manitoba were meanwhile filling up. Sons and daughters of the pioneer families, seeking to become farmers on their own, began to look westward. The leadership of the Manitoba communities negotiated with Ottawa---Saskatchewan did not become a province until 1905---to found new bloc settlements, first between the North and South Saskatchewan Rivers in 1895, and then in the Swift Current area in 1904. Smaller groups moved into southern Alberta and even into the interior of British Columbia.
The urgent need felt by the Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier to fill the “empty” prairies with European agriculturists led to a widespread policy of block settlement. This allowed pioneers to help each other get started on their farms. It created some continuity with life in the old country and made it easier to establish community structures, school and church. At the same time, it encouraged the perpetuation of the language and culture of the immigrant community.
As more and more of these immigrant communities began to dot the prairies, older Canadians from the east increased their efforts to “Canadianize” them. Some viewed with alarm the fact that as few as a third of them were of British extraction. Protestant missionaries were concerned to Christianize “sectarians,” like Mennonites and Doukhobors, as well as Orthodox and Catholic groups form Eastern Europe. In D’Alton McCarthy’s words, the goal was “to make the people Manitobans and Canadians, not French or Mennonite, nor Poles or Polish Jews.”
In Manitoba, Ontario anglophone pressure led to the abolition of French as an official language in government and schools in 1890. A six-year legal and political battle resulted in the famous Laurier-Greenway compromise, allowing Manitoba schools to be bilingual. Where at least ten children in a rural district spoke a language other than English as their mother tongue, school could be conducted in that language alongside of English.
The passions of World War I disrupted this gradual process of assimilation. The Mennonites had been assured at the time of their immigration that Canada’s laws provided for exemptions from military service for pacifist groups like Quaker, Dunkards and themselves. However, as the war dragged on, they faced increasing pressure to participate in purchasing Victory Bonds and making special donations to the Red Cross. Their German language newspapers were suspended from publication. The bilingual provision the School Act was abolished in 1916. And finally, as the war ended, their church-run schools were forcibly replaced with government-regulated public schools flying the Union Jack.
For many of the Mennonites, these developments had too many parallels with their experience in Russia fifty years earlier. They feared for the future and began to search for alternative places to settle. The Quebec government was sympathetic, but agricultural land there was scarce. The southern states were inviting but could not promise exemption from military service. In the end it was Mexico and Paraguay that offered the right terms.
The governments of both countries assured Mennonites of the right to their own schools, the free exercise of the faith, and exemption from military service. Large blocks of land could be purchased fairly cheaply from huge ranches. Agricultural conditions were not ideal, but appeared manageable.
In 1922 the first trainload of emigrants left for Mexico from the station in Altona. The move to Paraguay was delayed until 1926. By 1927, almost 8,000 Mennonites had left Canada for Latin America, almost 5,000 of them from Manitoba. They went disappointed, but not bitter. Many retained their Canadian citizenship and registered their children with the Canadian government.
In Russia, World War I brought other consequences for the Mennonites who had remained there. The Communist revolutions of 1917 and the overthrow of the Imperial government brought about enormous upheavals throughout the realm. Civil war, anarchist bandits, typhoid epidemic, crop failure might have been enough to drive them from their adopted Russian homeland. When economic, social, cultural and religious oppression were added, many decided to leave.
Ironically then, just as some 8,000 were in process of leaving the country, a new wave of Mennonite immigrants from the Soviet Union began arriving in 1923. Equally ironical: in 1919 the Canadian government, under tremendous public pressure, issued an order-in-council identifying Mennonites as “Undesirables because, owing to their peculiar customs, habits, modes of living and methods of holding property, they are unlikely to become readily assimilated or to assume the duties and responsibilities of Canadian citizenship within a reasonable time.” By the time the first refugees from the USSR began arriving four years later, there was widespread support for them and they were seen once again as a “desirable class of settlers.”
Obviously, the departure of 8,000 of the most uncompromising settlers and the arrival of 20,000 new immigrants, who saw Canada as a haven of freedom from atheistic communism, greatly altered the character of the Canadian Mennonite community. However, the severity of the great economic depression of the 1930s and the renewed anti-German and anti-pacifist attitudes in the Canadian public, slowed the process of assimilation. Among some, indeed, the threat to faith and future was severe enough that a second wave of emigration to Latin America followed in the late 1940s. Again, there was countervailing immigration of new refugees from the USSR. The numbers involved in both of these movements were much smaller than they had been in the 1920s.
Beginning with the 1950s, Canada has experienced a small but steady trickle of reverse immigration from Mexico and Paraguay. Some of these “returning” Mennonites have joined the labour force in Winnipeg and in southern Manitoba towns. Others have resettled in the very villages, which their grandparents vacated in the 1920s.
( Metis are descendants of marriages between French fur traders and indigenous spouses. In 1870 Riel formed a provisional government in Manitoba after the end of the Hudson Bay Company’s charter. The Canadian parliament accepted his proposal to create a new, self-governing province. This was in contrast to the rest of the Canadian Northwest Territory that was governed by an appointed governor.
This article was first published in a commemorative special insert in the Winnipeg Free Press, July 24, 1999, and was prepared by the Steinbach Hanover Historical Society and the Mannitoba Mennonite Historical Society. Reprinted with permission.Adolf Ens is a professor of history and theology at Canadian Mennonite Bible College.
Mennonite Historical Bulletin, July 2000