It is 1892 and the couple, recent immigrants, have just begun to
clear their land. They have no money, so they live in a small,
sod-roofed, earthen hut (burdei) they built themselves. It was
supposed to be temporary, but they'll have to spend another long,
cold winter in their crowded, dirt-floor home.
Their potato crop was poor last summer, so the family ate the
insides only and saved the skins (with eyes) to plant this year.
Anna is careful to save the best of her other vegetables for seed,
because her garden is critical to their survival.
Life is very difficult. There are no neighbours, no one to help if
the children are sick, nothing but bone-aching work. The garden is
suffering from lack of rain, and Anna will have to haul water from
the creek to save the drooping cabbages. The weeds, however, are
doing fine. Anna goes to pull some beets to make borshch soup over
the firepit, and discovers that a deer has helped herself to beet
and carrot tops during the night. Yes, their life is hard; but the
couple has land and good soil rich with possibilities for the
future.
The promise of land was what brought settlers like Anna and
her husband from the Ukraine to east central Alberta. Near the end
of the 1800s, the government of Canada actively solicited farmers
from eastern Europe-who had the reputation of being hard workers
used to farming and a difficult life-to settle the west. They were
promised 160 acres if they paid $10 and cleared a certain amount of
land each year.
"To someone impoverished, doing subsistence farming in the Ukraine,
where farms were only two to five acres and heavily taxed, it was
totally amazing to get 160 acres," says Arnold Grandt, head of
community and corporate relations for the Ukrainian Cultural
Heritage Village.
In 1891, Iwan Pylypow and Wasyl Eleniak travelled from the Ukraine
to check out the land east of Edmonton. It reminded them of home;
the soil was good and there were lots of trees to build and heat a
home. When they returned to the Ukraine, they encouraged Ukrainians
from Galicia and Bukovyna to immigrate to Canada.
The first settlers were peasants, because Canada didn't allow
priests or teachers until World War I, says Lessia Petriv, senior
interpreter for the village. "They had no academic knowledge, but
they had wisdom and practice inherited from the past. And they
brought seeds in their pockets," she says.