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Seeds in Their Pockets-page 2

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.

BeetsLife 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.
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Reprinted with the permission of  Marilynn McAra and Alberta Views (March/April 2002): 50-56.
 
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