Room for All of Us by Adrienne Clarkson

Author:Adrienne Clarkson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada

When I first went to Nelson, B.C., in the late 1970s, I heard that this little city in the Kootenays had the greatest concentration of American draft dodgers of any place in Canada. I kept this in mind, and when I came to write this book I decided to make the trip to Nelson. When I was there I visited the nearby Slocan Valley. Its beauty is extraordinary, and I’d never realized that all those draft dodgers I’d heard about had come to an area where the Doukhobors settled after being displaced from their initial settlement in Saskatchewan at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Like many people who came in large numbers to open up the West, the Doukhobors were initially welcomed. In their native Russia, their beliefs were contrary to that of the established religion, the Russian Orthodox Church, and they had known only persecution. Many had been exiled to Siberia. In fact, in 2003, when I was in Russia on my state visit as Governor-General to the circumpolar countries, I asked to go to a former gulag near Salekhard. It was something I wanted to see with my own eyes—the place, dreary, vast, hopeless, that conjures up Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich . I wanted to compare it to our North. Indeed, it was similar to the Northwest Territories—boreal forest, broken only by the wooden remains of bunkhouses. We were taken to a place that had housed not only exiles from the communist regime but also Doukhobors and other persecuted enemies of the czar. We were told that it was from that very camp within the Arctic Circle that the Doukhobors had come to Canada.

The story is not known to many Canadians, or many Russians either. Leo Tolstoy, the great novelist, had been developing his own form of mystical Christianity, which emphasized a personal relationship to God without the intervention of organized or state religion. When he heard about the Doukhobors, he was very sympathetic to them and their beliefs. The Doukhobors were pacifists and wanted to live off the land and share their goods communally. Tolstoy sympathized with their spiritual beliefs and followed their communities’ endeavours in Russia. They were always willing to work hard, and in fact that is one of the tenets of their faith: to work hard, to pray together, and to live a peaceful life. Tolstoy understood them. He knew about their persecution by czarist authorities and the imprisonment of their leadership in Siberia. Remarkably, he dedicated all the royalties of his last novel, Resurrection, to helping them emigrate to Canada to escape continued harassment.

Doukhobors refused to swear allegiance to any state authority. When 7,500 of them came to Canada in 1899, a deal was made with the minister of the interior, Clifford Sifton, that would exempt them from military service and allow them to enjoy freedom of religion and hold their land in common in the same manner as the Mennonites had done in coming to Canada several decades before.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.