About the Project

Introduction

Mass migration is now one of the defining issues of intercultural relations in the twenty-first century. While the relationship between migration and cultural change is more clearly understood in the contemporary world, our knowledge of the early history of mass migration and its consequences is far less developed. One of the early crucibles for ‘modern’ cultural diversity was the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century landscape of western Canada, where European migration precipitated the establishment of a new ethnic patchwork. What was the character of intercultural relations between these enclaves of settlement, and how did living in a new multicultural environment encourage the creation of new social and cultural realities? Previous researchers have attempted to answer these questions with top-down narratives of assimilation and growing Canadian nationalism or bottom-up arguments about the survival of migrant community identities. Neither is satisfactory in the light of more recent research, which emphasises the importance of context and the possibilities of entirely novel social categories. Moving beyond these older assumptions, this interdisciplinary project explores social and cultural variation through a comparative analysis of the material culture of historic farmsteads across a range of migrant landscapes. It will produce a fine-grained analysis of the variety of factors that served to recreate community social and cultural norms in different contexts, helping us to understand why migrant experiences were so different.

Background

Spurred by the promise of land, social enfranchisement, and economic opportunity, a tide of European chain migrants colonized the Prairies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Largely sweeping aside an older indigenous landscape, the incomers established a new cultural order. To facilitate a sense of common purpose and interdependence, the Canadian Department of the Interior favoured rapid assimilation into the dominant Anglo-Canadian culture. Conformity was encouraged in a number of ways, from promoting Anglophone and Protestant values in the government-controlled school system to discouraging the development of large homogenous ethnic communities. Moreover, conformity was also sought in the landscape itself, through the implementation of the ‘Township and Range System’, which ensured a relatively consistent pattern of settlement on 160 acre ‘sections’. By the mid twentieth century an uninterrupted checkerboard of Canadian farmsteads spread from southern Manitoba to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.Despite the pressures to conform, many parts of the prairies saw the formation of ethnic ‘block settlements’, particularly among non-English speaking migrants, including Ukrainians, Poles, Mennonnites and many others, who left persistent cultural imprints upon the prairie landscape. In seeking to deconstruct blander nationalist discourses of Canadian nation-building, questions pertaining to the identities of the emigrants and the communities into which the migrants settled have become an important part of the history of colonization, and have focused in particular on how objects and built environments expressed cultural values thought to be significant to the coherency of certain ethnic groups. In certain contexts, researchers have suggested that certain cultural patterns could be remarkably resistant to assimilation, as demonstrated in vernacular architecture or in the organization of domestic space. Whether an immigrant group achieved long-term stability or suffered social disintegration, it has been suggested, seems to depend on the strength of its religious and cultural institutions.

Project Aims and Questions

Discussions of assimilation versus cultural resistance have been with us for some time. However, given the incredible complexity of the settlement landscape, which included significant variability in the success of assimilationist measures, the opportunities of migrant communities, and processes of social and cultural interactions between newcomers, we should not assume straightforward outcomes. Moving beyond the more traditional approaches described above, the programme of research focuses on migrant community interactions and interconnections, which characterized life on the Canadian prairies between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It begins with the working hypothesis that intercultural relations were creative of altogether more multifaceted consequences, including entirely novel ways of living, working and thinking. Drawing on an interdisciplinary perspective, this three-year study will examine changing material culture traditions across a range of migrant settlement landscapes. Ultimately the project seeks to understand the nature and uniqueness of local interactions and the consequences these exchanges had for social and cultural change.

Our principal questions are:

1. How did living next to neighbours, who were potentially cultural ‘others’, influence the reproduction of values systems and new communities of practice? 
2. How did this local phenomena vary across time and space 

And since the broader influences of capitalism and scientific ‘improvement’ are known to have shaped agrarian lifestyles in the Canadian west at this time, additional questions include:

1. How did ‘modernity’, in its various guises, feed back into and       help to rework local scale social and cultural entanglements
2. How are such interactions expressed through the landscapes, material culture and practices of place, which served to give the region its diverse character in the first place?