Review - Frances Swyripa - Storied Landscapes

Frances Swyripa's Storied Landscapes: Ethno-Religious Identity and the Canadian Prairies (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2010), examines memory, meaning, and identity in a broad range of European immigrant groups. A series of connections frames the work, which link immigrant groups to other Canadian westerners, Canada as a whole, the mother country and the diaspora. At times these various "imagined communities" could be "overlapping....incompatible and competing." (8) For Swyripa, Ethno-religious identity is a major theme in Canadian regionalism which varies with each group's experience.  In tracing the history of heritage, Swyripa notes, "the landscapes are both physical places and places of the mind, the stories the multilayered, sometimes contested narratives and material legacies that immigrant settler peoples mobilized in shaping and claiming those places. "

      The attachment to the land and the manner in which it was ordered to gain meaning is an important theme in Storied Landscapes. Immigrant groups that arrived en masse are shown to often invoke the location of arrival as an important place. An interesting aspect of this relationship to the land is described in Ukrainian "cultural conditioning", which could affect selection of homesteads. Life on the steppe had taught that where there were trees there was fertile soil and firewood, yet in the prairie context this land demanded great labour to clear. Many homesteads were chosen in the infertile Interlake region of Manitoba. (43)

Sacred and secular symbols could be appropriated to bond ethnic groups. Numerous types of places served as artifacts which bound ethno-religious groups in a common identity. Communal pilgrimages to shrines could bolster faith, "but also reaffirmed the ethnic community in its primal connection to a specific place and its history." (66) Cemeteries also "helped create psychological and physical bonds to the new country". Founding fathers and arrival places were often a powerful secular symbol for those groups whose history featured a mass immigration.

Swyripa Lecturing at UofA. CIUS.

      Swyripa also examines the relationship between immigrant groups and other Canadian westerners. At times this is portrayed as a minority hoping to shape its own way of life within a society dominated by the majority. In other cases, the immigrant pioneer is integrated into the greater national narrative of western settlement. On the regional level, the prevalent use of the symbol of wheat and the grain elevator, (on tombstones, municipal logos, and public sculptures), linked the group to the specific lived experience of the prairie and "erased ethno-religious boundaries." (183) Wheat's history as a Christian symbol of "fruitfulness, the staff of life, or...the body of Christ", helped cross the divide between sacred and secular identity. Swyripa also notes conversely, the greater group can at times appropriate the symbols and myths of ethno-religious identity. Originally exclusive and Anglo-Canadian, by the 1930s, "the “old West” relished its diversity, proudly proclaiming cultural pluralism one of the defining features of the regional society." (22)

CPR Poster in Ukrainian, 1910-1930, GA.

      Swyripa treads wide expanses opening questions for others to explore. Canada's long-running discourse on peasants is one such theme.  Swyripa notes that Clifford Sifton's late nineteenth-century immigration policy recruited the eastern-European workers of the soil.  How was this notion related to earlier considerations of the Indian Department's Hayter Reed and the peasant farming model which brought severalty to the reserves in the late 1880s? How did later stories about European peasants in memory interact within the larger group's conception of the yeoman pioneer? The relationship between these prairie newcomers and the greater western region are addressed in brief, but a more in-depth consideration of how the experience of these newcomers interacted within western alienation, the rise of Social Credit and the C.C.F., and broader historical changes awaits another book. As a work in the booming field of historical memory which examines the similarities and differences of identity-creation across a range of ethno-religious groups, Swyripa's work is to be recommended.

Swyripa's Faculty Page at the University of Alberta

Swyripa's works at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies

Shawn Cafferky and Oral History

Shawn Cafferky.  FB photo.

Prior to the latest edition of Canadian Military History, I hadn't thought about Dr. Shawn Cafferky for a while.  I first received the news of his untimely death in 2008, through an email from the University of Victoria's Dr. David Zimmerman.  I had been Dr. Cafferky's student in his inspirational Oral History and Veterans class, and through this experience was inspired to pursue a Masters degree in Second World War military history.  There was something fascinating in the interviews in UVic's Special Collections on Second World War armoured operations.  Despite the inherent problems in the recollection of military memories, I was converted to a disciple of oral history.


It was hard not to get caught up in Cafferky's enthusiasm for his subject.  He had an easy-going manner which encouraged participation in seminar, in the hallways of the history department, or occasionally at the pub.  Cafferky's connections with the Vancouver Island branch of the Royal United Services Institute, allowed his students to have unprecedented access to retired members of the Canadian Forces.  In retrospect, it was incredible that Major-Generals were inviting mere undergraduates into their homes to conduct interviews on their military careers.


It was in Cafferky's course that I learned that doing history could be more than the time-honoured tradition of desk-bound academia.  Here was human history, with all its inherent problems of abrasive personality, selective memory, and interpreted experience.  Historians turn a skeptical eye towards the personal testimony of oral history, so often recorded long after the events in question.  For my own part, I consider oral history as another welcome source, to be scrutinized by the historian with due consideration for the nature of the oral medium.

Cafferky's article  "Battle Honours Won", published posthumously in the Summer 2010 edition of Canadian Military History, examines the British escort aircraft carrier HMS Nabob, which after the fall of 1943 was captained by Horatio Nelson Lay of the Royal Canadian Navy, and staffed by a mixture of Canadian and British Soldiers.

Culling of the Melfa

John Mahony VC

The Battle of the Melfa Crossing of 24 May 1944, was a hard-fought action of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division, during the exploitation of the 1 Canadian Infantry Division's rupture of the Hitler Line.  In this legendary river-crossing, the reconnaissance troop of the Lord Strathcona's Horse and a small group of infantry from the Westminster Motorized Regiment scraped out a small bridgehead and sustained several armoured counterattacks which failed to eject the force.  The most publicized hero of the battle, Major J.K. Mahony, was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery.

A lesser known member of this force, was the twenty-three year-old Private, John William Culling of Bluffton, Alberta, an infantryman of the Westminster Regiment.  Culling's actions on that day, single-handedly destroying a German Self-Propelled 88mm gun.  Culling's platoon had been the first across the Melfa.  Before they were done frantically digging their slit trenches, German tanks and self-propelled guns appeared and began opening fire.

L/Cpl J.A. Thrasher, Westminster Regiment and the Self-Propelled 88mm he knocked out with a PIAT, near Pontecorvo.

Culling slid into his thinly scraped slit-trench and awaited his fate.  Moments later a self-propelled 88mm gun rumbled next to the Private, and its commander appeared, attempting to assess the chaotic situation.  A proposed press release reported his subsequent actions:

"Culling grasped this heaven sent opportunity and his Bren gun.  First he wiped out the commander with the Bren then tossed a grenade into the open top of the vehicle, killing the driver.  Two more of the crew were shot with the Bren and the remainder called it a day and surrendered."

Melfa River Crossings Lawren Harris. CWM

Curiously, accounts gleaned from the Maple Leaf, Mark Zuehlke and Daniel Dancocks slightly alter the Culling story as recorded in the pre-press report for the unit war diary.  For Dancocks, Culling is from Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and never wields a Bren gun, but kills the crew commander with a grenade.  John Grodinksi in his essay in More Fighting For Canada has another variation of the circumstance adding that Culling tosses two grenades and kills the rest of the fleeing crew with his rifle.

A modern account in the Maple Leaf puts the story as such:

"The tank commander opens his hatch and starts to climb out, and Pte Culling throws a grenade, killing the officer and getting the attention of the gunner, who swivels the turret toward his slit trench. Pte Culling takes another grenade, pulls the pin and tosses it at the hatch, where it rolls around like a basketball on the hoop before dropping in."

Here we have a tank, not a self-propelled gun, not to mention the slightly different circumstance of Culling's feat.  One is left wondering, whether the war correspondent's initial account, or that gleaned from later personal testimony is legitimate.  Then again, perhaps such analysis is merely nitpicking.  Culling dispatched an armoured vehicle that day in a hard pressed situation, with a well-placed grenade. It is clear that he deserves the Military Medal that was awarded to him for the action.

5th Canadian Armoured Brigade War Diary. Appendix 5.  3 Jun 1944
Daniel Dancocks, The D-Day Dodgers, 268.
Maple Leaf War Time Story