In any case the Nykiforuks’ descendants evolved from “garlic eaters” and “Bohunks” into a large Canadian clan of wheat farmers, dentists, teachers, academics, stock brokers, artists, business owners, politicians and journalists. I only know that he and Maria fed half-starved Cree travellers with baked bread from a clay oven. I do not know what my great grandfather would have thought about the colonization of Treaty 8 lands. In this strange new world, the immigrants bought land (a quarter section for $10), built sod huts and became part of a Canada’s colonial project to industrialize the great prairie with King Wheat. The ship disgorged Stefan and Maria in Halifax where they boarded another train to northern Saskatchewan. The crew fed them herring dispatched from tubs as they sailed 13 days across the Atlantic. There the SS Barcelona received 757 mostly Ukrainian peasants. So he and his wife, Maria, a herbalist and midwife, packed up six of their eight children and left their ancestral lands in western Ukraine near the town of Horodenka.įor the trek to Canada my ancestors anxiously boarded a train (they had never travelled on such an industrial thing) and rode it to the Polish capital of Kraków, then took a faster one to Hamburg, Germany. After completing three years of forced service in the cavalry, Stefan decided that he no longer wanted to be an instrument of an empire. In 1904, Stefan Nykiforuk, my great grandfather, fled an imperial project called the Austro-Hungarian Empire. “The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.” - Leo Tolstoy
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