Walking the Neighborhood

Street in Kyiv in honor of Kyivan Rus' Sovereign,
King and Saint Volodymyr.
amk2013

A couple of weeks ago or more I set out on a Black Sea Cruise. What drew me here? Am I on vacation to rest, am I tracing my ancestral roots, or is my inquiring mind thirsting for adventure?  I think it is more complicated than that.  Ancestral roots are one thing, but there is a context for my ancestors life choices, for leaving these lands and emigrating to Canada.  How better to understand at least some of that than to walk in their neighborhood.

The trip started in Constantinople, toured the Rock Church monastery in Sumela, visited Trabzon (the trading port through which many people from the now Ukrainian lands entered Turkey many centuries ago), Batumi Georgia, Feodosia, Sevastopol, Yalta, Balaklava, Odessa, Nessebur Bulgaria, Kyiv, Lviv, Sokal, Kaniv, and more.  History oozes out of every nook and cranny here.  Centuries old buildings, old stone babas, fortresses in ruins, castles and palaces, churches in every condition, those almost destroyed all the way through to beautifully new-built marble temples, and roads that have served the common folk for centuries. Rubbernecking like a tourist I have stood slack jawed, stunned and in awe of the swath of physical artifacts from this civilization, from the people in my ancestry.  Filled to the brim with thoughts bubbling and swirling, I am finding it hard to trim back my writing to a few paragraphs.

I may have initially thought the term "native/foreigner" was appropriate, but I have been a tourist, plain and simple.  Walking through museums, touring the sites, hearing lectures and listening to tour guide interpretations is an opportunity for serious learning. Nothing passive about it.  Watch an experienced traveler and you will see how they assume the "stance", ears perky, eyes wide and observant, and a mind swirling with connections. Notebook in one hand, camera in the other, crazy sunhat, water bottle, and sore feet are just the start. Soaking it all in means active processing.  One net of understanding laid upon another web, upon another grid, upon another......and the moment these nets cross an exhilarating jolt of recognition runs through the body.

The exponents in the display case could have been part of my life, these things could be part of my family's lifestyle, these could be the tools, the weapons, the products, the hopes, dreams and aspirations of my near and far ancestors.  Finding a quiet spot to tend for one's life, to live in peace and comfort, to provide for family has been the most important thing a person could do.  This could be my life, but for the adventurous streak in my ancestors.  The jobs,  groceries, children, homes, and survival were all part of living here.  It all speaks of industrious, resilient, ambitious people wanting to thrive, spending a lifetime in the pursuit.  But the winds here are powerful, so swaying and bending is part of living here.

Nobody here is passive, even though it may look like it on the surface. Paraphrasing an poster hanging in the Balaklava Museum, "don't say everything you know, nor know enough to say".  Tour guides and lecturers continue to be constantly aware of their audience, remembering to stay "on the script", concerned for the security of their jobs. History is everywhere, and people sometimes choose not to see what is right in front of them, for a good reason.  I feel like a detective on the trail of a treasure, finding bits of it here and there, excited for the parts I understand and puzzled by much.  But I get the feeling that some people living here feel the exact same way.  For answers to some of the puzzles, a serious treasure hunt, they might enjoy a "stay-cation" excursion to the intriguing museums here, too.  For that matter, maybe the Ukrainian museums here in Canada and the US might be an interesting start!  Fascinating stuff.

Check The Ukrainian Museum of Canada for more http://www.umc.sk.ca/page/happening.

From the Black Sea

Since childhood I have felt of "two worlds".  Canadian born, with Canadian born grandparents, I nonetheless consider myself not only of Ukrainian heritage, but Ukrainian.  I know that seems  ridiculous, but like many western Canadians of Ukrainian heritage the idea of becoming "only" Canadian, really offends my sense of ancestry, heritage and quite frankly, family.

Economic opportunity and a life of possibilities drew me great grandparents to Canada.  Though not necessarily impoverished at home, they worried incessantly about their children's children and how life would unfold for them.  So they assertively and adventurously set out for a life of delayed personal gratification, temporary self sacrifice and cultural impoverishment for the comforts of home, un order to secure better economic opportunities for their progeny.  They endured a life of communal melancholy for their ancestral home -ways, while simultaneously endlessly optimistic and high spirited for the limitless opportunities Canada offered them.  Their material gains nonetheless left space for a recognition that their children would be impoverished without the language, traditions and cultural artifacts of a thousands year old homeland.  I was fortunate to have had an enriched experience with all the trappings of an arts filled Ukrainian-Canadian lifestyle.

I have led the life of an "in-between-er", "bi-or-multi-cultural" through and through.  Over a century Canadian, I have a romanticized vision of the ancestral home life, and often long for things I have never known personally but vicariously.  

So I am on a voyage to the Black Sea to explore this interesting place I find in my head, the place where I am a native-foreigner, not a native born in Ukraine Ukrainian, yet not necessarily a foreigner because the language and culture is familiar.  Interesting melancholia/euphoria of a native/foreigner.  More to come.   

Is there Ukrainian DNA?

While I have never been there, my mother's ancestral family in Western Ukraine originates in a tiny area - with a name that implies it was "behind the woods",  surrounded by other equally tiny settlements.  The location, the diminutive names, the "off the beaten track" route, and feeling of primitive times makes me wonder how far back the family has lived on the same territory.  What is the DNA of the soil and could there be ancestral links back thousands of years?

Intriguing opportunities now exist for technology to breakthrough the code of mitochondrial DNA and establish links through hundreds of generations, perhaps thousands of years.  Wonderful, dreamy, fairy-tale thoughts perhaps, but wouldn't it be amazing to step back into time and discover your ancestral great-great-great-great-great Baba? What would she be like, and would she recognize you?

Recognizing my weird penchant for family things,  dreamy fantasy about historical lineage questions, my family purchased a kit from National Geographic which proposes to be a start in discovering my deep ancestry.  The purpose of this Genographic Project www.genographic.com is to chart the early stages of human history by comparing the DNA from world populations that have been genetically, and geographically stable for hundreds or thousands of years.  I may discover what different geographic regions around the world my ancestors migrated through.  I may also learn about my relationship to different human populations around the world and if there are Neanderthals or Denisovans in my ancestry.  Although I have no control over the project direction, I am excited to play an active role in this project, through my DNA!  I am excited to discover what the genetic markers might show about my ancestral lineage, before my great-grandparents migrated to the western world.

It would be exciting if such a project could take flight among the Ukrainian diaspora - wouldn't it be interesting to know how many of us are in fact family, maybe even close family - even though we may live on different continents?  If you have been paying attention to First Nations issues in Canada, a similar process is helping their community discover special pockets of deep ancestry.  It is their story.  It is our story.  It is the human story - how cool is that!

http://www.canada.com/technology/Breakthrough+study+links+woman+year+grandmother/8622672/story.html

Living Culture - Ukrainian Style

Learning the language and culture of your ancestral heritage is a precious gift to open! Canada provides top notch public school education, and fabulous Ukrainian Bilingual Programs in many of the large cities, places like Edmonton, Vegreville, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Dauphin and Toronto. The students who are fortunate enough to participate often become polyglots - fluent in many languages - and not only in the languages of their familial ancestry. Elsewhere things are perhaps a bit more complicated.

Fortunately for "elsewhere", there are great opportunities opening up for summer studies in Ukraine. Take for example this L'viv Summer Course offered by the University of Alberta. They are announcing the twelfth annual travel study course hosted by the University of Alberta's Ukrainian Language and Literature Program  in L'viv, Ukraine to take place from May 17th to June 14, 2013.

Ukrainian Through Its Living Culture is an opportunity to explore the culture and local flavour of the Ukrainian world, while practicing your language skills in a living experience. If you are interested in what could be the most memorable experience of your life, you will find L'viv Ukraine is a beautiful city. The program itself is full of educational value, not only the academic kind, but learning from an immersion in the culture and daily life of this vibrant Western Ukrainian city.

A recent CNN article calls L'viv "Little Paris of Ukraine." That sounds like high praise to me, so it's a wonder that so many waves of Ukrainian immigration to Canada eminated from L'viv and area - there clearly must be layers of the story we don't necessarily know about in the western world.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/12/travel/lviv-ukraine-culture-capital/index.html

To make things even more interesting, I have discovered that there is financial support for potential candidates of this program too. Makes it a very worthwhile little detour from the daily grind, eh!

For more information, see the course site at

http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/ukraina/study_in_ukraine/ukrainian_through_its_liv/

or contact the instructors yourself at

Dr. Alla Nedashkivska, Associate Professor
Undergraduate Academic Advisor: Ukrainian
Chair, MLCS Curriculum Committee

Modern Languages and Cultural Studies
University of Alberta, 200 Arts Building
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E6
TEL [general office] (780) 492-4926
FAX 492-9106

Puschenia Fall 2012

Puschenia is a pre-lenten celebration (in anticipation of the lenten periods before Christmas and Easter).  Puschenia is a party!

In Canada it involves a supper and dance, a last opportunity to indulge before the 40 day fasting and prayerful preparation for the Feast. Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox Lent encompasses the 40 days of preparation for Christmas. Those who celebrate Christmas according to the Gregorian calendar on December 25th, will have Puschenia by the 15th of November. Those who celebrate Christmas by the Julian calendar, on January 7th, will have Puschenia no later than November 28th.

Ukrainian Christmas traditions are really an accumulation of hopes, dreams and prayers, all transmitted in symbolic form to the present. The ancestral agrarian relationship with nature, the physical reminders of the cycles of life, and the seasons of living are evident in almost all the Ukrainian Christmas traditions we know today.

Ukraine was welcomed into the kingdoms of the Christian world in 988 AD, and the people whose pagan practices and traditions filled every breathing moment,  increasingly came to understand their world through a Christian lens. Already understanding the multi-layered nature of life, ancestral Ukrainians were simply sophisticated enough to see how the culture they were already living, had prepared the way for the Christian story - an evolution of values, beliefs and credos.  Their relationship with nature, expressions of life, cycles, seeding of good will,  had already instilled in them a bone-deep appreciation for deferred gratification.  With the Christian message of the "world to come", Ukrainians, a patient people, prepared for the "Good News" - for the joyous Feast of the  Birth of Christ - Christmas!

Hope Springs Eternal





My embroidery

Our daughter just moved away from the comforts of our home in Calgary, and into a new life far away from the embrace of the familiar - her community, friends and family. As parents, we know the human journey involves change, and her place isn't really that far from home. But if you look at it as another emigration from the "homeland" it takes on a hugely different significance.

The ancestral homeland of Ukraine sits at the crossroads of many important travel, economic and political influences.  It has been so, since forever, it seems.  So, with international opportunities beaconing from every corner of the globe, Ukrainians, like every other people, have chased, emigrated, resettled, re-acclimatized, and re-assessed their "cultural inheritance".  I mean that quite broadly, though.  " Pobutove zhittya" is probably a better descriptor than "culture", but even that needs explaining.

In this particular context I am defining culture as "everything people can pass on to ensure their progeny thrive in the future".  So when helping pack some of her things, we had to anticipate her needs, in the short term, and perhaps longer.  Then to look at all of our collected stuff, and consider what would be hers to inherit. Besides the coffee maker and towels, what could we give her to sustain her, comfort her, and prepare her for life - for it happens without our invitation.  Change happens, but somebody recently told me, it is the small stuff that reveals what a person is made of.  If so, what truly authentic messages will her "stuff" reveal about her ancestral inheritance?  About us, her parents, grandparents, great grandparents?

I was speaking with a cousin in Winnipeg, and she suggested that every child of hers would have a newly embroidered pillow, for the living room sofa.  Taking a traditional pattern, going monochromatic with the color scheme, graphic and modernly finished.......

One of her grandparents gave her a painting referring to home-ie. Ukraine. A montage of events around church, the sights, smells, and spirituality a thousand years or two in the making.  Memories of blessing baskets, eating kutia, that kind of thing.

Another family member wanted to send jars of borsch.  Food, they say, is the most tenacious of the cultural elements, because it hangs around in the memories of home, comfort and love.  Actually, my daughter makes better varenyky than I do, but nobody makes better jam than baba.

And, knowing how much fun it can be to move big bulky stuff, I sent pysanky which can sit in a bowl on the counter to remind her of the many hours we sat together dreaming of what the future would bring. The "masterpiece in the hand", the "ikon of the universe" may prove to be a conversation piece, perhaps someday someone will ask what the whirls, crosses, circles, deer, wheat, and flowers signify?

What does a family give their child who is leaving, not just an airplane trip away, but a world away, like my great grandparents did over a century ago?  What "stuff" sustained them to the degree that many generations later, we still identify with their journey? Many Ukrainian immigrations ago it was said that a person could survive with two books in hand, the Bible and Taras Shevchenko's Kobzar!   How about your family and the travails that have brought them to their Ukrainian Calgary adventure?  What really important message is hidden in the gifts you will leave in your packing trunk?

What do you do?

Whether you are Ukrainian from over there, or a long time North American of Ukrainian ancestry, or somehow attached to the entire Ukrainian thing, this is the place for you.

So how do you keep a touch of that ethnic thing while living in North America (or wherever you may be?).  Besides the big things like language, culture, pyrogies or cabbage rolls or other food, clothing, songs, dance, embroidery, weaving, ceramics, politics, economics, agrarian practices, spirituality, folk art, sculpture, tragedies, wars, Chernobyl, regional issues, braids, .....well,   you get it, there must be some small, less exhausting stuff, so what do you do?

Symbols mean a lot to me, so I have a sunflower plate on my coffee table - it's a start.