Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity

Japanese, Ukrainians, and Scots, 1919-1971

Aya Fujiwara

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2012
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780887554292
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Ethnic elites, the influential business owners, teachers, and newspaper editors within distinct ethnic communities, play an important role as self-appointed mediators between their communities and "mainstream" societies. In Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity, Aya Fujiwara examines the roles of Japanese, Ukrainian, and Scottish elites during the transition of Canadian identity from Anglo-conformity to ethnic pluralism. By comparing the strategies and discourses used by each community, including rhetoric, myths, collective memories, and symbols, she reveals how prewar community leaders were driving forces in the development of multiculturalism policy. In doing so, she challenges the widely held notion that multiculturalism was a product of the 1960s formulated and promoted by "mainstream" Canadians and places the emergence of Canadian multiculturalism within a transnational context.

CHAPTER 1

Changing Ethnic Profiles: Scots, Ukrainians, and Japanese

Ethnic boundaries have always been dynamic and fluid and cannot be defined by pre-existing national, religious, and racial backgrounds. These factors, however, determined primarily how wider Canadian society perceived the nature of each ethnic group. They also affected its position in the country’s ethnoracial hierarchy, which favoured those of British origin. Ethnic leaders constantly sought to redefine the nature of their ethnic communities, both responding to political and economic conditions of the new land and negotiating old stereotypes imposed on them.

This chapter outlines the backgrounds of three ethnic elites, which shaped the wider society’s first impressions of them. It also focuses on change and continuity within Ukrainian, Japanese, and Scottish ethnic communities over approximately a century, investigating two simultaneous but contradictory forces: segregation and integration. In the first decades of the twentieth century, discrimination dominated public attitudes toward ethnic communities, which tended to distance themselves from the wider society. In the post-World War II period, prewar ethnic community boundaries collapsed or shifted considerably, leading ethnic elites to become integrated into mainstream politics. Undoubtedly, Scots created close-knit circles among themselves, yet their nation-wide “imagined” Scottish community was not as consistent and cohesive as those of Ukrainians and Japanese and often overlapped with that of Canada. Although in different ways and at different paces, both Ukrainian and Japanese imagined communities dramatically transformed their outlooks over the years, becoming increasingly open and minimizing the distance from mainstream society.

The Era of Segregation and Alienation

The great surge of immigration to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was crucial to ethnic community building. While pre-existing national, racial, and religious biases determined the hierarchy of ethnic groups, other factors, such as the scale of immigration and the place and size of settlement, reinforced it. These biases and factors not only influenced the agenda of ethnic elites in Canada but also had a persistent impact on negotiations between ethnic groups and mainstream society.

The first and most significant factor, placing Scots in a different cultural location than Ukrainians and Japanese, was racism. The old but powerful concept that categorized humans by skin colour and physical features into “Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negroid” believed in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and other northern European races.1 Racism emerged as a scientific doctrine mainly from the increasing contact between Europeans and others as a result of colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it dominated public discourses in North America into the early twentieth century.2 Mainstream Canadian politicians, philosophers, and commentators believed that people’s racial or physical characteristics determined their group nature in other respects. They thought that Canada should remain an Anglo-Celtic or at least a “white” nation because the race represented both physical and moral strengths. James S. Woodsworth’s 1909 immigration study, for example, classified immigrants into ethnoracial categories and perceived both Ukrainians and Japanese as inferior to Brits. Still, there was a clear difference in his attitudes toward the two groups. For example, he portrayed Galicians (Ukrainians) as “quarrelsome and dangerous” but also “patient,” “industrious,” and “eager to become Canadianized.”3 Japanese and other Asians, in contrast, tended to maintain “their own virtues and vices” and “constitute an entirely distinct class or caste,” and they could not “be assimilated.”4

A second crucial factor was the particular roles that the homelands of the three groups played on the world stage, for they predetermined how their people would be perceived in Canada. Politically united with England since 1707, Scotland wielded considerable influence in the world. Not only did Scots expand geographically around the globe as part of the British Empire, but they also contributed fundamentally to modern science and technology and to the British-based legal, political, and educational systems like those in Canada. As Arthur Herman has shown, Scotland thus became a symbol of modernity and hegemony for Scottish immigrants overseas.5 Neither Ukraine nor Japan could make such a claim on behalf of Western civilization. The contemporary territory of Ukraine, which had known periods of statehood in medieval Kievan Rus’ and under the Cossacks, was divided among neighbouring powers and subject to foreign rule.6 The provinces of Galicia and Bukovina in Western Ukraine, where most Ukrainians in Canada originated, were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then interwar Poland and Romania, and then the Soviet Union, except for the short period between 1917 and 1920. Statelessness and national oppression disadvantaged both Ukrainian immigrants and their descendants as a sign of cultural and political weakness and galvanized them to help the homeland. Statelessness also led to confusion, so that when Ukrainians first came to Canada they were identified by various names as Austrians, Ruthenians, Galicians, and Bukovinians. In contrast, Japan had existed as an isolated realm since ancient times and developed as a strong modern nation-state after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. But in light of its seclusion from the world for a long time and localism in the Far East, Japan was regarded in Europe and North America as backward economically, politically, and culturally. Its attempt at colonial expansion was viewed as neither equally influential nor benevolent as the British Empire. Ukrainians and Japanese, then, were placed below Scots in the world’s hierarchy of power, even before they immigrated to Canada.

A third important factor was the sheer scale and timing of Scottish immigration—both much larger and earlier than Ukrainian and Japanese immigrations. Scots not only constituted a dominant group numerically in Canada but also were initial builders of the new colony following the British conquest of New France. For them, British North America was a logical place for emigration and an extension of their homeland. During the eighteenth century, Scots in Canada included often transient fur traders, soldiers, merchants, labourers, and adventurers as well as more permanent settlers of Loyalist stock. Large-scale immigration and settlement occurred after 1815, nearly a century before Ukrainians and Japanese began arriving in Canada en masse, thereby consolidating the Scottish imprint on British North America. Between 1815 and 1870, approximately 170,000 Scots immigrated to Canada; another 326,000 arrived between 1870 and 1918.7 Although the reasons for this movement were often associated with economic conditions in Scotland, such as overpopulation and lack of land, they also represented imperial expansionism politically, culturally, and economically.

British Canada’s deeply rooted ethnoracial biases allowed more Ukrainians than Japanese to immigrate, thereby securing for the former greater numbers and political influence. Even though Ukrainians would later promote themselves as co-builders of western Canada, British immigrants had already established Canada’s political and cultural norms. Yet, as experienced and skilled farmers, Ukrainians were economically if not ethnically desirable and actively recruited to settle prairie homesteads after Clifford Sifton became minister of the interior in 1896. Approximately 170,000 Ukrainian peasants came to Canada between 1896 and 1914, attracted by 160 acres of “free land” in the west. Another 68,000 Ukrainians arrived in Canada between 1925 and 1930 under the Railways Agreement, most again destined for the rural Prairies.8 The experience of Japanese immigrants was different in that they were neither racially desirable nor needed from an economic standpoint. Some industries might have enjoyed cheap...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1
• CHAPTER 2
• CHAPTER 3
• CHAPTER 4
• CHAPTER 5
• CHAPTER 6
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography