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A New Beginning...
by
Annie B. Barnes
The following
vignette offers a glimpse of the inner voices of Doukhobor women who until
now have not had a chance to reveal their societal worth as homemakers
and career people. Reproduced with permission from Annie B. Barnes, "Doukhobor
Women in the Twentieth Century" in Tarasoff, Koozma J. (compiler and editor). Spirit
Wrestlers Voices. Honouring Doukhobors on the Centenary of their migration
to Canada in 1899 (Ottawa: Legas, 1998).
The S.S.
Lake Huron steams towards Grosse Isle, the "Quarentine Island" in Quebec
on 21 June 1899. The girl's hands grip the ship's rail tightly. Twenty-seven
days earlier she left the port of Batum on the Black Sea. Her home in the
village of Terpeniye in Kars province is a world behind her. A strange land
lies ahead.
What
promise does it hold for this thirteen-year old Doukhobor girl? The immediate
future will mean an additional twenty-seven days in quarantine becaue of
a smallpox outbreak during the voyage. She looks for reassurance from her
mother beside her: are they really in Canada?
Doukhobor
Immigrant family, 1899
The
future will be living with a Mennonite family in Manitoba where her father
and older brothers find work. It will be some time before they can proceed
to the village of Nadezhda in the South Colony of the North-West Territories
(now the province of Saskatchewan). While living with the Mennonites, Annie
will spend only one glorious day at school with her brothers. Despite her
tearful pleas to remain, despite the urging of her Mennonite teacher, she
will stay at home. She is needed to gather wheat kernels in the field and
to knit woolen stockings for her father and brothers for the winter. Her
father says girls do not need to go to school. The future holds no opportunity
to learn to read or write.
The
future will be marraige at eighteen years of age, formalized only by receiving
the blessing of both sets of parents. She will give birth to five children
at home and strive to allow each one of them some formal education. There
will be many years of hard work on the farm, the death of a son and a husband
within a four-year period, and finally a peaceful ending to her life on
17 April 1964.
The
girl at the ship's rail was Annie (Hlookoff) Zarchikoff.
The Hlookoffs and their six children were on the last of the four ships
that brought approximately 7,500 Doukhobors to Canada, of which only a
fifth were male. Over 12,000 remained in Tsarist Russia.
In
1990 Annie's great-great-granddaughter, Hannah Barnes, was born in a modern
hospital in Edmonton, Alberta. Vaccination programmes had eliminated the
scourge of smallpox. She lives with her parents and brother in a condominium
and has a library of picture-books and videos. She attends school and ballet
classes and education is certain. She travels by car and jet airplane.
Doukhobor history is a pleasant folk-tale related by her Baba. Her future
seems secure. But her parents worry about the escalating violence in city
schools, the immorality and the growing crime element. They plan to eventually
flee the pressure and pollution of the big city. They, like the Hlookoffs
nearly a hundred years ago, want a better future for their children.
Every
Doukhobor woman today has an ancestor who felt the biting lead tip of the
Cossack whip and who had the courage to leave a homeland of persecution.
The ancestors believed that freedom from having to bear arms against a
fellow human being and right to worship in their own way would be worth
the unknown hardships they would have to endure.
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