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Subject: [DOUKHOBOR] Local history finally getting its due
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 02:16:05 -0000

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Author: Jon_Kalmakoff
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Local history finally getting its due

Bronwyn Eyre, The StarPhoenix

Published: Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Prairie writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner once wrote, "The assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places."

It's fitting, then, for Stegner -- who wrote so movingly about pioneer experiences in the province and who documented the First Nations' past around Cypress Hills -- that banners on Eastend's Main Street now proclaim the town "Home of Wallace Stegner." Signs point the way to the house (now a writers' retreat) where he lived from 1917 to 1921.

Perhaps a society comes of age when it begins to acknowledge the value of its past. Like many North American cities, Saskatoon once tore down historic buildings, including the Capitol and Victory theatres and the King Edward School. But these days, we're more apt to be renovating and restoring them. Finally, "history" applies to us, too.

Since 1996, Architectural Heritage Awards have recognized 94 restoration projects in Saskatchewan. In Saskatoon, these include -- most recently -- the T. Eaton Warehouse condominium and the F.W. Woolworth Building.

Across the province this year, meanwhile, Heritage Awards have honoured projects that include the 1912 Shiloh settlement church north of Maidstone -- part of Saskatchewan's only black pioneer settlement -- and a restored prayer home in Verigin.

The Verigin area, near my mother's home town of Pelly, is scattered with Doukhobor communities Peter Verigin founded around 1900 on Leo Tolstoy's principles of communal pacifism. These villages had been reduced to a few crumbling prayer homes until historical societies got involved.

The Pelly region is also experiencing something of a historical renaissance. Pelly -- once considered a possible site for the provincial capital before the railway was built farther south -- is located near the old Hudson's Bay Co. post of Fort Pelly on the Assiniboine River and the North West Mounted Police headquarters at Fort Livingston on the Swan.

When I visited these sites as a child, they were overgrown with weeds and bereft of historical markings. But in recent years, Fort Pelly has undergone archeological digging and the outlines of the main buildings have now been marked. A large highway sign also indicates the Fort Livingston site -- and there's talk it will be completely rebuilt.

Our agricultural past is also being highlighted. The Motherwell Homestead, near Indian Head, for example, features prominently in Saskatchewan tourist brochures these days. Innovative farmer William Motherwell was the province's first minister of agriculture and a founder of the college of agriculture. His fieldstone house -- modelled after an idealized 19th century Ontario farmstead, complete with servants' quarters, flower garden and tennis lawn -- reflected Motherwell's position as a "man of substance."

Closer to Saskatoon, public tours to the once abandoned Seager Wheeler farm (where Wheeler experimented with varieties of hard spring wheat in the early 1900s) have been offered since 1996. It's hard to imagine, now, how vital it once was for farmers to develop varieties of grain that grew in our short growing season, and how profoundly Prairie history was altered by such research.

Nor have members of the arts community been left out of Saskatchewan's cultural revival. This past summer, for example, Aden Bowman's Castle Theatre was renamed the Robert Hinitt Castle Theatre after the beloved teacher and proponent of Saskatoon's drama scene.

Hinitt, who was present at the ceremony, has been an inspiration to countless students, including Joni Mitchell. His former house on Wiggins Avenue, decorated each Christmas along elaborate literary or fairy tale themes, delighted generations of Saskatoon families. And the plays he directed for Gateway and for Saskatoon Players, with their beautiful staging and high attention to historical detail, taught our city the magic of theatre.

When it comes to our history, cultural or otherwise, it shouldn't be only in the world's great cities that buildings and boulevards commemorate significant figures. After all, we have plenty of our own heroes and stories. And who we are now is based largely on who we once were.

The Gandhi statue on 21st Street, for example, is well and good. But the statue of John Lake and Chief Whitecap, at the foot of the Traffic Bridge, is more like it. How long until the pioneers get a proper statue, too?

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