PROOF OF THE SHAME
Documentary fights to have audiences recall Ukrainian-Canadian internment
When Ryan Boyko was in high school, he saw a documentary about the Ukrainian-Canadian internment during the First World War. Boyko, a descendant of Ukrainians, was curious to find out more so he asked his teacher.
“And he said, ‘you mean the Japanese internment during the Second World War? And I said, ‘no, I mean the Ukrainian internment during the First World War,’ ” Boyko says. “He said, ‘that never happened.’ ”
The internment, under the 1914 War Measures Act, involved more than 8,500 people, many ethnic Ukrainian immigrants. They were deemed enemy aliens because they were born in Austria-Hungary, which was at war with Canada, and were interned from 1914 to 1920 at 24 camps across the country, including in Alberta at Cave & Basin at Banff, Lethbridge, Jasper and Munson. The men — although there were camps in B.C. and Quebec that interned women and children — were subjected to harsh conditions and hard labour, including building roads and clearing forest in Banff and Jasper national parks. It left a terrible legacy of fear and distrust, further amplified by the fact the Canadian government destroyed records of the internment in 1954.
Boyko, initially an actor by trade, returned to the subject matter first as a one-man play. He realized the format couldn’t tackle a subject matter so vast and he shelved it until he received funding first for a series, The Camps, which visited former camp locations across the country, and then a documentary, That Never Happened: Canada’s First National Internment Operations, which is screening in Calgary on Oct. 23.
The doc’s title speaks to the denial of the subject matter faced not only by Boyko, but everyone else who has researched it. “It’d be everybody from community leaders to government officials saying ‘That thing never happened. This is Canada. It never happened here,’ ” he says.
The documentary features interviews with descendants of survivors — the last known internee died in 2008 — as well as with former Conservative MP Inky Mark, whose private member’s bill in 2005 led to the establishment of the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund, which funded the documentary. The powerful and emotional stories in the film include that of Andrea Malysh, a program manager with the Internment Recognition Fund who went to high school on the site of an internment camp.
“And she had no idea her family was directly affected until she had already been working for the fund for four or five years,” Boyko says. “That’s just a wow moment.”
The film has made the rounds of festivals across the country, where at “almost every screening ” people come up to Boyko saying “this must have been what happened to my grandfather,” he says, “or this must’ve been what happened to my great grandfather or all those stories I heard growing up finally make sense when I see this film.”
It has also made waves abroad; it recently screened at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. “It was a pretty incredible experience going into the United
Nations,” says Boyko. After the screening, Boyko, who directed the doc, and producer Diana Cofini answered questions for the assembled delegates — standard fare for the film circuit. “For us, it wasn’t something that was shocking that there were questions and answers and that we’d have a big talkback. After it was done, we were told that actually, it’s very rare for the United Nations to have people asking questions after a film is done,” he says. “It was cool to have that response because these are global ambassadors, global leaders to the United Nations and all of them were (asking) how can we get this film in our country.”
At home, the Canadian government has acknowledged the internment happened but has never formally apologized for its role. “I don’t think anyone’s ever asked for a formal apology other than the individual who was in the film, and we intentionally left that there. If somebody ever wants to make a formal apology, people will be happy about that,” he says.
“Is the acknowledgment and recognition and further education more important than an apology?” he wonders. “Ultimately that was the answer, the conclusion that everyone came to: we can fight for an apology, but what happens the day after the apology? They wanted to fight for memory. They wanted to fight for this going into the curriculum in every province in Canada. They wanted to fight so that no teacher could ever say to a student again that this never happened.”
This film is just one step in that process, addressing an ethos that is found in the film’s final still image: the famous quote from George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
“I could make a 10-minute film of all of the interview subjects, those who made it into the film and those who did not, saying some version of that quote,” he says. He decided to use the original quote itself rather than the interview subjects’ interpretations.
“I think it’s poignant that not only is the quote 110 years at this point, but it’s very important that that quote existed years before the internment operations started," he continues. “Those leaders, those people who made the decisions to do what they did, could very easily have been aware of that quote of the time. Had anyone had the wherewithal ... to acknowledge that and look around, maybe these internment operations would’ve never happened. Of course, had the wherewithal happened before the Second World War, the second national internment operations wouldn’t have happened. It’s a poetic justice argument, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t ever be true.”