Whose land was this? As truth and reconciliation have come to the fore of public discourse, it’s a question that has caused me some unease.

I’m a Mennonite by heritage and religion. I’ve spent most of my life on or near the “motherland” of Steinbach.

In that time, I’ve picked up on — shall we say — a certain whiff of Mennonite snobbery; a slight savour of self-righteousness born of piety mixed with prosperity. I’ve had that attitude myself, at times.

I am not the only one who has noticed this. Cornelius J. Dyck notes a “certain Mennonite hauteur and condescension” in the book An Introduction to Mennonite History.

In his case, it was an attitude toward Ukrainian neighbours when Mennonites lived in settlements in that country. The ethno-religious group moved into Ukraine and within a couple of generations had established thriving farms and businesses.

When Mennonites became concerned about threats to their religious and cultural freedom, groups emigrated to Canada. They settled on land the government offered them and, through hardship, became prosperous again.

It’s human nature to think this was due to the staunch Mennonite work ethic. To be sure, the Mennonite work ethic is real. I consider it one of my greatest strengths and most pernicious weakness.

Still, was that the only factor? Or did the Mennonites also succeed off the backs of others, for example by settling land they had no right to?

Bare and unsettled land?

Steinbach is an original Mennonite settlement on the East Reserve, a wedge-shaped tract of land in southeastern Manitoba bounded in the north by Niverville and Blumenort and in the south by a line about 20 miles from the U.S. border, as per the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

The reserve is inside the boundaries of Treaty 1, which was signed in August 1871, about three years before the Mennonites arrived.

In a nutshell, the treaty is an agreement between Canada and the Anishinabek and Maskêkowiyiniwak (Swampy Cree) nations. It set aside reserves of land for First Nations and ceded a swath of southeast and south-central Manitoba to Canada, said the Canadian Encyclopedia.

It’s not clear if the First Nations realized that Canada intended to kick them off the land and confine them to reserves.

Some Indigenous scholars suggest “it is unlikely the Indigenous participants understood the concept of ‘surrender,’ particularly when the Euro-Canadian negotiators repeatedly assured the Indigenous signatories that they would be able to continue using the natural resources on the surrendered tract,” the Canadian Encyclopedia said.

Prior to 1871, Manitoba joined Canada via the Manitoba Act. The then-rectangular province was formed around the Red River settlement of the Métis, a self-governing group descended from voyageurs and Indigenous women.

Métis communities like Lorette, St. Norbert and St. Vital and many others stretched along the banks of the Red, Assiniboine and Seine Rivers.

In The North-West is Our Mother, Jean Teillet writes that besides the two-mile settlement belt on either side of the rivers, the Métis had other lands they considered theirs via their laws and customs. These included woodlots, hay land, hunting and fishing camps, rendezvous sites and refuge points used to escape floods or fires.

Manitoba was formed only after conflict between Canada and the Métis, led by Louis Riel.

Canada to that point had been confined to the east but wanted to annex land to the west. It never crossed minds that the Métis Nation had already settled there, Teillet wrote.

The Manitoba Act of 1870 was a treaty of sorts. While it ended the armed conflict, anti-Métis sentiment was extremely strong among the Canadians. The period after the act was signed became known to the Métis as the “Reign of Terror.”

With the Manitoba Act, 1.4 million acres were set aside for the Métis and Canada expected them to relinquish claim to the rest.

In the view of Canadian authorities, lands the Mennonite settled were “absolutely bare, desolate, untenanted, the home of the wolf, the badger and the eagle,” said a quote from Governor General Dufferin in 1877, via Dyck’s writing.

However, Donovan Giesbrecht writes in Métis, Mennonites and the ‘Unsettled Prairie,’ 1874-1896 that 15 Métis families claimed to have lost land to the Mennonites and complained to the Canadian government in more than 30 letters and memorandums.

Giesbrecht notes the Mennonites seemed unaware of the problem. Historian Gerhard J. Ens wrote in a 2016 article that the Métis’ land disputes were with the federal government, not the Mennonites.

In my reading and discussion with Métis historians and brothers Daniel and William Benoit, I found only one reference to confrontation between the Mennonites and the Métis.

Dyck references a “Métis incident” when Mennonite representatives visited Manitoba to scout the land. The scouts “were set upon by an angry mob of Natives who rightly sensed that their future was at stake.” Soldiers broke up the confrontation.

He adds, “The incident was apparently considered to be the kind of problem pioneers ought to be prepared to expect. Violation of the rights of others… was not a central issue for them.”

The Mennonite scouts don’t appear to have approved of the Métis. One called them “lazy farmers” in his diary, Dyck wrote.

As I said, Mennonites can be snooty.

A favoured community

Like the Métis, the Mennonites were a collective with their own language, spiritual practices and governance structure. Unlike the Métis, the Mennonites were able to make agreements with the government that honoured that collective structure.

Wrote Teillet: “The Métis wanted their land in reserves. Except for the Métis, no one liked the idea of Métis land reserves. The very idea was said to be an ‘improvident’ use of land.”

Instead, each Métis citizen was entitled to a portion of land, which many weren’t able to actually claim.

Yet within a few years, the government granted the massive East Reserve to the Mennonites. Its objectives couldn’t have been merely about setting aside land for a separate group with its own culture. Both groups had that.

Likely, Teillet said, it was a “lethal combination” of racism and revenge for the recent Red River Resistance.

The Mennonites likely conformed, more or less, to the Canadian government’s vision of the ideal settler. They were seen “as desirable ‘respectable settlers,’ but were also distinctly not British,” wrote Shelisa Klassen in ”Working Like Men”: Newspaper Examinations of Gender, Respectability and Mennonite Immigration to Manitoba in the Late Nineteenth Century.

In 1876, the Manitoba Free Press said the Mennonites, who had significantly developed their land in two years, were “likely to prove amongst the most valuable class of our settlers,” quoted Klassen.

The Métis, with their long river lots and shared timber and hay lands, had been farming long before the Mennonites arrived, noted Joseph R. Wiebe in Posture, Privilege, and Place: Mennonite Settlers and Métis in Manitoba. Farming was a supplement to their bison economy.

Many used their Red River properties like wintering homes, with some families spending months or years away as hunters, traders and freighters. Métis law allowed for this lifestyle, wrote Teillet.

When the families returned, they’d make any needed repairs and move back in.

“Métis farming practices did not fit within the new system because they were based on traditional seasonal cycles,” Wiebe wrote. “The government responded by saying that if anyone didn’t use the land as intended — namely, individual homesteading — they couldn’t legally keep the land.”

Of course, the Mennonites weren’t individually homesteading either. They’d been given special dispensation to settle in their traditional village style. The Métis were not so lucky.

What to make of this

It could be argued that Mennonites didn’t technically steal land or settle stolen land. I guess that depends on interpretation. However, it seems clear that Mennonites were given a leg up over their Métis neighbours.

That’s unfortunate — not that the Mennonites were treated well, but that the Métis weren’t treated with the same respect.

The Bible says, “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgement.”

In my opinion, acknowledging the provenance of this land isn’t a cause for guilt. It’s a chance for sober evaluation of what has made us the people we are today and an opportunity to, where possible, make things right with our neighbours.

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The farmhouse, along the main entrance to Basswood, and just off the Yellowhead Hwy., was a perfect spot for villagers to witness the destruction. In fact, we could have rented lawn chairs, peddled sodas, and sold hotdogs to curious locals.

This story began five years earlier when Mom and Dad bought out elderly neighbours. Their 250 acres squeezed between our land and the hamlet. So Dad just made a few “cuts” through the overgrown road allowance, and we had great access to the new addition. Handy.

The couple negotiated with Mom and Dad to remain in their modest farmhouse. My parents gladly granted them that privilege.

Their farm matched ours: rolling hills, a big lake in the middle, and it bordered the Yellowhead Highway to the north. However, just west of Basswood was a notch cut out for the cemetery.

Dad made cemetery jokes like, “Why are there fences around cemeteries? People are just dying to get in.” Huummm. Not that funny to us youngsters.

The land addition was ordinary, but it had two small tracts north across the Yellowhead. That meant we could “show off” by hauling big hayrack loads through Basswood, often to Dad’s annoyance. Those power lines sag lowly, he observed.

In July of 1972, this story endured a tragedy. The elderly folks perished in a car accident northeast of Erickson. Dad mentioned loose gravel and an obscured intersection as the culprits. Sad news. Mom and Dad had enjoyed the company of this “adopted” couple, visiting them for conversation and coffee. The farmhouse warmth had welcomed them in many times.

Three years later, after we completed the haying in early August, our parents announced they were going to tear down the old house, “before the rodents could take over completely,” I remember Mom saying. Fair enough.

Older brother David had just obtained his driver’s licence and he could legally drive our blue pickup through Basswood. My older sisters had recently graduated from high school and had moved west to Alberta. The house destruction assignment fell to us four brothers, aged 10 to 16.

Mom and Dad immediately planned a week-long vacation. They had heard of wild blueberries in the Swan River/Minetonas area and they wanted to scout them and pick. Dad did mention that he expected to see work done when they returned.

Mom reminded us to “Be careful!” and to “Be kind to one another.”

On Monday, we went to the house and started pulling nails. And we had a revelation. This was more fun than it was work.

I suppose most young boys have a destructive urge. This may have been the ultimate manifestation. Wreck this house and we’d receive praise instead of retribution. Upside down, yes – but crazy good.

The humble house was maybe only 800 ft. sq. on a main floor and had an attic. In the space of a long day, we had the roof stripped off. We even cleaned and stacked the used lumber.

In the days that followed, the walls yielded their wood-shavings insulation, their slat-board plaster, and we pulled up the linoleum floors. We tossed it all into the empty basement.

When the parents came home (with blueberries for jam), not only had we kept up with the chores, Dad claimed we had made great progress on demolition. And Mom noted that while she had heard vague reports of quarrels, the older brothers had not bullied the younger ones. That was the progress she wanted.

The poor lady’s kitchen was in shambles though. We lived on jam sandwiches, raw carrots, and gluey macaroni. Plus, we let the dishes pile up. The demolition was a higher calling, we decided.

For the next three weeks, and mainly without Dad there, we kept at it. You could say we acted out episodes of TV’s “This Old House” in reverse – wrecking things, not fixing them. We were wanton junior carpenters run amok.

If we broke a light fixture, big deal! We tore out windows and threw the whole frames into the basement with a loud smash. And we hung from cupboard handles until the whole door broke loose. We knew Dad would pack down the debris with his heavy 955 Caterpillar track loader, cover it with dirt, and then scatter brome grass/alfalfa seed. Who would be the wiser come spring?

We had little aggression left when school began again in September. Who were these four mild Basswood farm boys? Instead of placing rivals in headlocks on the bus, we’d just as soon read them poetry.

We salvaged most of the lumber and hauled it home. After the harvest, Dad started two modest projects: a lean-to shed for the mix-mill and tractor, and a smaller garage-type structure for the hay baler and for his brand new sickle mower.

The bonus for Dad was that he now had four experienced sons who knew how to use a gooseneck wrecking bar, a hammer, and other carpentry tools. I’m sure he smiled as he fitted a board and a chorus of hammers nailed it down. The buildings weren’t fancy – gravel floors, a few rafters were 2x4s spliced together – but the shelters were practical and sturdy against Manitoba rains, winds and winters.

A year later, we brothers built a classic white picket fence around Mom’s garden using more reclaimed lumber from the old house. She was thrilled.

In a familiar almost comforting way, the old boards from the old house now had new life.

In a few years, David left home and began to apprentice as a carpenter in Alberta (and he became a journeyman). I worked through four college summers building and renovating houses. My younger brothers, Tim and Ron, have successfully tackled home fix-it pro­jects.

Perhaps we could credit all that to lessons learned from that razed farmhouse. And if not, we sure had fun anyways.

Mark Kihn writes of his Manitoba memories from his home in Calgary.

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But it wasn’t until the Neubergthal artist became involved with a local housebarn preservation that she began to truly see these floors for herself.

That was several years ago, while serving as chair of the Neubergthal Heritage Foundation and working with others on the restoration of the village’s Friesen Housebarn Interpretive Centre.

They’d begun to strip off old carpet and layers of linoleum and underneath found floors painted oxide yellow and grey and emblazoned with floral and geometric designs.

The painted floors astonished Krahn. They had a story to tell about Mennonite life and culture she’d been largely unaware of.

Here was Mennonite folk art much like that of the Polish and Ukrainians, she said.

Evidently, Mennonites had a far more colourful side than most thought. Vibrant-coloured aprons and quilts were other signs of it.

“We think of the black clothes… that was Sunday only,” said Krahn.

“I realized I didn’t know a lot about my history,” she adds.

Her fascination with the hand-painted floors has also led to a long exploration of floor designs and how each was chosen and created.

She and her husband Paul have, since 2002, been restoring The Herdsman’s House, a Neubergthal property built in 1890 where she’s reproduced hand-painted floor patterns in it.

She’s also visited housebarns in other villages in southern Manitoba documenting floor patterns found there.

For the most part, floor painting was done by women and it was a form of interior decoration that lasted from the earliest settlements of the 1870s right through to the 1940s, explains Krahn. (After that time many of these floors were covered over by linoleum.)

Earliest designs were flowers, laid in precise rows using the floor boards to guide their placement. Later geometric designs were inspired by the early linoleum patterns.

This was folk art created using everyday items from around the farm, from ropes and twisted rags, even corncobs and other vegetables, said Krahn.

And it was art created as a winter pastime, when these women had more time to take up creative expression with less to do outside.

“Winter was a time to brighten up their place, and to focus on craft, whether it was sewing or painting or quilting,” she said. “I can only imagine that for some women they loved this time of the year.”

Primarily kitchen and living room floors were painted. The practice didn’t entirely disappear even as linoleum took its place.

People have since told Krahn they recall grandmothers still painting floors even in the 1960s.

“It would have been in basements,” she said. “People tell stories of their grandmothers painting the concrete floors in bungalows on farms.”

Krahn’s study of floor patterns also led to eventually create some of them herself.

Last month she launched Resurfacing: Mennonite Floor Patterns – A Field Journal.

The slim volume doesn’t contain historic information nor tell the stories of painted floors. That’s for a future book now in the works, said Krahn. Rather it’s a journal, containing blank pages for putting down one’s own artistic aspirations but also with sample images of original floor designs she found in housebarns in Neubergthal, Neuhorst, Grunthal and Sommerfeld.

Krahn has recreated those designs herself on floor cloths of cotton canvas using latex paint, polyurethane and epoxy-fortifed enamel.

It’s art you can hang on your wall — but it really belongs on the floor, she said. And these floor cloths are extremely durable, adds the artist.

“You shouldn’t be afraid to walk on it,” she said.

These floor patterns remind us of something else we shouldn’t fear, she said. We should stay curious and creative, and never be afraid to express both, said Krahn.

“Don’t paint your whole house beige and think that painting the door burgundy is daring,” she said. “We need to live colourful lives.”

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But that’s certainly not the only thing she’s done during her long stint volunteering with Carman Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Thrift Shop.

She’s been volunteering with the non-profit enterprise since its start, and today is still among its 100 others arranging, sorting, folding, fixing, cleaning and pricing thousands of donated items that keep this thrift shop thriving.

The eagerness of customers streaming through its doors each day is matched only by the generous time given by volunteers to keep the store shipshape, and raising mountains of money for Mennonite Central Committee’s international work.

In 2017 sales of donated clothing, furniture, household items have raised $386,288 — the most money it’s ever generated.

After expenses are paid, and a portion of the funds turned over to local causes, that’s $240,000 for MCC’s international work.

They are rather pleased, in a modest sort of way, about it.

“There are stores that are bigger than ours and they make more money than we do,” said Frank Elias, a retired school principal and current president for the organization. Places like Winkler and Steinbach occupy space several times larger than Carman’s. There are 16 MCC Thrift Stores in Manitoba.

“But in our 5,000 sq. feet we generate about $65 to $70 per square foot,” he said. “There’s no store in Manitoba that matches us for performance.”

Those sales now add up to about $1,500 for every day the store is open.

Not too shabby for a shop that had a humble start in a basement.

It was 1975 when a few feisty local church women, inspired by the newly opened and original MCC Thrift Shop in Altona, decided to try selling donated goods here too.

Anna Penner, who has also volunteered since its beginning, remembers the early days. They’d price everything in the basement under a single bare light bulb, hung from a ceiling so low some bumped their heads on it.

“That first store was just a teeny little hole in the wall,” she said.

Some didn’t think it would last either. But $13,000 raised that very first year quelled the skeptics, and in years to follow Carman’s MCC Thrift Shop would outgrow its location several times.

The current location, purchased in 2004, occupies a former IGA grocery store. It’s a bright, spacious place, organized like a department store, with sections for household goods and furniture, tools, jewelry and clothing, a toy department, plus a library filled with books and magazines.

Liz Moffatt began volunteering here about five years ago and said Carman’s store is extra special among all she’s visited.

“I love thrifting, and I go across the country to visit thrift stores,” she said. “I always tell these ladies, ‘you have undoubtedly the best going as far as displays and merchandising.’ It really is remarkable.”

The bustling store is more than a place just to shop too. Customers regularly chat and power visit here. Parents are comfortable with children in tow, because the toys in the toy department can be played with while they shop.

“That’s the kind of store that we are. Everyone is given a friendly greeting. We have that kind of atmosphere,” said Elias.

Longtime volunteers say donations to the store are increasingly generous. It’s astonishing how much comes in and it seems to be of higher and higher quality all the time.

That’s a sign of how much stuff everyone has, of course, and how frequently upgrades of things like furniture and electronics happen nowadays. They take it all because that couch or radio goes happily out the door in to another home. There’s no question where a lot of this material would be ending up otherwise, says Penner.

“The landfill.”

The MCC team doesn’t throw away stuff either. They’ve devised a colour-coded price tag system that shows what’s been on the shelves awhile. Those items are gathered up for Union Gospel Mission in Winnipeg where they’re redistributed to those who need them.

“The bulk of it is clothing,” said Elias. “They also take some shoes.”

That’s been very helpful because Carman would otherwise run out of space mighty quick, he adds.

“At one time we had a terrible time with where we put the excess. To put it in the garbage just didn’t seem right.”

Evidently, some donors feel that way about nearly anything. They had a pair of false teeth given to them.

“And we had a bag of dried tea bags come in once,” adds Wiebe. “Someone thought we could use them again.”

Donors also turn over some very valuable items.

“This just was handed to me and I don’t know if it’s gold but it’s very pretty,” said volunteer Laura Thielmann, holding up a lady’s locket. Items like these will be appraised.

“We do have gold given to us,” she adds.

And many one-of-a-kind vintage items and antiques. Store volunteers started selling these through silent auctions a few years ago, seeing this as not only giving more people a chance to purchase something they really like, but a way to earn more money with these items too. Sales from silent auctions last year brought in $34,000, and these events definitely draw the customers. It’s commonplace on the final day of sales to have buyers milling about, bidding each other up to the last anxious minute, said Elias.

All the cash through the register, minus store operating expenses is turned over to Mennonite Central Committee to support its international relief, development and peace programs in 55 countries. Those programs include providing food and other assistance in times of crisis around the world, and tools and education to support sustainable agricultural practices among the world’s farmers. MCC also does peace-building training in areas of conflict throughout the world.

A portion of funds raised here also support the local community, of course. The thrift shop donates to the Handi-van service, the hospital auxiliary and many other organizations and projects. They’ve provided funds for refugee assistance and store credits for them to start their lives with household items from here. Families who lose homes to fire also come to begin rebuilding their lives.

Volunteers tell heartfelt stories about what a difference the thrift store can make for individuals.

“I remember this young boy who came in and said, ‘I can’t play soccer because I have no shoes and I can’t afford any,’” recalls Helen Kroeker. “They don’t let them play soccer unless they have the right shoes. I said, ‘well, come with me.’ We got him a pair of soccer shoes for $2. He was so happy.”

It’s those kinds of moments that are especially gratifying. Volunteering has cemented lifelong friendships too of course. And it’s gratifying knowing the work they do supports important causes both locally and internationally.

This store provides a place to put their faith in action, says Penner. She said she used to wish she could go overseas to do mission work.

“So this is my long-term mission trip,” she said. She has also volunteered here since 1975.

“Christ said, ‘When I was hungry you fed me. When I needed clothes you clothed me,’” said Elias. “While we’re working here we do exactly that. Someone picks up that pair of pants. That’s $3. That’s going to feed many people.”

Tempted to visit Carman MCC Thrift Shop? Please note it is closed for the holidays December 24 until it opens again January 2. Regular store hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday.

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Some time after settling in Raditschev, in northern Russia in 1770, they were taught to farm by Johann Cornies – whose role was similar to that of agriculture minister – by placing Hutterite young people on Mennonite farms. The Mennonites had arrived in southern Russia decades earlier, and were successfully “dry farming” in the Chortitza area.

In 1874, the Hutterites immigrated to North America. “We are farmers,” they told President Grant and he invited them to settle in Dakota Territory. For the next 40 years, they engaged in agriculture, producing grain, sorghum, broomgrass and silage corn, as well as livestock, including milk and egg production.

Harassed during the First World War for refusing to participate in the military effort, the Hutterites immigrated to Canada, settling in the Prairie provinces, where they continued to farm and improve their agricultural expertise.

Because Hutterites are still involved in agriculture today, it is appropriate that even in the primary grades, Hutterite children are introduced to this aspect of their livelihood. Fortunately, there is a program available that has enabled us to do just that — Agriculture in the Classroom (AITC).

I teach at Brennan School, at Elm River Colony, and in the past I had seen AITC information, but always assumed the programming was geared to children in the city, rather than youth in a rural setting.

This year, however, my thinking changed, and I am glad it did.

Under the umbrella of AITC Manitoba, schools can enrol in various well-organized programs and utilize interesting classroom resources that provide hands-on learning opportunities for students from kindergarten to Grade 12.

Throughout this past school year, Brennan School students had the privilege of participating in several programs.

For example, last spring, we applied for and received a grant for our own “Little Green Thumbs” classroom garden. Then in fall, one of our teachers received training for two days and came home with all the equipment and materials necessary for this intensive indoor gardening program such as grow lights, potting soil and seeds. Several classes had the opportunity to grow vegetables and herbs in our school, providing a hands-on agricultural experience to strengthen that farm-to-food connection.

On a sunny fall morning, Brennan School hosted a first-ever breakfast at school. AITC Manitoba provided a “Made in Manitoba” breakfast, which our students, staff and many community members loved. Contrary to most of our meals – which are prepared in our community kitchen – this breakfast was cooked in our school, so several of our community ladies helped. An interesting interactive presentation was made before breakfast to give the students an opportunity to explore the agricultural industry and discover the origins of their breakfast. Although we are part of a farming community, this program gave students an opportunity to learn about agriculture beyond our immediate surroundings.

As well, every February, many schools across the province promote literacy during “I Love to Read” month. This year our promotion was extending into March to include agriculture-based literacy. Denise Payment, a retired teacher from Oakville with a farming background, came to celebrate not only literacy, but agriculture. She read books about farming, showed videos, and had our students participate in a hands-on agriculture activity: making butter. Our students eagerly shook their vials of cream, chanting the familiar rhyme:

“Come, butter come! Come, butter come!
Peter’s at the garden gate,
Waiting for a butter cake.
Come, butter come!”

By the time we chanted the rhyme for each primary class child, the butter was ready. We spread it onto soda crackers and the consensus was that they’d never tasted better butter.

Pizza Farm is an interactive learning experience for Grade 7 and 8 students. This program usually includes farm tours in the fall and spring, at farms that raise or grow pizza ingredients. Between the farm tours, each class engaged in curriculum-linked activities and grew their own pizza ingredients in an indoor school garden.

During the fall, our middle grades and high school agriculture students, along with several other classes in Portage la Prairie School Division, spent a morning touring several local dairy and vegetable farms.

At the dairy farm they saw a milking parlour and the huge tank where milk is stored until it is transported to the creamery. They also saw calves and were invited to pet them and let them suck on their fingers, a familiar experience for many farm children, that was enjoyed by the whole group. After the tour, students were treated to homemade cookies and a carton of chocolate milk.

At the vegetable farm they observed the process of market preparation: carrots arriving at the plant, being washed, packaged and boxed for shipment. They saw the storage facility and the machines in action.

Next, the students travelled to the community hall in Oakville for lunch, after which they visited various agricultural centres which included learning about erosion and pesticides – both chemical and organic – as well as the economic spinoffs and potential careers in agriculture.

The final phase of the program took place here at Brennan School in spring. Several stations were set up in our gym where students engaged in hands-on activities: learning about pulse crops, testing canola seeds for ripeness, crushing canola seeds to make oil and making salad dressing, which they tasted by dipping fresh vegetables provided by AITC Manitoba.

The grand finale to this program? Our Grades 3 to 8 students made their own pizza. Typical for all AITC programs, materials, cooking utensils and ingredients were sponsored by various agriculture commodity groups or companies.

After each of the programs, the presenters left us with fabulous resources to further our students’ agricultural learning.

There are a few things we plan to do differently this year, with the experience of hindsight, but we definitely plan to continue teaching our children about agriculture.

The post Not just for city kids appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

So-and-so lived just east of Schonsee. Another person came from Alt-Bergfeld. Braun himself was from Friedrichsthal. The individual identities of Mennonites were inextricably tied to the places they came from.

Braun, a retired high school teacher, came from a family that took its history seriously. When he discovered an authoritative map of the area had his home village in the wrong place, he decided someone had to do it right.

Braun’s rekindled interest in old Mennonite villages led to his involvement in the Hanover Steinbach Historical Society, the Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society and eventually his own historical research.

The result was the 256-page Historical Atlas of the East Reserve, an illustrated reference book profiling the history of the eastern Manitoba region populated by Mennonite immigrants over 140 years ago.

• Read more: Bringing all of Manitoba’s local histories together

The book, published last year by the Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society, is co-edited by Braun and Glen Klassen, a retired University of Manitoba microbiology professor.

The full-colour, coffee table-style volume is an exhaustive compendium of historical maps and documents, archival photos, settlements, burial plots, aerial composites and written text describing the Rat River Mennonite Reserve, as the settlement was originally called.

Besides combing archives for documents and historical information, Braun and Klassen did extensive fieldwork, walking over sites, checking on-the-ground details and documenting them definitively.

In the past, local Mennonite histories tended to be dense black and white efforts, heavy on text and light on illustrations. But when Braun and Klassen received a donated set of coloured 1872 survey maps of the region, they decided on a full-colour illustrated format for their book. However, they couldn’t afford a professional layout artist, so Klassen became a self-taught graphic designer, taking care of all the maps. Braun handled the photos and wrote most of the text.

Klassen also contributed work on the cemeteries of Hanover municipality, which he had been researching on his own at the time.

Between the two of them, Braun and Klassen ended up doing most of the archival and field research, the writing, cartography, book design, proofreading and marketing.

The project, administered by the EastMenn Historical Committee, got underway in 2010. Braun and Klassen began working full time on it in 2012 and continued virtually non-stop until publication in October 2015. Since then, the book has undergone three printings and sold 600 copies.

Preserving the historical record

Braun says the driving force behind the project was the realization that, if this information weren’t documented, it would be lost forever, along with an important chunk of Manitoba history.

“That was one of the primary motivations — if our generation doesn’t do this, most of the sources are either going to get lost, die or disappear,” he said in a recent interview.

The book details the village lands and township profiles of the region settled by Mennonites fleeing oppression in Russia. The first refugees arrived by riverboat at the mouth of the Rat River near what is now Ste. Agathe in late July 1874. With them they brought their religion, their language and the names of villages they had left behind. These they transplanted into their new land as they settled and established communities.

Recreating church and village life as they had known it in Russia was important for Mennonites, historically a wandering people with no actual homeland, says Conrad Stoesz, archivist for both the Centre for Mennonite Brethren Studies and the Mennonite Heritage Centre.

Having a reference work such as this atlas is a way for Mennonites to locate themselves in time and place as “sojourners on this planet,” says Stoesz.

“Our memory is tied to symbols which help us to remember events and people. A place can be a very powerful symbol that connects us to family and formational events in our lives.”

Braun and Klassen acknowledge they are not professional historians. Nonetheless, their atlas has been nominated for the Manitoba Historical Society’s Margaret McWilliams Award as best local history of the year. The winner will be announced this fall.

The book earlier this year received a Manitoba Day Award from the Association for Manitoba Archives.

Combing through obscure historical records unearthed some rare information, such as a (mostly incorrect) map by Henry Jacobson, a spy sent by the federal government in 1888-89 to see how the Mennonites were doing.

But the greatest sense of discovery came from readers fascinated by the detail and historical background.

Klassen says people would come to him and say, “My grandfather grew up in that village.”

Braun recalls a Chinese friend who examined the book and exclaimed in amazement, “My family has 3,000 years of history. We have nothing like this.”

In the end, the most important aspect of the atlas may be its legacy as a social history, both archival and personal, according to Klassen.

“It’s something my grandchildren will see when I’m gone,” he says.

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A new food history exhibit at the Mennonite Heritage Village Museum in Steinbach answers those questions and more.

Typical Mennonite foods like kielke (egg noodles, schmauntfat (white cream gravy) and/or pereschtje (meat-filled buns) are all part of a diet borrowed from other cultures, as much heavily influenced by 500 years of migration, as by what types of crops Mennonites grew or animals raised, according to Tastes in Transition, on display at the Gerhard Enns Gallery until early 2016.

Call it a planetary recipe swap lasting half a millennium — and it isn’t over yet.

“The key word here is transition. Mennonite food has changed,” says assistant curator Jessica McKague, who worked with senior curator Andrea Dyck to tell an intriguing story of the how the Mennonites’ diet, despite what most stereotypically think it is, is in fact widely diverse and always changing.

“Mennonites are a kind of a snowball of all the places they’ve been,” she says.

So is their food.

Telling the story

The Steinbach exhibit focuses on Manitoba’s Mennonites, telling a story of how foods like watermelon and knacksot (roasted sunflower seeds) and the Mennonite version of perogy (varenikje) entered their diet, thanks to influences from the Russian and Ukrainian neighbours they had. From Prussia, now Poland, Mennonites developed a taste for potatoes. And, hard as it is to believe, pie hasn’t always been for dessert in Mennonite homes, although foarma worscht (farmers’ sausage) arguably was.

“Pie started here,” says McKague. Mennonites’ love of things sweet and baked really picked up after arrival in North America and increased access to sugar.

Farmers’ sausage, on the other hand, has been eaten by Mennonites for as long as they’ve raised a few pigs, which is a very, very long time. The early-winter gathering of a half-dozen families around a grope (cauldron) for a schwienschlachte (hog butchering bee) provided the ingredients.

Yet even as some foods are instantly recognized as Mennonite, today a Mennonite meal is just as likely to include burrito and refried bean, thanks to time Mennonites spent in countries like Mexico and Paraguay and learning to cook from their Spanish neighbours in other Latin and South American countries.

Multicultural

And with a bigger membership in Mennonite churches now found on the continents of Africa and Asia than all of Canada, Europe and the U.S. combined, Mennonite food is going through another transformation.

“They’re not eating perogies and farmers’ sausage,” said McKague. “They’re eating their cultural foods and those cultural foods have been mixed in with the Mennonite faith. It’s a brand new world that’s happening.”

The exhibit looks at the Mennonite menu from other perspectives. Through their five-century history, Mennonites have lived through times of wealth and freedom, repression and deprivation, making their foods symbolic of both their good times and the very bad. Their faith, and experience of scarcity and new environmental conditions shaped their diet too.

New foods

Adapting to a new climate and country is reflected in the ways some foods are prepared. Mennonites couldn’t grow Morello cherries and Damson plums for their signature plumamoos (fruit soup) after arrival in Manitoba; chokecherries and black currents had to suffice.

The Mennonite way of life here began to shift again in the late 20th century too, as many Mennonites left the farm for urban life, buying food in stores and eating in restaurants. That’s resulted in some of the more labour-intensive dishes like varenikje or pereschtje (meat-filled buns) becoming less the mainstays they once were. It’s also meant sharing foarma worscht with others. After the Penner Food store in Winnipeg stocked farmers’ sausage in 1981, the exhibit notes, other supermarket chains followed, spreading the popularity of the sausage well beyond Mennonites tables.

Yet, even as we continue to recognize a range of foods identifiable and distinctly Mennonite, McKague says it’s hoped visitors will go away impressed by just how much Mennonite food has changed, and will continue to change. Mennonite food is an “unfolding story,” says McKague.

“I hope that people’s notions of Mennonite food are challenged and expanded,” she said.

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“This year, I’m helping provide food for hungry people around the world by trading in my skates and becoming a farmer,” she says in a release. “And I invite others to join me!”

Klassen isn’t actually going to drive a tractor, plant seeds and then harvest a crop.

Instead, she’s providing $300 to pay for the costs of growing one acre on a farm in southern Manitoba through Grow Hope, a new joint project of Mennonite Central Committee Manitoba and Canadian Foodgrains Bank.

After harvest, the crop will be sold for as much as $500 per acre, which will then be deposited into the MCC account in the CFGB.

When MCC withdraws the funds for its programs in the developing world, it can be matched up to 4:1 by the Canadian government — the $300 sponsorship can grow into as much as $2,500 when used for humanitarian aid.

“In other words, these gifts will grow, both literally as a crop rises from the ground, and financially as the crop is sold and matched by the Canadian government,” says Brad Reimer, who directs communications and donor relations for MCC Manitoba.

The goal of Grow Hope is to invite churches, families and individuals to help people who are hungry in the developing world by joining Klassen in sponsoring an acre.

“Sponsors will get updates about the crop through the growing season and have access to educational, worship and devotional resources about farming, food and hunger,” Reimer says.

“We think this is an excellent and powerful way for a Sunday school class, small group, or for the whole church to help people who don’t have enough to eat.”

Sponsors who live in southern Manitoba will also be invited to come to the farm to see the crops harvested at the end of the growing season.

Funds raised by Grow Hope will be used by MCC to respond to food emergencies, to help people in the developing world achieve food security, or to provide nutritious food for mothers and children.

People who want to be part of Grow Hope can learn more and sign up at the Mennonite Central Committee Grow Hope website or call MCC at 1-888-622-6337.

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