Featured in I Love Creston Magazine - Jul, 2011
How fitting for Larry Ewashen to produce a work about the Doukhobor migration, given that he’s migrated quite a bit himself, most recently to the Creston Valley.
Retired here since last fall, the historian, musician, author and film industry veteran was born to humble roots in the Crowsnest Pass, spent the bulk of his working days in Canada’s Big Smoke and also lived in Vancouver before coming full circle, in a sense, to the Kootenays, where his ancestors settled a century ago.
Though his only direct ties are through his brothers, longtime residents Alex and Bob, the town was a natural choice.
“It was mostly a family thing,” Ewashen says, “plus Creston is a wonderful place to live. It’s a wonderful valley.
“I like the agricultural aspect. I like an emphasis on holistic living and sustainable agriculture and community gardens. It has a very vibrant arts scene, a lot of musicians. That appeals to me.”
Perhaps due to his Doukhobor background, which embraces such values, Ewashen felt comfortable here right off the bat. He volunteers with New Life Furniture, the Creston Community Auditorium Society and Wynndel coffeehouse, and teaches theatre and folk guitar classes at the College of the Rockies.
“I've always felt like this was kind of a second home,” says Ewashen, who would visit family here – including his now-deceased father, Alex Sr. – while based in Toronto, and lived here in the 1980s while working on another project.
“I was writing a book on the history of the Crowsnest Pass,” he explains. “I interviewed people wherever they went, all over B.C. This was a good base because a lot of those people had retired here. “I ended up working on the Creston flats running a combine and stuff like that. I’m from a farm/ranch background and so that’s how I spent a couple of years here.”
That’s how the lifelong bachelor lived, pursuing various artistic passions – writing, acting, film making, composing and playing guitar – paying the bills. The unifying thread was Canadian heritage and culture.
“I found I was doing a lot of what I would call Canadiana,” he says. “This led to a film about my own background called In Search of Utopia, which had some success (and) took me a long time.”
“I think there was an untold story there. There still is an untold story, and that’s what I was trying to do: tell the story of the Doukhobors and their contribution to Canadian culture.”
Ewashen was the writer, producer, director and researcher, arousing within him a new found cultural pride which “in some, maybe small, way directed me to working at the Doukhobor Museum in Castlegar.”
When museum operators beckoned in 1993 he was making movies and ads in Vancouver. It might have seemed an unlikely career jump given that city life had been the norm for several decades.
Ewashen studied at the University of Alberta as a young man, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Edmonton before pursuing further education at the Royal Conservatory of Speech in Toronto, Actors’ Studio in New York and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he obtained an Honours Master of Arts degree.
Diverse and far-flung freelance assignments had him researching in Russia, writing in New York, working for the Canadian Museum of Civilization near Ottawa and acting and directing in theatres across North America and Britain. He worked extensively in radio and appeared in numerous feature films and CBC-TV productions.
Always musically inclined, Ewashen composed the soundtrack for an award-winning documentary at the Cannes Film Festival, toured as a guitarist with country legend Stompin’ Tom Connors and served as president of the Guild of Canadian Folk Artists.
He even worked in the educational field briefly, founding theatre departments at Ryerson University in Toronto and Canadore College in North Bay, Ont., and teaching at a private Jewish school for boys in Toronto.
“I was getting a little burned out in Toronto,” he says. “It was time to leave. I found myself going to smaller and smaller centres, if you can think of Vancouver as a smaller centre.
“You can only do so many commercials and so many films.It was a living. When I was invited to come to Castlegar it was just the challenge I needed. “There were some doubts about the viability of the museum and I was invited to try and revitalize the whole process, and I did. That was a much more meaningful way to contribute.”
Ewashen’s father was an independent Doukhobor and his mother was related to Peter Verigin, the leader who died in 1924.
Derisively dubbed “doukho-bortsi” back in 18th century Russia (the term means “spirit wrestlers”), the Doukhobors were persecuted after taking a dramatic stand against militarism in 1895. Four years later some 7,500 of them emigrated to the Canadian Prairies where they settled more than 60 villages on a quarter-million acres under the motto “Toil and Peaceful Life.”
Their communal ways were disrupted in 1907 when authorities demanded they register and cultivate individual quarter-sections of land (160 acres), plus swear an oath of allegiance to the monarchy that stipulated going to war if necessary. One-third of them, Ewashen says, accepted the terms. The rest followed Verigin westward in 1908 after he purchased 14,000 acres near the confluence of the Kootenay and Columbia rivers, thinking private land ownership would preserve their pacifistic lifestyle.
Among those communal Doukhobors was a small group of zealots, the Sons of Freedom, “who later on became notorious for their demonstrations, nudism, arson and so on and – having said that – they had a case,” Ewashen says.
“The big issue was education. They said, ‘OK, you’re going to take our children and send them to schools. What you really want to do is assimilate them’ . . . and so they resisted violently.
“The majority of Doukhobors under Peter Verigin, probably 90 per cent, said, ‘OK, we’re going to try to work with this. We’re going to build our own schools. We’re going to teach them Russian in the community but we’ll allow them to go to school and learn English.’ ”
Sons of Freedom children were seized by the provincial government in the 1950s and interned at New Denver.
“They came out very bitter and dysfunctional,” Ewashen says, noting that one female octogenarian remains imprisoned in the Lower Mainland.
The Sons of Freedom comprise part of the display in the revamped Doukhobor Museum, which opened with one communal house in 1971 and was renamed the Doukhobor Discovery Centre by Ewashen.
Among the highlights of his tenure were a million-dollar renovation of a 98-year-old suspension bridge that linked two Doukhobor communities near Castlegar, obtaining national historic site designation for the bridge and successfully lobbying to have Verigin (about whom Ewashen published a short biography in 1988) recognized as a person of national historic significance.
“The important thing was having a wonderful site where tourists from around the world would learn about the Doukhobors,” says Ewashen, who for a couple of years also directed a Saskatchewan museum in the town of Veregin named after Peter.
Not all important museum guests travel far, Ewashen reached out to local Doukhobor youths who had lost touch with their roots – or never were in touch in the first place.
“Doukhobors have no idea about their own history,” he says, estimating their numbers at 10,000 in B.C. and 30,000 nationwide, with a similar number remaining in Russia. “Neither do their friends. That’s where it starts, getting them the history.”
Is it an endangered breed?
“I think it is in the sense that all the ethnic cultures in Canada are dying,” he says. “But no less, either, because there’s certainly a drop-off of interest. It’s the same with the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides and the Catholic Church; all of the youth membership is falling down, so whose fault is it?
“It’s not a fault. It’s a generational thing where the children of today are perhaps more interested in video games and getting together in their peer groups and communicating on the Internet”.
He thinks he sparked a mini-revival of the Doukhobor creed “but I don’t think that’s going to solve everything. I’m not sure it has to be solved. The Doukhobors made their contribution. They have principals and values and they’re all very valuable.
“What we do, whether we’re Doukhobors or well-meaning Methodists or whatever, is try to plant a seed of human consciousness in people to make them think of a broader vision beyond themselves and their immediate needs, and sometimes very selfish and unnecessary wants. That’s all you can do, and I think the Doukhobors have done a wonderful thing. Over 100 years ago they were talking about a holistic way of living – vegetarianism, pacifism, not smoking, not drinking, all of this sort of thing – that is so necessary and wonderful now, you know, ideas whose time has come.
“Among the youth today there’s a certain coolness about holistic living, where it might have to do with vegetarians or it might have to do with an organic style of life, and I think a lot of youth are kind of hip to that, so maybe it’s kind of cool to be a Doukhobor now.”
How fitting for Larry Ewashen to produce a work about the Doukhobor migration, given that he’s migrated quite a bit himself, most recently to the Creston Valley.
Retired here since last fall, the historian, musician, author and film industry veteran was born to humble roots in the Crowsnest Pass, spent the bulk of his working days in Canada’s Big Smoke and also lived in Vancouver before coming full circle, in a sense, to the Kootenays, where his ancestors settled a century ago.
Though his only direct ties are through his brothers, longtime residents Alex and Bob, the town was a natural choice.
“It was mostly a family thing,” Ewashen says, “plus Creston is a wonderful place to live. It’s a wonderful valley.
“I like the agricultural aspect. I like an emphasis on holistic living and sustainable agriculture and community gardens. It has a very vibrant arts scene, a lot of musicians. That appeals to me.”
Perhaps due to his Doukhobor background, which embraces such values, Ewashen felt comfortable here right off the bat. He volunteers with New Life Furniture, the Creston Community Auditorium Society and Wynndel coffeehouse, and teaches theatre and folk guitar classes at the College of the Rockies.
“I've always felt like this was kind of a second home,” says Ewashen, who would visit family here – including his now-deceased father, Alex Sr. – while based in Toronto, and lived here in the 1980s while working on another project.
“I was writing a book on the history of the Crowsnest Pass,” he explains. “I interviewed people wherever they went, all over B.C. This was a good base because a lot of those people had retired here. “I ended up working on the Creston flats running a combine and stuff like that. I’m from a farm/ranch background and so that’s how I spent a couple of years here.”
That’s how the lifelong bachelor lived, pursuing various artistic passions – writing, acting, film making, composing and playing guitar – paying the bills. The unifying thread was Canadian heritage and culture.
“I found I was doing a lot of what I would call Canadiana,” he says. “This led to a film about my own background called In Search of Utopia, which had some success (and) took me a long time.”
“I think there was an untold story there. There still is an untold story, and that’s what I was trying to do: tell the story of the Doukhobors and their contribution to Canadian culture.”
Ewashen was the writer, producer, director and researcher, arousing within him a new found cultural pride which “in some, maybe small, way directed me to working at the Doukhobor Museum in Castlegar.”
When museum operators beckoned in 1993 he was making movies and ads in Vancouver. It might have seemed an unlikely career jump given that city life had been the norm for several decades.
Ewashen studied at the University of Alberta as a young man, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Edmonton before pursuing further education at the Royal Conservatory of Speech in Toronto, Actors’ Studio in New York and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he obtained an Honours Master of Arts degree.
Diverse and far-flung freelance assignments had him researching in Russia, writing in New York, working for the Canadian Museum of Civilization near Ottawa and acting and directing in theatres across North America and Britain. He worked extensively in radio and appeared in numerous feature films and CBC-TV productions.
Always musically inclined, Ewashen composed the soundtrack for an award-winning documentary at the Cannes Film Festival, toured as a guitarist with country legend Stompin’ Tom Connors and served as president of the Guild of Canadian Folk Artists.
He even worked in the educational field briefly, founding theatre departments at Ryerson University in Toronto and Canadore College in North Bay, Ont., and teaching at a private Jewish school for boys in Toronto.
“I was getting a little burned out in Toronto,” he says. “It was time to leave. I found myself going to smaller and smaller centres, if you can think of Vancouver as a smaller centre.
“You can only do so many commercials and so many films.It was a living. When I was invited to come to Castlegar it was just the challenge I needed. “There were some doubts about the viability of the museum and I was invited to try and revitalize the whole process, and I did. That was a much more meaningful way to contribute.”
Ewashen’s father was an independent Doukhobor and his mother was related to Peter Verigin, the leader who died in 1924.
Derisively dubbed “doukho-bortsi” back in 18th century Russia (the term means “spirit wrestlers”), the Doukhobors were persecuted after taking a dramatic stand against militarism in 1895. Four years later some 7,500 of them emigrated to the Canadian Prairies where they settled more than 60 villages on a quarter-million acres under the motto “Toil and Peaceful Life.”
Their communal ways were disrupted in 1907 when authorities demanded they register and cultivate individual quarter-sections of land (160 acres), plus swear an oath of allegiance to the monarchy that stipulated going to war if necessary. One-third of them, Ewashen says, accepted the terms. The rest followed Verigin westward in 1908 after he purchased 14,000 acres near the confluence of the Kootenay and Columbia rivers, thinking private land ownership would preserve their pacifistic lifestyle.
Among those communal Doukhobors was a small group of zealots, the Sons of Freedom, “who later on became notorious for their demonstrations, nudism, arson and so on and – having said that – they had a case,” Ewashen says.
“The big issue was education. They said, ‘OK, you’re going to take our children and send them to schools. What you really want to do is assimilate them’ . . . and so they resisted violently.
“The majority of Doukhobors under Peter Verigin, probably 90 per cent, said, ‘OK, we’re going to try to work with this. We’re going to build our own schools. We’re going to teach them Russian in the community but we’ll allow them to go to school and learn English.’ ”
Sons of Freedom children were seized by the provincial government in the 1950s and interned at New Denver.
“They came out very bitter and dysfunctional,” Ewashen says, noting that one female octogenarian remains imprisoned in the Lower Mainland.
The Sons of Freedom comprise part of the display in the revamped Doukhobor Museum, which opened with one communal house in 1971 and was renamed the Doukhobor Discovery Centre by Ewashen.
Among the highlights of his tenure were a million-dollar renovation of a 98-year-old suspension bridge that linked two Doukhobor communities near Castlegar, obtaining national historic site designation for the bridge and successfully lobbying to have Verigin (about whom Ewashen published a short biography in 1988) recognized as a person of national historic significance.
“The important thing was having a wonderful site where tourists from around the world would learn about the Doukhobors,” says Ewashen, who for a couple of years also directed a Saskatchewan museum in the town of Veregin named after Peter.
Not all important museum guests travel far, Ewashen reached out to local Doukhobor youths who had lost touch with their roots – or never were in touch in the first place.
“Doukhobors have no idea about their own history,” he says, estimating their numbers at 10,000 in B.C. and 30,000 nationwide, with a similar number remaining in Russia. “Neither do their friends. That’s where it starts, getting them the history.”
Is it an endangered breed?
“I think it is in the sense that all the ethnic cultures in Canada are dying,” he says. “But no less, either, because there’s certainly a drop-off of interest. It’s the same with the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides and the Catholic Church; all of the youth membership is falling down, so whose fault is it?
“It’s not a fault. It’s a generational thing where the children of today are perhaps more interested in video games and getting together in their peer groups and communicating on the Internet”.
He thinks he sparked a mini-revival of the Doukhobor creed “but I don’t think that’s going to solve everything. I’m not sure it has to be solved. The Doukhobors made their contribution. They have principals and values and they’re all very valuable.
“What we do, whether we’re Doukhobors or well-meaning Methodists or whatever, is try to plant a seed of human consciousness in people to make them think of a broader vision beyond themselves and their immediate needs, and sometimes very selfish and unnecessary wants. That’s all you can do, and I think the Doukhobors have done a wonderful thing. Over 100 years ago they were talking about a holistic way of living – vegetarianism, pacifism, not smoking, not drinking, all of this sort of thing – that is so necessary and wonderful now, you know, ideas whose time has come.
“Among the youth today there’s a certain coolness about holistic living, where it might have to do with vegetarians or it might have to do with an organic style of life, and I think a lot of youth are kind of hip to that, so maybe it’s kind of cool to be a Doukhobor now.”
