Called to be Reconciled
/“Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”
I am a Mennonite, culturally and religiously. My family arrived in Canada in two waves from their home in the Crimea. My Mother’s family came in the late 19th century. In the old country, the level of animosity between the native Russians and Ukrainians and the Mennonites was steadily increasing and so when Canada started to put the call out for farmers to come and settle the Manitoban frontier, my ancestors sent out scouts to survey the new land. When the scouts returned with the message that what they saw was good and with an assurance from the Canadian Government that no Mennonite would have to serve in the army (Mennonite being famously pacifist, this was a make or break part of the deal), entire towns and churches of Mennonites (for back then these two concepts were closely related), closed up shop and moved to the new world. The journey was hard and many died en route, but when they finally arrived, they quickly came to know that they had found a new home.
Not long before my mother’s family arrived in Manitoba, a law was passed granting a number of tracks of land along the Red River and its basin to the Metis peoples of the province. My understanding was that the land had largely belonged to the First Nations until the law divvied and redistributed it into the hands of others. When reading through Canadian history it becomes clear rather quickly that such considerations were rarely a hindrance when it came to handing out property, though.
The Red River is long, twisting and turning through the south of the province for many hundreds of miles before eventually passing into the United States where it serves to mark the border between Minnesota and North Dakota. Much of this land was only accessible by boat, with the nearest roads being dozens of miles away through rough terrain, and so, when the Metis received these lands, many were not in a position to develop it. Many of the recipients were already living in other towns and had no intention in moving. Many were too poor, too old or too young to be able to put in the effort it would take to get things up and running. And so they sold their land soon after they received it.
Although “sell”, in many of the situations, may not be the most accurate way of portraying what really took place. To say the land was “sold” sounds like a simple innocent market transaction, exchanging property from one set of hands to another. However, from sources we have from that time we know that for many, if not most of these “sales,” the circumstances surrounding the exchanges were dodgy at best, if not straight out fraudulent. The buyers constantly low balled the Metis, who had no ability to actually get their sites appraised for a number of reasons, some of which related to their race. The buyers would straight out lie to make the sales look like they were in the best interest of the Metis even when it would be obvious to anyone who actually had the ability to see the land, that it certainly was not. There are stories from this time of getting the owners blind drunk, in order to pressure them in their inebriated state to sell their land, along with the land of their families and their children for a pittance on the dollar. And of course, when that all didn’t work, there were also straight-up threats of violence as well. Of these thousands of plots, comparatively few are still in Metis hands today.
Looking into it, the unscrupulous buyers of this land were seemingly not the soon to arrive Mennonites, but it was nevertheless largely this land that was the first to be purchased as they arrived. And on this land, the Mennonites thrived. Steinbach, Kleefeld, Landmark, Rosenort, Niverville, Bluemenort, Gruenthal, and many dozens of other Mennonite communities exist because of these shady deals, that while we didn’t make them ourselves, we most certainly benefited from. It is understandable that in many cases the relationships between the original owners of the land, both the First Nations peoples as well as the Metis who were taken for a ride, and the eventual beneficiaries, the Mennonites, have been less than pleasant.
Forty years after my Mother’s grandparents moved to Canada, the First World War broke out. Mennonites, as they were assured when they first arrived, were exempt from military service on the grounds that they serve as Conscientious Objectors (COs), so while many of the other families of the country sent their sons to sacrifice their lives for the glory of the British Empire, the Mennonites worked largely on the home front, growing food for the effort. By war’s end, 61,000 Canadians lost their lives, young men who were supposed to grow old. Young men who were supposed to take up the reins of their fathers, building their businesses and their farms so that their children could inherit their legacy in their own time as well. But as always happens with war, with the deaths of so many, came the end of a multitude of plans of succession, the only option left being to sell.
And so it was, as I understand it, that the Mennonites first came to MacGregor and a number of other towns across Canada like it. As the name implies, before the war the town was largely made up of Scottish and British families. Talking to the older members of our town as well as by touring local museums, I have come to understand that there was once a time when you couldn’t go a stone’s throw without hitting an Anglican or United Church (or at that time I suppose likely a Methodist or Presbyterian Church as these two groups along with two others largely absent from Manitoba only merged to form the United Church in 1925), but it didn’t take long after the farmsteads started to sell before into the English speaking fray came the German Mennonites. The outsiders, profiting from the deaths from the first families’ sons. When the Second World War broke out a few decades later, history repeated itself but intensified, for while the remaining English and Scottish families again sent their children off to war, the Mennonites again served mostly as COs, surviving where the other families’ young men died, and buying more land in turn.
The animosity this caused between the two groups can still be felt to this day. I have talked to more than one Mennonite senior citizen who was a child when their family moved to the region who has stories of having to run home after school for fear of getting pelted by rocks thrown by the English children he went to school with. It is not that the Mennonites did anything wrong in buying the land, it was for sale and they bought it because they needed a place to call home. The land was put to good use by young Mennonite families looking to make a life for themselves. However, just as with the Metis, Mennonite prosperity, came in part due to the suffering of others. It is not easy to lose a son, and that loss is made harder when every time your mind drifts back to them - their smile, their voice, their wit, the plans you had for them that can no longer come to pass - you are snapped out of those fond memories by the sight of someone else benefiting because of their death.
Often, when Mennonites preach on pacifism, we do a bad job of recognizing this exact problem. On more than one occasion, I have even heard it said in church that the prosperity of the Mennonites came as a blessing from our refusal to go to war. In a very real way, in MacGregor at least, as well as a number of other towns across Canada where similar stories can be found, this is true. But things can be true while also being shot through for many others with pain. Because the Mennonites could buy more land following the war, their families could grow and multiply and prosper. New children were born who grew up and were able to start families of their own. Generations of Mennonite families have been born, raised and have had vibrant lives of their own due to the purchase of this land. All of this is a good thing for certain, as new life always is, but it was only possible because the families of our neighbours were robbed of those blessings by a war they didn’t start and had little choice about fighting in.
It is fully possible that for the most part Mennonites did nothing wrong by moving to the area around the Red River basin. After all my Mother’s grandparents and their family were not the ones who frauded the Metis and the First Nations out of their holdings and very possibly didn’t even know that it was happening until after they arrived and settled. They were fleeing a terrible situation back home that got much worse after they left, after all. Their minds were completely somewhere else. It is also fully possible the Mennonites did nothing wrong by moving to the area of MacGregor and other towns like it, onto the land that was meant to be for the town’s first sons, fallen in war.
It is completely possible that the Mennonites have done nothing wrong in choosing the areas to settle that they did, but that doesn’t mean that others haven’t legitimately been hurt by our choices. After all, not all grievances between peoples come about because one party personally and pointedly wrongs the other. Often things are far messier than that, far more complicated as well. As with most struggles with other people we will face in our lives, you often don’t need to personally target someone to hurt them. For every person in my life I have hurt on purpose, there has been another ten I have wounded by a simple accident of my going about my day. That I didn’t intend it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t at least apologize and work to set things right. How little I would have to care for these others I hurt by accident to not even care to spend the time to do that.
This is something the Bible speaks plenty on. As Christians, we are called when faced with a grievance to work to right the wrong and seek forgiveness as soon as we can. The verse that starts off this post is one such example of scripture addressing just this, but there are a number of others as well. When it comes to grievances, the Bible is never so much concerned with who is right or wrong, as much as it is simply concerned with setting things right; calming the waves, bringing peace back to the land. For many of the Mennonites alive today, these issues of property are several generations removed from us, while for many others they are far fresher. For all of us, though, I would say this distinction of the level of degrees we are removed from these issues doesn’t particularly matter. If it is still an issue causing grievances today, it is still an issue that requires us to do some work of reconciliation.
That I still hear about these issues between the English or Scottish and the Mennonites, or the First Nations and the Mennonites, or the Metis and the Mennonites on a somewhat regular basis suggests these issues, while having happened in the past, are nevertheless still with us now. Perhaps that means, that even though it was not us who caused these grievances, there is nevertheless still some forgiveness we need to seek out and work toward finding.
