The first Mennonite settlers arrived in Manitoba 150 years ago.
The group of 65 families, the first of more than 7,000 Mennonites to come to the province between 1874-78, disembarked from a steamship at the junction of the Red and Rat rivers on Aug. 1.
A conference at the University of Winnipeg, titled Subjects, Settlers, Citizens: The 1870s Mennonites in Historical Context will mark that anniversary, on Friday and Saturday.
The conference, which is sponsored by the Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies at the university, is free and open to the public. It will also be live-streamed.
The coming of the Mennonites “was a central event in the history of Manitoba,” said conference organizer Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, chair in Mennonite studies and co-director of the centre.
Their arrival was not only a monetary boon for businesses in Winnipeg — those first families spent $20,000 in the city on supplies to begin their new lives in Manitoba — they and their descendants went on to shape Manitoba economically, politically, religiously and culturally.
The Mennonites who came to Manitoba 150 years ago were fleeing restrictions that had been imposed on their way of life in Russia, where the government planned to remove an exemption to military service.
“They weren’t willing to compromise on that,” Nobbs-Thiessen said, adding they came to Manitoba because they were promised religious freedom and the opportunity to follow their traditional way of life and language.
Topics to be addressed at the conference include: Leaving the Russian Empire: Religion, Identity, and Neighbours Transformed; Delegates, Immigration Agents, and Treaty-Making; A Tale of Two Treaties: A Reflection on the 1874 Mennonite Migration within Canada’s Treaty-Making Era; Manitoba’s Most Prosperous Agriculturalists: Mennonites, Land, and the Settler Colonial Project; and No Longer Mennonite: Steinbach’s Identity Shift in the 1930s.
The conference will include the premiere of Where the Cottonwoods Grow, a documentary about the 1870s migration, and a keynote Address by Dave Scott, an elder from the Swan Lake First Nation, who will talk about oral histories of Indigenous-Mennonite encounters.
For information, visit https://wfp.to/1870mennonites
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John Longhurst
Faith reporter
John Longhurst has been writing for Winnipeg’s faith pages since 2003. He also writes for Religion News Service in the U.S., and blogs about the media, marketing and communications at Making the News.
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