Memories of a Canadian Post-Peasant Farmer - Oral pioneer history with Paul Galatiuk
Channel: StElijahPioneer
Date: 2012-05-10

Paul Galatiuk was a successful large-scale Canadian prairie farmer until he retired (now deceased). 

Like many farmers on the Canadian prairies who were associated with the wave of Eastern-European immigrants at the beginning of the 19th century, during his childhood he grew up very much like his poor Romanian Bucovinian peasant ancestors, depending on subsistence farming to feed one's family.

But with the advent of the Second World War and the prosperous economy that it ignited, money and opportunities were extended even to the children and grand-children of peasant immigrants. They assimilated into the Canadian mainstream.

Despite having actively pursued and benefited from his modern, industrial and technological, consumer lifestyle, Paul Galatiuk looks back on his life of poverty as a peasant with fondness. Beyond simple nostalgia, he seems to express a profound loss for the lifestyle of his ancestors, which was not colored by the constant need for more that is characteristic of living in a consumer society. As John Berger points out in his introduction to "Pig Earth," while cultures of progress (industrial/technological/consumer) must constantly envisage future expansion, cultures of survival (peasant/indigenous) envisage the future as a sequence of repeated acts. In the repetition in the acts of daily life and and the subtle changes that occur in it lies the peasant's world of significance."

This is an excerpt of a larger interview with Paul Galatiuk. It is part of the oral-history research for the writing of a film script called "Demolishing the House Bunica Built".

For more information on Romanian and Ukrainian Bucovinian pioneers of the Lennard, Manitoba region, see the history section of the St. Elijah Pioneer Museum web site: http://www.stelijahpioneermuseum.ca/history.php