00front.qxd 2/5/2004 11:19 AM Page i Negotiated Memory 00front.qxd 2/5/2004 11:19 AM Page ii 00front.qxd 2/5/2004 11:19 AM Page iii Julie Rak Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse 00front.qxd 2/5/2004 11:19 AM Page iv For Joan © UBC Press 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), www.accesscopyright.ca. 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Canada on acid-free paper National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Rak, Julie, 1966- Negotiated memory : Doukhobor autobiographical discourse / Julie Rak. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7748-1030-0 (bound) 1. Dukhobors – Canada – Biography – History and criticism. 2. Autobiography. I. Title. FC106.D76R34 2004 305.6′89071 C2003-907326-2 UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A reasonable attempt has been made to secure permission to reproduce all material used. If there are errors or omissions, they are wholly unintentional and the publisher would be grateful to learn of them. UBC Press The University of British Columbia 2029 West Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 604-822-5959 / Fax: 604-822-6083 www.ubcpress.ca 00front.qxd 2/5/2004 11:19 AM Page v Contents Acknowledgments / vi Introduction/ viii 1 Beyond Auto-Bio-Graphe: Autobiography and Alternative Identities / 1 2 Doukhobor Beliefs and Historical Moments / 34 3 Vechnaiia Pamitin the Diaspora: Community Meanings of History and Migration / 55 4 Negotiating Identity: Doukhobor Oral Narratives / 84 5 Witness, Negotiation, Performance: Freedomite Autobiography / 115 Conclusion: Negotiating the “I” and “We” in Autobiography / 143 Notes / 146 References / 153 Index / 161 00front.qxd 2/5/2004 11:19 AM Page vi Acknowledgments I am glad to say that my list of acknowledgments for this project is long. I am very conscious of producing this work standing, as it were, on the shoulders of many people whose encouragement, example, and some- times collaborative effort have made it possible for me to do it at all. Completion of this work has been made possible by Support for the Advancement of Scholarship and Humanities and Fine Arts Research grants provided by the University of Alberta, 1998-2001, and by a grant from the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme. I thank the Honour- able Lois Hole, lieutenant-governor of Alberta, for her financial support. I thank Koozma Tarasoff, Jim Popoff, the staff of Iskra,Mike Chernenkoff, Steve Lapshinoff, Vi Plotnikoff, Jim Kolesnikoff, Jan Kabatoff, and John MacLaren, who provided me with much valuable information, assis- tance, and encouragement at key stages of my research. Many Doukhobor people have invited me into their homes and made me feel welcome dur- ing this project. There are too many of you to mention here, but please know that I am very grateful to all of you. I thank Jack MacIntosh of Spe- cial Collections at the University of British Columbia Main Library for his invaluable assistance. Thanks to Edward Hickcox for acting as an on-site research assistant during the final stages of the project. I am very grateful to my mentors and colleagues who have either read this manuscript or have had to hear me talk about it: Lorraine York, Daniel Coleman, Nina Kolesnikoff, Heather Zwicker, Shirley Neuman, Daphne Read, Dianne Chisholm, my graduate research assistant Karen Clark, and, of course, the Wriot Grrrls writing group – Cecily Devereux, Andie Palmer, Aara Suksi, and Heather YoungLeslie. I thank all of the students who took my course Subjectivity, Identity, and Autobiography between 1998 and 2001. They have helped to form my thinking about the issues I deal with here. I would also like to thank all of my translators: Elena Ilina, for the material from A.M. Bodianskii’s collection and A. Efanow’s diary; Jim Kolesnikoff, 00front.qxd 2/5/2004 11:19 AM Page vii Acknowledgments vii for all the oral narratives and for reading manuscripts with me; and Carol Theal, for the material from the Agassiz diary. Portions of this book have appeared in somewhat different forms. Part of Chapter 3 has appeared as “‘Vechnaja Pamjat’ in the Diaspora: Commu- nity Doukhobor Autobiography” in The Doukhobor Centenary in Canada (Ottawa: Slavic Research Group at the University of Ottawa and the Insti- tute for Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa, 2000), 322-41. Some of Chapter 5 has appeared as “Doukhobor Autobiography as Witness Narrative” in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (Special Issue: Auto- biography and Changing Identities) 24, 1 (2001): 226-41. Another part of Chapter 5 is forthcoming as “One Hybrid Discourse of Doukhobor Iden- tity: The Freedomite Diary from Agassiz Prison” in Adjacencies: Minority Writing in Canada,ed. Lianne Moyes, Domenic Beneventi, and Licia Can- ton (Montreal: Guernica Editions). I gratefully acknowledge the following sources for permission to repro- duce material previously published elsewhere: To Elaine Makortoff for her poem “Of Other Generations,” Mir 2, 3-6 (1974): 44. To D.E. (Jim) Popoff for the interview with Nick D. Arishenkoff and Cecil W. Koochin, “Life in the Doukhobor Commune – (CCUB),” Mir 2, 3-6 (1974): 3-50. To Eli Popoff for his transcription and translation of material from the Joint Doukhobor Research Committee, Report of the United Doukhobor Research Committee in the Matter of Clarification of the Motivating Life- Concepts and the History of the Doukhobors in Canada (Symposium Meetings, 1974-1982)(Castlegar, BC: Selkirk College, 1997). To University of Toronto Press for the passage from William Janzen, Lim- its on Liberty: The Experience of Mennonite, Hutterite and Doukhobor Commu- nities in Canada(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). To the Writer’s Trust of Canada for excerpts from George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, The Doukhobors (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977). The cover image was graciously provided by Jan Kabatoff. This is what the artist has to say about the image: “The ‘I Remember, I Forget ... ’ mono- print uses acrylic paint, silk-screened historic photograph and heirloom imagery, and collage on paper. It is part of a series of monoprints that are one-of-a-kind, even though they share similar elements. The ‘I Remember, I Forget ... ’ series speaks of memory fragments, history, loss of cultural identity and the passage of time. The identity of the Doukhobor women is unknown, but this image is important to Doukhobors because the women in it symbolize the feminine strength and stoicism that was too long undervalued in Doukhobor culture.” 00front.qxd 2/5/2004 11:19 AM Page viii Introduction When the first Doukhobor immigrants stepped onto a pier in Halifax in 1899 as refugees from tsarist religious persecution in Russia, they began a chapter in the history of the development of Canada as a nation that is still being written and that, at times, is still under erasure. The story of the Doukhobors in Canada remains one of the most unusual stories of mass migration because the Doukhobors arrived at a time when ideas about Canada’s position in the British Empire were still debated and the position of migrants was not yet fully worked through. Soon after the Doukhobors began to live in Canada their belief in pacifism, anti-patriotism, commu- nal living, and vegetarianism, along with their desire to retain their own language and their deep suspicion of institutionalization of any kind, proved to be threatening to many who were developing ideas about Can- ada and what it should mean to be Canadian. This resulted in a struggle that highlights what type of nation Canada was at the turn of the last century, and why, until very recently, the Doukhobors have had so much difficulty living in it. Doukhobors, out of all proportion to their rather small numbers, have played a large part in the othering of certain kinds of ethnicity and reli- gious expression in Canada. This is because they have been, in Louis Althusser’s words, “bad subjects.” Not only did they resist the institutions, laws, and beliefs that would have made them into “good” immigrants and docile citizens but they also refused to recognize the terms of recognition that would have made them like most other migrants. Althusser (1990, 135) says that subjectivity works through the recognition of an already- existing state of affairs rather than through choice: good subjects “work all right ‘all by themselves’” because they recognize their own positionality, but bad subjects are bad because they cannot recognize themselves inside the mechanisms that produce personhood. Therefore, the State cannot recognize them either and can only inculcate its goodness and the right- ness of its practices by repressing their ways of knowing. So-called good 00front.qxd 2/5/2004 11:19 AM Page ix Introduction ix nations need bad subjectivity in order to point the way to good and obe- dient citizenship. Bad subjects cannot be treated as people who have his- tories and knowledges of their own because the history of the bad subject cannot be recounted or written inside of the State. Bad subjects are people who are treated as if they are without their own cultural sense of memory, without full personhood, and, at times, without the rights and privileges that are extended to other citizens in a liberal state. The questions that I address in this book are: if the Doukhobors have been bad subjects in Canada and must live within systems that cannot rec- ognize them as anything else, then what happened when some of them used a discourse of the “good subject” – like autobiography? And why would they have used it? In order to answer these two questions, critical thinking about autobiography needs to change. Autobiography must be thought of as a discourse rather than as a genre, and as a discourse that is sustained by the trappings of identification that have underwritten what the self is and how it has been seen in much of the Western world. When autobiographical discourse is used by writers or speakers who do not have access to the privileges of autobiographical identity – such as print literacy, a sense of one’s “place” in history that others will recognize, or the leisure time to write a book – then that discourse changes as it is used, even as it brings certain advantages. Autobiographical discourse can surface in places where it normally is not seen, such as legal records, news- paper articles, prison narratives, and ethnographic recordings. And when it appears in such places the discourse itself alters so that it can be appro- priated for use by those who are not powerful or whose version of events cannot be allowed to have validity. In this more flexible way of under- standing what autobiography is and how it can be used, autobiography can become a point of negotiation between good subjects and bad, and it can be a way for those who are bad to become visible – regardless of whether the outcome is an identity win or an identity loss. Doukhobor history and cultural context must be considered as key to the ways in which autobiography can be used to achieve visibility. During their 100 years in Canada the Doukhobors have not often been remem- bered for their pacifist principles, their commitment to types of commu- nal living, or even for their non-institutionalized religious expressions. Usually they are remembered, inaccurately, for nude protests and arson in British Columbia. This is a result of negative press coverage and, in partic- ular, of the success of Terror in the Name of God (Holt 1964), a sensationalist account of the protests and depredations by Vancouver Sunreporter Simma Holt. Complex relations inside of Doukhobor groups have meant that, while some historical studies have been written by Doukhobors, like other ethnic minority or religious sectarian groups, much more information has been written about them by outsiders than by Doukhobors themselves. 00front.qxd 2/5/2004 11:19 AM Page x x Introduction This makes it all the more imperative to study what has happened when Doukhobors have written and spoken about themselves and about Doukhobor identity, and to see the very act of entering autobiographi- cal terrain as an attempt to negotiate what will be remembered about Doukhobor history as well as what position Doukhobors will have in Canada both now and in the future. Even now, Doukhobors who refer to themselves as “Canadians,” and who had the right to vote restored to them in 1962, do not call themselves Doukhobor-Canadians. They do not hyphenate their identities, and for many of them the terms of this non-hyphenation are still being thought through. Thus, Doukhobors who live in Canada have negotiated between Homi Bhabha’s (1994) idea of nation as the pedagogical and the perfor- mative without accepting either the formulation of the nation as the nation-state or the belief in the nation as a group of people. Doukhobor beliefs and practices were always radically anti-national and anti-institutional, and then they were combined with their commitment to oral traditions, their history of conflict with secular and church author- ities, and their conviction that they were destined to be exiles and wan- derers until a prophesied return to Russia. Not only were Doukhobors opposed to a separation of church and state, but they also opposed the ideas of church and state in and of themselves. This meant that Dou- khobors effectively became subjects who could not be written into the Canadian national script except as curiosities or as a threat to nationhood. They literally had no way to recount their own histories because they had little legitimacy within Canada as subjects. Therefore, when, by the 1950s, many of them had partially assimilated, some Doukhobors began to com- bine their oral traditions with written forms in order to write as what I term “hybrid subjects.” Their sense of who they were and how to tell their life story falls somewhere between the ideals of Doukhoborism and the idea of Canada. As they either wrote autobiographically or responded to ethnographers or interviewers who asked them to tell their life stories, these Doukhobors turned a discourse that normally excluded them and their concerns into a point of negotiation between their sense of their history, community, and identity (on the one hand) and the Canadian version of history, identity, and nationality (on the other). They tried to use the power inherent in autobiographical discourse for their own ends. When they have needed to become visible as subjects in the Althusser- ian sense, either outside their own contexts or, in later cases, to each other, Doukhobor writers and speakers have also used aspects of autobiographi- cal discourse as a way to figure out how Doukhobor identity works for them in their own terms. At times they have also used this alternative identity construction to resist assimilative discourses that anxiously seek to erase the differences between Doukhobor ways of understanding the