Russ Gourluck. The Mosaic Village: An Illustrated History of Winnipeg's North End. Winnipeg: Great Plains Publications, 2010. viii + 244 pp. Index. $29.95 sc. Esylt W. Jones and Gerald Friesen, eds. Prairie Metropolis: New Essays on Winnipeg Social History. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009. 260 pp. Bibliography. References. Index. $29.95 sc. Royden Loewen and Gerald Friesen. Immigrants in Prairie Cities: Ethnic Diversity in Twentieth-Century Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. vii + 257 pp. Bibliography. References. Index. $27.95 sc. Adrienne Clarkson, in her new book Room for All of Us, presents what is now the standard picture of a multicultural Canada to which immigrants are welcomed and where they are encouraged to maintain their own ethnicity in the rich mixture of cultures that make up the Canadian identity. While she does discuss the difficulties she and her family had in settling in their new home, Clarkson's life and career seem to prove that this fondly-held belief that Canadians have about their country is true. The three books discussed here--each in its own way--contribute to an understanding of how we developed as a multicultural society by addressing the core concerns of this journal: ethnicity, immigration, inter-group relations, and the history and cultural life of ethnic groups in Canada. Central in all three books is the question of how immigrants and refugees have been welcomed in Canada and what has been expected of them once they were here. It is clear from what these authors tell us that our present situation has been won slowly over many years of gradual evolution. All three books concentrate on prairie cities, particularly Winnipeg, as uniquely instructive in understanding this evolution. The two scholarly books, Prairie Metropolis and Immigrants in Prairie Cities, are the work of distinguished Winnipeg academics. Gerald Friesen, whose research and writing on prairie history stretches back over four decades, worked on both projects, as an editor for the papers collected in Prairie Metropolis and as the joint author of Immigrants in Prairie Cities. His collaborators were Esylt Jones, author of the award-winning Influenza 1918: Disease, Death and Struggle in Winnipeg and a professor at the University of Manitoba, and Royden Loewen, a University of Winnipeg History professor, holder of the Chair of Mennonite Studies, and editor of the Journal of Mennonite Studies. He is also series editor of the Ethnicity and Culture History Series at the University of Manitoba Press and the author of a growing list of books that deal with the issues of ethnicity and immigration. The third book, Mosaic Village, is the work of the well-known Winnipeg popular historian Russ Gourluck, who, although he writes for a different audience, nevertheless concerns himself in his book with many of the same complex issues as the three other writers. His approach of collecting stories from a large number of interviewees provides an archive of interesting illustrations for many of the points made in the two academic works. One might well ask why we need yet more books that examine these topics. A quick search of any university library catalogue retrieves hundreds of titles with terms like multiculturalism, ethnicity, and immigration published in the past decade alone. But there are far fewer that look at prairie cities and, specifically, Winnipeg. Loewen and Friesen, in their introduction to Immigration in Prairie Cities, argue that there is indeed something quite unique about these communities-- ... medium-sized inland centers that received sequential waves of newcomers throughout the twentieth century. These cities were nearly as multi-ethnic at the outbreak of the First World War as they were in the 1990's.... Within their boundaries, the intensity of the immigrant experience and the power of the immigrant challenge to convention shaped a distinct variation on the Canadian model of cultural diversity (3). …
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Nov 6, 2023
Ali A Alhamzah + 3
Open Access
