Aging order faces choices, but what to do: market a culture to preserve it, or live it? Reproduced from the pages of the Vancouver Sun (Saturday, July 27, 2002) this article reveals the forces of cultural change among the Doukhobors of the British Columbia interior. Although the article is now six years old, the focus remains as relevant today as ever - JK.

DOUKHOBOR CULTURE AT A CROSSROADS

By Pete McMartin

From the west, the highway falls out of the mountains and gives you a view of the big shining valley below. You think you have reached the promised land. The valley is flat and quilted with fields. The fields are rectangles of green or yellow, or black where they have been newly plowed. Among the fields are orchards, as perfect as if plotted by surveyors, and near the orchards are the farmhouses. They sit in shady windbreaks of cottonwood and poplar. The Kettle and Granby rivers wind through the valley, and the town huddles at their confluence. The town is treed and pretty.

Grand Forks is Doukhobor country, and we have come looking for Doukhobors. We have heard about the food and how delicious it is; we know a bit of the history and want to know more. We are tourists looking for a tourist experience, a quick slice of cultural pie to go.

Finding it is turning out to be more difficult than we expected. Some of the restaurants serve Doukhobor food, especially borscht (which is nothing like the Joy of Cooking beet soup variety) and the town's pretty little Boundary Museum has a few small displays about early Doukhobor life.

But the Doukhobor fact is muted. It is not visibly part of the community fabric, despite the enormous presence the Doukhobors have had here. 

We would find, said Joan Miller, the Boundary Museum's curator, that the Doukhobor community is not aggressively self-promoting, that it can be private and, at the very least, regards the outside world warily, given how the outside world has treated it. Doukhobors were persecuted in Russia for being pacifists -- their great benefactor, Leo Tolstoy, paid for their emigration to North America, thus saving the movement -- and in Canada they had all their communal lands confiscated in Saskatchewan, a loss of more than 250,000 acres. That confiscation forced the Doukhobors' move to B.C. in 1908. Grand Forks was their promised land.

But here, too, the Doukhobors suffered from skewed public perception. The word Doukhobor came to be synonymous with acts of arson and public nudity, even though those acts, symbolic renunciations of material things, were the acts of the Sons of Freedom, a fringe group of the Doukhobors. But the greater public rarely saw the distinction, and it stigmatized all Doukhobors -- akin, one Doukhobor leader said, to believing all Irishmen belong to the IRA.

Still, Miller says, there are some Doukhobor sites to see. She suggests the Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ hall, the administrative centre for Doukhobors. Fabulous banquets, she says. "And the Mountain View Doukhobor Museum," Miller says. "You should see it, if only for the view from its front porch."

Lucy Demosky and her family welcome visitors to their Mountain View Doukhobor Museum overlooking the town of Grand Forks. The museum, which originally housed six families and was built in 1912, is not really a museum as much as an artifact on its own.

The Mountain View Doukhobor Museum sits on the flank of a grassy bench high above the town. It commands a view so big and beautiful it is enough to make you cry. The museum, once a communal home for seven or eight Doukhobor families, is a squarish, three-storey building of red brick built in 1912, and it does not look like a museum but a homestead where the farmer got too old for the work and simply got up and walked away. The paint on the front porch is fading. In the side yard, two old wooden hay wagons rot away, as grey as bone, and in the back a ramshackle barn and shed lean earthward, falling to their knees. The grass, where it has not been cut back for lawn, is chest high. Cicadas sing in it. The air smells of meadow.

On the front porch, we meet owner Lucy Demosky, a small blond woman we called beforehand to meet us, because the museum keeps irregular hours. She is Doukhobor but not a practising Doukhobor -- it is a long story, she says. Lucy only become owner of the museum last year after her brother, Peter Gritchin, a bachelor, died suddenly.

Peter had been a life-long collector of Doukhobor artifacts, Lucy says, and the museum was his passion. She inherited it and everything in it, a piece of fate that seems to have her flummoxed. She is not sure what she has in the museum, or what to do with it.

Inside, the house is comfortably cool -- the bricks, Lucy says, keep the heat out. We are the only ones there. A small front room serves as a makeshift souvenir shop. Off the front room are other rooms -- a parlour, a big communal kitchen, a tools room -- and Lucy leads us through each one, imparting bits of Doukhobor history.

The rooms look worn and lived in, and filled chock-a-block with treasures. When the Doukhobors arrived in Grand Forks, they were so poor they manufactured everything for themselves, and Peter Gritchin collected it all, saving thousands of pieces -- hand-turned dining tables, painted cabinets, wooden tubs, baby cradles and clothes, exquisite white linen suits made from flax the Doukhobors grew and wove, looms, beds (including one slept in by "Lordly" Peter Verigin, the charismatic Doukhobor leader), quilts, hand-knotted rugs, churns, milk separators, an abacus, embroidered vests, shoe trees, cherry-wood ladles, wooden hay rakes and shovels, bricks made in Doukhobor kilns, hand-forged drills and saws and axes, an ironing board, a wood-burning stove, a communal kitchen table, bowls, women's scarves and headdresses and skirts, old panoramic photographs of Doukhobor outings, iron roof ornaments and latticework -- all of it handmade and all of it right there at hand's length. Nothing is roped off. None of the pieces are imprisoned in exhibits. Lucy did not mind when we picked articles up and felt them. (Those linen suits!) Upstairs, which holds the eight small bedrooms -- each bedroom sleeping an entire family -- the floor boards are a foot wide and clear of knots. The beds are made. It feels as if we have just missed the Doukhobor families living there, and who might be out in the fields haying at this moment.

The house, it is apparent, is not really a museum, but is itself an artifact, passing away like the old communal Doukhobor life it housed. When we say to Lucy that the place is a jewel and more affecting than any other museum we have ever been in, she is agog. "What? This old place? It's falling down!"

We say goodbye. Lucy takes our picture. Back down in the town at the Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ hall, a surprisingly modern place, we meet, for lack of a better term, the hall's press officer. He does not want to be named. He is not unkind but reticent -- he has cooperated with the media for years and has been amazed how consistently it has managed to misrepresent Doukhobor life. He says the issues of Doukhobor life in Grand Forks are too complex to be covered in a 20-minute interview, but then, impassioned, talks for an hour.

There might be 2,500 Doukhobors in Grand Forks, he says, and about 8,000 left in the entire West Kootenay. But the population there is in transition. It is aging. He figures the median age of Doukhobors left in the area is around 60.

The young people go to the big cities where there are jobs. There are 5,000 Doukhbors in Vancouver, he says, and probably the same number in Calgary, and the median age of Doukhobors there, he figures, is around 30.

Can the Doukhobor culture in Grand Forks survive such depopulation? Couldn't an aggressive campaign of self-promotion and tourism marketing keep the young people here and provide them with work? "I could talk for hours about the tourism possibilities of Doukhobor culture," he says, "and have on occasion. And I agree to some extent that it has been under-utilized in the area and more could be made of it. "But at this point in my life ... I have other things on my mind at my age, like what it means to be a Doukhobor, and how does one continue to be true to Doukhobor beliefs today."

Yes, he says, Grand Forks and the Doukhobor community could probably make a fair dollar serving up dollops of Doukhobor culture. Maritime churches make good money serving lobster dinners to American tourists; you can go to the Queen Charlottes and for a price watch Haidas carve totem poles. Surely, there is money in borscht and pyrehi (perogies to you). And there is the unique Doukhobor creed as a selling point -- they were pacifists, vegetarians and believers in communal life before it became fashionable. That too could be marketed.

But what would that do to the Doukhobors' own sense of themselves, he asks? What happens when you start selling your culture rather than living it? What happens when you begin to preserve it as something to be put on display and charged admission for, like a museum piece? "If you're 'preserving' your culture," he says, "then you're doing something wrong. You shouldn't be preserving it; you should be living it."

He picks up a finely-turned shellacked chalice from a shelf behind him. "See this? Doukhobor culture has already come down to this kind of bric-a-brac, and this is getting close to cigar-store Indian status. For this bric-a-brac to be really Doukhobor, it wouldn't be shellacked, it wouldn't be fancy. It would be rough hewn and homemade. It would say something about the original Doukhobor experience."

But that experience has long passed. Doukhobors no longer live communally, are no longer an agricultural society -- they are doctors and lawyers and car salesmen, just like everybody else. Time has caught up to them. So that leaves them at a crossroads, the man in the hall says. They have to find meaning in their creed, not in bric-a-brac.

We leave it at that. The Doukhobors of Grand Forks, he seems to be saying (and I could be just another journalist misinterpreting them) will adapt to the world on their own terms, or pass from the landscape like an old barn falling to its knees. 

When the time comes to leave town, we still have not had any Doukhobor food. On the way out on the highway, we stop at one of the restaurants that have been recommended to us as serving authentic borscht. We get some to go. The waiter, a young man, brings it us in styrofoam containers. The borscht is pink. "You should hear some of the tourists that come in," the waiter says. "They'll say, 'This is the best authentic Doukhobor borscht we have ever had!' " And then, smiling, the waiter says: "Pretty good for a Greek cook."