Your Worship Mayor Mike O’Connor, President of the Kootenay Doukhobor Historical Society Mr. Bob Ewashen, Columbia Basin Trust, Ms. Jackie Drysdale, Mr. Fred Makortoff, Messers. Turner, Nesteroff, Mahonin and Killough, Members of the Kootenay Doukhobor Tri-Choir, Doukhobor descendants, my fellow Canadians:

I am delighted to have this opportunity to visit with you once again, here in the Kootenays and to assist with the opening the Doukhobor Village Museum for the 2005 season. I must admit I always stop for a bowl of borscht when passing through your neighbouring community of Grand Forks as a touchstone with our shared past as British Columbians from all beginnings! I am greatly honoured to join you considering that last year, your honoured guest was Vladimir Tolstoy, the great, great grandson of Lev Tolstoy, whose eldest son Sergei accompanied and documented the first Doukhobor arrivals in Canada. As many of you will know and certainly I remember with great fondness, that when I visited with you in February of 2003, I was treated to the melodic voices of the Tri-Choir, who we enjoy again today. I have listened to your CD many times over to relive that deep, melancholy, yet pride-filled resonance of this unique Doukhobor Choir in which the echoes of this Valley and the struggles of its Doukhobor people can be clearly heard.

It is through this valley that the great Hudson’s Bay and Northwest Company Surveyor David Thompson passed, mapping the land and waters for the future, in charts that today’s surveyors tell me are accurate beyond their expectations. This place, located at the confluence of the historic Columbia and Kootenay Rivers, became what Peter V. Verigin called ‘Dolina Ootishenie’ or the ‘Valley of Consolation’. They sought to leave behind religious persecution and find sufficient freedom in a British Columbia that was itself only 32 years old, for the Doukhobor communal-agrarian lifestyle to flourish. In 1908, beginning with 14,000 acres of land, Doukhobor agriculture thrived through the hard and dedicated work of its men, women and children, so that by 1917, the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood had more than 71,000 acres in agriculture both here and in Saskatchewan.

But as with other parts of the society, the great Depression hit hard and the Commune was not sustained, but there were other forces at work too, including the magnetic pull of the mainstream society. I am sure the promise of “toil and a peaceful life” was not enough for some people and following the violent death of charismatic Leader Peter Verigin in 1924, it became intensely difficult to continue the high ideals that had inspired the first Doukhobors from Russian to sail aboard the S. S. Lake Superior in 1899 to Halifax and a new life in Canada.

This museum and this gathering today pays tribute to that special heritage of the Doukhobor settlers who left Russia and became known as ‘Spirit Wrestlers’. It is a term long known among BC’s First Nations peoples, but it this case it was meant to be pejorative. But those it was meant to offend took it to heart and interpreted it to mean ‘Wrestling with and for the spirit of God against evil”. Gradually the surrounding communities came to acceptance, if not full understanding of straight-line-thinking of their neighbours the Doukhobors for whom war was incompatible with Christianity. (It was a philosophy that since at least the1960’s has gained wider currency in our society and appears to be growing in acceptance.) Canada had no state religion, so all faiths and none could find a home here.

This museum speaks of a people who worked hard to be totally self-sufficient and who struggled hard to keep their faith. Like so many migrants before them, they earned their way into Canada and as Canadians and with your neighbours today, we all live in a very different country than the one to which your ancestors journeyed more than a century ago. As Canadians, we have learned the lessons of inclusion. It reminds me of the way even the Golden Rule has changed in our time, where once we were told to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, today in what they call a Platinum Rule we are advised to “do unto others as they would wish to be done by”! No nation has attempted to learn this critical lesson better than Canada and no people have had to learn the lesson as well as Canadians so that we can continue to forge ahead as a nation composed of all peoples living in mutual trust and respect.

Our First Nations fellow-residents have lived here for eons. The original inhabitants of this land are now carbon dated to have lived here between some 6,000, and up to 17,000 years of continuous habitation. They deserve our respect for having lived so ‘lightly’ on this land ‘since time immemorial’ that they did not harm its use by those who subsequently joined them here. This museum tells the story of the Doukhobor people who also left the land better than they found it.

The First Nations and Aboriginal Peoples, who lived here for millennia, were all vastly different from each other, with differing forms of governance, different cultures, arts and many varied spiritual beliefs, yet they thrived in all their differences until our arrival. It is up to us now to assist them and all our citizens to bring their many cultural and spiritual gifts into the whole society, along with all the countless gifts of the many other cultures that are now part of the web of our province.

During the past 200 years peoples from every corner of the earth have come here as your forebears did, to start ‘anew’. As a result we are building a very new kind of country here together. It must be a country where every person is equally valued, equally trusted and mutually respected. I paraphrase Sergei Tolstoy wrote in his diary on his arrival in Winnipeg: ‘The population is quite diverse and variegated, there are Britishers, Europeans, Mennonite Germans, Galicians, Lithuanians, Byelorussians, Russian Jews, Finns, Swedes, Germans, Icelanders and others, the Chinese are here too and a few Negroes. When he refused to buy a service offered by a fellow Russian, the fellow said: “Why won’t you listen to me? This is not mother-Russia, we are all equal citizens here!”

Or as the great South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu has put it: “all the problems with our world are all because we have ‘insiders and outsiders’. Then he went on to say, “People must embrace diversity, where no one is an outsider, no one is an alien. All white, black, brown, red, yellow, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, young, old, those with disabilities and those without,(the Archbishop went on to list other members of society who feel that they are among the ‘outsiders’ and ended with the words), all, all of us belong in God’s Rainbow Family”!

Today we pay tribute to the contribution made to our province and country by the members of the Doukhobor community, remembering in this historic place all those who travelled in a convoy of six special trains to the west to begin a wholly new life. As representative in our province of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen of Canada I salute the proud memory of your forebears and the legacy they have left us all that is forever a part of this museum that I now declare open for the 2005 season!