Mennonites: Not so squeaky clean after all...
Luisa D'Amato devotes a column in yesterday's Waterloo Region Record to a weekend conference on Indigenous-Mennonite relations. This got me thinking about some of my own realizations about my own Mennonite ethnic tradition which has a tendency to try and hide its own sins, burying them as if they were fertilizer for future good works, instead of just bad decisions and misguided theology.
1. It was only when I read Geoff Martin's essay "From the Banks of the Grand" a couple of years ago that I realized that Mennonite settlers in the Waterloo Region were complicit in the stealing of the Haldimand Tract from the Six Nations peoples.
A triangulation of places that form a larger place. And yet Waterloo Region, the City of Hamilton, and the Six Nations Reserve are not equally connected nor remembered in our public consciousness. It’s a region divided against itself despite the river that connects. For all the loyalist histories of settlement in Upper Canada, all the pioneer villages depicting settler life-ways and their attendant struggles, the history of the Six Nations’ own arrival and settlement along the Grand River is consistently disregarded, if not effaced entirely. This is especially peculiar, I am beginning to realize, given that their existence on the Grand centers not on a claim to ancient territorial inhabitation, like most other Indigenous land claims, but originates from the basis of rights and legalities contained within a Royal Proclamation (1784) and a British land patent (1793). Their legal and historical basis is, in other words, the same as Canada’s legal and historical basis—to ignore the legitimacy of one makes a mockery of the other. And the evidence of our stories notwithstanding, the Six Nations have coexisted alongside both early settlers and contemporary Ontarians for the entire history of this British-Canadian province.
2. Mennonites have a unique history as a persecuted religious minority, desiring their own closed communities where they could practice their pietist religion in peace. This has the tendency of putting Mennonites and their descendants on the defensive, instead of recognizing the ways in which they were complicit in, and often active participants in, state violence against Indigenous peoples.
From yesterday’s D'Amato piece:
"For Mennonites, these questions are complicated by the fact that they themselves had been a persecuted minority, and they cherish values such as humility and pacifism, Harder-Gissing said.
Often, after being confronted with the Indigenous perspective, they would say to themselves, “But we thought we were doing the right thing.”
“That adds an extra layer of particular history that Mennonites have to grapple with,” she said."
3. I was yesterday years old when I learned that Mennonites ran three so-called 'residential schools' in Northern Ontario. Not surprisingly, abuse happened there too, just as it had in Catholic, Anglican, and United Church run schools.1
"Mennonite-affiliated organizations operated three residential schools in Northern Ontario from the early 1960s until 1991: Poplar Hill Development School, Stirland Lake School and Cristal Lake School.
“I remember crying myself to sleep while I was at Poplar Hill after one particular beating,” one survivor recounts in the exhibit. “I don’t know what I had done.”
“There were five of them — men and women, holding me face down, one at each arm and one at each leg. Yes, there was pain and humiliation, but worse than that was the fifth person.
“They stood over me reading loudly from the Bible, asking Christ to forgive me for my sins. I will never forget it.”"
4. Terre Chartrand, an Indigenous friend of mine with a heart of gold and the educational passion of a thousand suns, in a comment on my Facebook post about this very piece, notes
First Mennonite at the corner of Sterling (sic) and King [in Kitchener] they discarded an Indigenous grave site to build their church, parking lot, and their own graveyard. No one knows where the bones are.
This 2016 Waterloo Region Record article, which makes no mention of the Regions Indigenous inhabitants at the time of settlement, notes the importance of the First Mennonite graveyard to the community, reporting that,
The cemetery includes the grave of Bishop Benjamin Eby, who travelled from Lancaster County in Pennsylvania in 1806 and who built the first Mennonite church in western Upper Canada in 1813. When Eby died in 1853 at age 68, more than 1,000 people and 180 carriages lined up to attend the funeral. Other notables buried there include Joseph Schneider, whose 1816 house on Queen Street is now a museum, and Rev. Joseph Cramer, who founded the House of Friendship social service agency.
5. I attended an online lecture a couple of weeks ago where scholar Colin P. Neufeldt, professor of history at Concordia University of Edmonton, noted that Mennonite church leaders were active members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, participating in the leadership of the local Soviets. They were therefore responsible for drawing up and submitting the names of those in their community deemed 'Kulaks,' which resulted in the forced deportation of thousands, often friends and family, to Siberian work camps. Many never made it there alive.
6. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, a Mennonite historian at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, frequently posts short historical pieces to the Anabaptist Collective: A MennoNerds Group on Facebook. They always come with receipts, and are usually pretty damning about Mennonite ethical behaviour. This description of Russian Mennonites, venerating the Aryan Mother in Ukraine during the Nazi occupation, is one of many examples. I always learn something new from him.
In the largely Mennonite district "Halbstadt" (formerly Molotschna) no one was made more famous than the 84-year-old Mennonite midwife, “Mutter Berg”. During the visit of Reichsführer-SS Himmler to Halbstadt, October 31 to November 1, 1942, Helene Berg was honoured for helping birth some 8,000 ethnic German babies over a lifetime—the midwife and mother of a people. She had opportunity to give hospitality in her home to high-ranking Na@i officials—including SS Obersturmführer Dr. Gerhard Wolfrum (note 7)—and was given a small cameo appearance in a German propaganda film of the (largely Mennonite) Halbstadt area (note 8). Over the next two years, Wolfrum “emphatically” sought to honour her with a secure retirement and through her honour the Black Sea German Mennonites on behalf of the Reichsführer-SS (note 9).
The ostensibly conservative concept of motherhood placed a woman’s highest call in connection to the “motherhood of the people,” that is, above the parenthood of their real, living children. Hand-in-hand with this cult of German motherhood was the growth of eugenic counselling, i.e., the sterilization or killing of those determined to have heritable diseases or “deficiencies” or deformities. Individuals with some of these conditions are noted in Stumpp’s village reports for easy identification and remedial action (note 10). Mennonite physician Dr. Johann J. Klassen of Muntau (Halbstadt) was accused after the war of supporting the liquidation of handicapped children and adults in Orloff, November 1941 (note 11). At the district School for the Deaf in Tiege, near Orloff (Halbstadt), a memorial stands today for 131 deaf and mute children who were killed by the N@zis (note 12).
The confusion came not only from official propaganda, but from the new church contacts as well. Mennonite pastors from the Reich also spoke of “racial contamination,” “healthy breeding” (note 13) and of the threats of self-centred, Volk-destructive individualism to a woman’s “highest and holiest determination” (note 14).
While Mennonites like to think of themselves as a persecuted minority - they were - they were also active participants in oppression, not only against their own friends and family, but also against others, including the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. Part of what it means to be the descendants of Russian Mennonites is to accept the fact that my ancestors led complex lives, frequently participating in oppression against their neighbours. It’s this recognition that make the weekend of discussion hosted by Conrad Grebel University so important.
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I have been contacted by a conference attendee who indicated that there was some confusion about whether this story was to be shared with the general public. I will update this piece once the D'Amato piece from which I pulled has been edited or I get a note from the conference organizer indicating it should be removed altogether.