The theme of this issue, “When the Russlaender met the Kanadier,” is close to my heart. I am the product of a third-generation Kanadier meeting a second-generation Russlaender at a church youth event in the 1970s. In my own youth I was unfamiliar with these terms, “Kanadier” and “Russlaender,” yet the existence of a cultural difference between these two worlds, despite the overlap in foods, required no explanation. For me, it was simply self-evident. My Ditsied (this side) started in Winnipeg and extended past the Perimeter Highway to the farmyard of my maternal Russlaender grandparents, outside of the small town of Marquette. Winkler, the home of my paternal Kanadier grandparents, filled the role of my imaginative Jantsied (the other side), a place visited annually around Christmas when we made the trek down Highway 3. If you had asked me the direction of Winkler – north, south, east, west – I likely would not have been able to respond. As John H. Warkentin notes in his article, these terms, Ditsied and Jantsied, “convey meanings to different Mennonites depending on their experiences and imaginations,” and mine had little to do with geography. Jantsied didn’t need to be located on a map; it was a place I didn’t attempt to understand, a place that was soon forgotten on the ride home under the starry night sky listening to the hockey game.

In my youth, it never occurred to me how these places might be intertwined, bridged together in historical moments. It never crossed my mind that my own family history included a round of Mennonite musical chairs in the 1920s: as my paternal great grandfather packed up his family to move from Saskatchewan to Mexico, my teenaged maternal grandmother and grandfather left Soviet Ukraine, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and landed in Saskatchewan and Manitoba with their families. My imagination gave space to the voyage of my maternal side but refused to make room for the people in Canada, my Kanadier relatives in the West Reserve, who met the Russlaender trains, opening their homes to the newcomers.

For almost fifty years, more than an ocean separated the groups. While desire for land was a factor in the 1870s migration, culture also performed a significant role. As the groups reunited on the Prairies during the 1920s, these cultural differences produced contention. Smoking, viewed as sinful to Canadian Mennonites, was a necessity to some male Russlaender. Even something as simple as a Christmas tree, highlighted in Elisabeth Peters’s article, became a symbol of the different spiritual paths taken by each group. As Russlaender Mennonites settled in places like Winkler or Steinbach, the subject of Ralph Friesen’s article, they cultivated a new cultural dynamic, aspects of which were welcomed by the local Kanadier population, while others were viewed with suspicion. Such interactions produced the fullness of human exchanges: friendship and animosity, intolerance and understanding. Sometimes these encounters resulted in marriages, like in the case of Maria Pauls Driedger Buhler. Her story shows how the stability of life in Canada could soothe some of the trauma carried by the Russlaender to their new homes. In other cases, as the articles by Leonard Doell and Elisabeth Peters illustrate, these interactions reunited family members separated by the 1870s migration from imperial Russia to Canada. We often think of the 1870s migration as a movement of intact families, effectively cutting intimate ties with their former homeland. These two articles challenge that assumption.

Also often overlooked is the crisis that many conservative Mennonites faced as they addressed the conflict within their own religious communities over the migration to Mexico. Mennonite leaders like David Toews and others, so committed to bringing their co-religionists to Canada from the Soviet Union, demonstrated little sympathy for the plight of Kanadier communities conflicted over the education of their children and questions of compromise with the world. The exodus of Old Colony Mennonites to Mexico was convenient for those advocating for emigration from the Soviet Union; not surprisingly, criticism arose among some segments of the Kanadier population that empathy was readily demanded from them, but rarely shown to them.

The connections between these stories of migration deserve more research. By telling the story of migration separately, we have reinforced the division, limiting the questions that we ask and allowing for prejudices, like those of my youth, to go unchallenged. Over a hundred years ago, the Kanadier did indeed meet the Russlaender, and we are better for it.