My title comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, a story in which everything can be switched instantly. Just so, the terms Ditsied (This Side) and Jantsied (Other Side) can be alternated, depending on where you are within Mennonite southern Manitoba. Through the Looking-Glass was published in 1871, the same decade Mennonites settled in the East and West Reserves, a coincidence of no significance.¹ However, the words Ditsied and Jantsied have the same space-shifting magical geographical qualities found in Carroll’s book. In this essay I express my personal impressions of Ditsied and Jantsied, together with reflections on the individuality of the East and West Reserves, including the impact of railways, the effects of their different proximities to Winnipeg and the US border, and the responses of visitors and creative writers to life in each reserve.

My early geographical memories in the 1930s and early 1940s are of Lowe Farm, a small village of about four hundred people, sixteen kilometres west of the Red River, where I was born in 1928. It is well removed from the two main clusters of Manitoba Mennonite settlement, the East and West Reserves (hereinafter ER and WR respectively). I did know something of the WR, because that was the home of my father’s family. I also knew the part of Winnipeg south of the CPR main line and near the Red River, because that’s where my mother’s family lived. Lowe Farm, I knew, was in what was called Ditsied, but I gave it little thought. At the same time, I was vaguely aware of a place across the Red River called Jantsied, which I never visited as a child, and first saw when I was sixteen.

Lowe Farm, like most of the WR to the south of it, is situated in the flattest part of what once was the clay bottom of the glacial Lake Agassiz. Before agricultural settlers planted trees it was a land of tall grass prairie. About all I knew of the ER, which we referred to as Jantsied, was that in contrast to our naturally treeless landscape, it was where prairie and woodland met, and it was populated by Low German–speaking Mennonites, like us. Later I learned such a transition natural landscape is called parkland.

A vivid Lowe Farm memory of what I thought Jantsied must be like has stuck in my mind. I don’t recall the year, but it must be from the mid-1930s that I remember a Mennonite family, fleeing drought-stricken southern Saskatchewan in an old car, stayed for a night in Lowe Farm with relatives. They were on their way, I was told, to a refuge, or so I imagined it, in the moister Jantsied, where there were woods. In my imagination Jantsied assumed mythic woodland sheltering qualities, in contrast to my familiar sparse Ditsied landscape around Lowe Farm.

In 1944, my family moved to Steinbach in what now to me instantly and magically became Ditsied – no longer Jantsied. Ditsied and Jantsied thus are magical space-shifting expressions. Beside relative location, the words convey meanings to different Mennonites depending on their experiences and imaginations.

I recall my first glimpse of a new, more enclosing, landscape of parkland, especially of fields and woods on the south of the road as we came closer to our new home in Steinbach. The place we rented on the eastern stretch of the long Main Street had a deep yard that backed on the creek along which Steinbach is oriented. After a good rain, water flowed in the creek, albeit barely and slowly. This was quite unlike Lowe Farm, where all was flat, and shallow ditches paralleled the streets.

This new Ditsied had a further contrast. Lowe Farm, like much larger Altona and Winkler to the south, was a railway town oriented to the tracks (now gone) and to the cardinal directions. Beside the rails stood tall grain elevators (now also gone), owned by corporations far away or by provincial farmer pools. Steinbach, without a railway, was oriented roughly northwest-southeast along the creek. For the first week in Steinbach, if I was out on Main Street when the sun was setting, I was slightly disoriented. The western sun above and along the street was aligned differently from what my mind was accustomed to in the matching street and evening sunset in Lowe Farm. It felt eerie. Parts of my mental map and clock were still in Jantsied.

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When you grow up in a prairie railway town, some things are ingrained in your nature. New Bothwell, I have been informed, was designated “New” to distinguish it from Bothwell, Ontario. On a dazzling July day in 1979 when I drove into Ontario’s Bothwell for the first time, entering not from the highway but from adjacent farmland, and rattling across railway tracks, I instantly had a strong and strange uncanny feeling that I had been there before. I soon realized why I had this response: I felt I was home. Better than any other Ontario town I know, Bothwell, located in a flat agricultural landscape, has a prairie railway town’s tightly integrated alignment of rail and street grid pattern. It felt like the railway town I had grown up in decades earlier.

Mennonites established their settlements in the Canadian Prairies within a quickly developing international agricultural market economy, and commerce was the vital link to the outside world. Railways were of prime importance in establishing this connection, but their impact was different in the two Mennonite reserves.

In the ER, paradoxically, this is exemplified by the survival of Steinbach, even though it was not located on a railway, and by its eventual growth to become southeast Manitoba’s dominant centre. It could have gone otherwise. Manitoba’s first railway was the line from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Winnipeg. Completed in 1878, it went into operation in 1879, a mere five years after the arrival of the first Mennonite immigrants in the ER. Later part of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) system, a short section of the line was built alongside the western boundary of an ER township, and a station was established at Niverville, right at the edge of the reserve. As Ernie Braun and Glen Klassen pointed out in the Historical Atlas of the East Reserve, Niverville’s growth was hampered by the poorly drained lands in its immediate agricultural hinterland. Roads also were adversely affected, making access to Niverville difficult from the interior of the ER. Niverville did have Western Canada’s first commercial railway grain elevator, but it did not become the leading town of the ER. In the meantime, Steinbach grabbed the opportunity.

A branch railway was never built into the eastern part of the ER, but railways still affected that area, including Steinbach. Founded in 1874 as a farm village, within three years Steinbach had its first store. When the railway line on the west side of the ER was completed, a connection from the Steinbach store to Winnipeg suppliers was made via Otterburne. Then in 1898, after the Canadian Northern Railway (CN) began operations ten kilometres east of Steinbach, the link from Steinbach to Winnipeg became much easier via La Broquerie or Giroux. Steinbach was fortunate in its energetic business leaders, who established home-grown enterprises. In the twentieth century, the internal combustion engine and good roads transformed the town’s connection to the regional metropolis, reducing the dependence on rail, and Steinbach flourished.

In the WR the penetration of the larger world through the railway into the reserve was much more overt. Towns such as Gretna, Altona, and Winkler were inserted directly into the WR in 1882 once rail lines were built through it, and then in 1907 Haskett appeared as more rails were laid. As in Steinbach, commerce was essentially in Mennonite hands, but station agents and bank managers were typically non-Mennonites, perhaps along with a Jewish merchant who fitted comfortably into the Mennonite community, as I knew from Lowe Farm. All were part of a Canadian economic system linked to the world, sending out agricultural commodities and receiving manufactured goods in return.

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Many kinds of connections to the outside world existed, not just commerce. In their early years, the Mennonite reserves were of keen interest to non-Mennonite visitors, simply because the settlements were so exceptional in the Prairies. Aristocrats, including minor royalty, visited both reserves during their early years. Two examples follow, one well known, the other not.

The Mennonite distinction between Ditsied and Jantsied was unknown to such visitors. However, the sojourners recorded their impressions of Mennonite settlement, and their responses provide an opportunity to see each reserve through the eyes of others. We see the ER through the strategic eyes of someone from the governing class of the British empire, and the WR through the nostalgic eyes of a Russian exile, familiar with the kinds of landscapes from which the Mennonites came. Mennonite farm villages had barely been established when the ER welcomed its visitor who came by trail, but the WR had been settled for twenty years when its visitor arrived by rail.

After the Dominion Lands Act of 1872, individual Ontario homesteaders began migrating to the young province of Manitoba, taking up individual homesteads, but the Mennonite and Icelandic migrations of the 1870s were the first large group immigrant movements to the Canadian West. Since Queen Victoria’s representative in Ottawa was touring the West in 1877, both the new Mennonite and Icelandic communities, welcome harbingers of hoped-for future migrations, deserved a visit.

In the summer of 1877, Governor General Lord Dufferin and Lady Dufferin made a carefully arranged official visit to the ER, where the Mennonites had only recently arrived. The Dufferin entourage camped the night of August 21, 1877, about ten kilometres west of Steinbach. Lord Dufferin, fifty-one years old, was in his prime as an orator. In his address to about seven hundred assembled Mennonites, he recognized the newcomers’ pacifism but could not resist the metaphor of war as he alluded to the hard battle they were waging in settling the prairie. In her journal, Lady Dufferin wrote that Mennonites alone were ready to settle woodless plains, and noted the amazing progress they had made in only three years.²

The governor general’s group returned to Winnipeg on August 23. Then in late August and September the party travelled eastward by the Dawson Trail to Lake of the Woods, and then by the Winnipeg River and Lake Winnipeg to visit the new Icelandic settlement at Gimli, which dated from 1875. Thus both Mennonite and Icelandic early migrations were recognized.

Prince Peter Kropotkin escaped imperial Russia in 1876. Known today as “the anarchist prince,” Kropotkin actually did not use his title of nobility. He was making his living in England as a science writer at the time he visited Canada in 1897 to report on the proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science when it held its annual meeting in Toronto that year. Following the Association’s summer field excursion from Toronto all the way to British Columbia, the fifty-five-year-old prince took a private side trip to visit the farm villages in the WR, on lands Mennonites began to occupy in 1875. Writing in 1897 from a Winkler hotel to his friend Professor James Mavor in Toronto, Kropotkin said he intended to travel the following day through the Mennonite settlements to Gretna.³ We don’t know what arrangements he made for the journey on Wednesday, September 22, but likely it was by horse and buggy. We do know Kropotkin reached Gretna, since in an article published in 1898 in the magazine The Nineteenth Century, he says he met H. H. Ewert there. In approaching a Mennonite village, Kropotkin tells his readers, he was immediately transported to imperial Russia as he saw the trees Mennonites had grown from saplings. Mennonites, he writes, prosper everywhere they move, and Canadians say they are the wealthiest settlers in the neighbourhood. He was informed that about one-third had left the villages to farm by themselves, in part for economic reasons, in part to get away from the strictures of conservative elders.⁴

Someday, I hope that Erin Koop Unger of the Mennotoba blog will drive with her husband, Andrew Unger, to the Eigenfeld campsite,⁵ and after listening to Lord Dufferin’s speech, have an imaginary faspa with Lord and Lady Dufferin in the arbour prepared for them on the stap (prairie), and report on how the couple respond to Erin’s “5 Questions.” Someday, I also hope that Armin Wiebe will write a tale of an anarchist prince staying a night in Winkler in the 1890s, poking through Gutenthal, perhaps treated to faspa, before staying the night in Gretna and then continuing onward by train to Winnipeg.

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Through the twentieth century both reserves thrived. In the ER, Steinbach became the largest urban centre in southeast Manitoba, propelled by light industry, greatly improved communications in the region, and increased commerce. In the WR, Altona and Winkler grew through agricultural processing and light manufacturing. In both reserves agriculture was intensified over the years.

In the broader space relations of these prairie reserves, two critical factors stand out. First is the relative closeness of the ER to Winnipeg, compared to the greater distance of the WR from the regional metropolitan centre. Second, the ER’s location is well removed from the Canada-US international boundary, whereas the WR is right on the boundary.

Growing up in Lowe Farm, as I did from 1928 to 1944, Morris was the nearest town with pharmaceutical, medical, and other services unobtainable in our village. The next tier up in the urban hierarchy was Winnipeg. We had a railway connection to Winnipeg for shipping outgoing grain and animals for slaughter, and for incoming agricultural machinery, coal for winter heating, and gravel for improving roads. But for consumer goods, a daily transfer (truck) took orders to Winnipeg in the morning (say, to Eaton’s) and brought goods back that same evening. Kids would be at the transfer office, waiting to get their new hockey sticks right off the back of the truck. The village was so small that the driver knew most of us.

When my family moved to Jantsied and the ER, I quickly saw that Steinbach had much larger transfer services to Winnipeg, along with connections to the railway in La Broquerie and Giroux. When highways were greatly improved and extended in the last half of the twentieth century, Steinbach gained in a two-fold way: northward by easier and quicker access to and from Winnipeg, and southward to an expanded hinterland toward the US border. Local Steinbach entrepreneurs recognized opportunities engendered by these developments. Two large Canada-wide transport companies emerged, and also auto dealerships that grew to serve Winnipeg as well as southeast Manitoba. In the northern part of the ER, daily commuting to and from jobs in Winnipeg became practical with good roads, as the recent growth of Niverville shows.

On Main Street, the Niverville of today recalls its space relations of an earlier time in a heritage wall that, among other things, draws attention to the Crow Wing Trail, used to travel by Red River cart from the Red River settlement (today’s Winnipeg) to Saint Paul, and to Manitoba’s first railway. Only a few kilometres to the west of Niverville is the Mennonite Landing, the historic site located on the Red River at the mouth of the Rat River, where the first Mennonite migrants landed from a river boat in 1874 on their way to the ER.

The WR extends a long distance east–west, and this length together with substantial north–south breadth provides sufficient space in a highly productive agricultural area to support a typical segment of the prairie urban system. Here the local urban hierarchy that emerged on three railways at the turn of the twentieth century comprised the larger commercial centres of Morden, Winkler, Altona, and Gretna, and the smaller places of Plum Coulee, Horndean, Rosenfeld, and Haskett. Other railway-based local urban systems exist to the north, but no large centre intervenes between the WR and Winnipeg. Emerson had hoped to command the WR’s trade, but the Boundary Commission Trail (or Post Road, as it was known to Mennonites) was no match for direct rail connections to Winnipeg. To the south, any potential hinterland was sharply cut off by the international boundary. Commercial activities and civic administration were organized through the existing Canadian urban system, as was true in the ER.

Still, just by being there, the US to the south had a constant impact on the WR. Life north of the boundary was connected to Winnipeg, and from there east to Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa. To the south, life was connected to Grand Forks, Chicago, New York, and Washington. Of course, there was local interaction across the border, such as occasional shopping at nearby places such as Neche and Walhalla, rare use of agricultural services, and occasional golf before there were local courses in the WR. Lowe Farm is a considerable distance from the border, but some of our neighbours would drive to Neche to buy particular items, and my relatives in Winkler too sometimes travelled across the border to Walhalla.

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As terms, Ditsied and Jantsied are simple, direct ways of identifying the relative locations of the two main Mennonite settlements separated by the Red River. The terms may have been used as early as 1874, since an offshoot of the first Mennonite migration to Manitoba selected land on the Scratching River (now known as the Morris River) at Rosenort, west of the Red River, rather than in the ER. Associations across the Red River continued, and it would have been natural to use Ditsied and Jantsied to refer to one or the other community. Whether or not that distinction between Scratching River and the ER happened right away we don’t know; however, it was likely soon applied to a much larger territory. This came after the creation of the WR in 1876 west of the Red River, diagonally across from the existing ER on the east side of the Red. In the late 1870s, Mennonite immigrants directly from imperial Russia began to settle the WR.

Separation does not mean lack of knowledge of the other. In a farming culture this is especially true of land; news of good land travels fast. Soon there was also a movement of some ER Mennonite families from poorly drained or stony land in the ER to land in the WR without such disadvantages. Most ER Mennonites did not move, but this migration across the Red River clearly would have introduced familial associations between Ditsied and Jantsied.

In her autobiography Enchantment and Sorrow, Gabrielle Roy (1909–83) describes her sense of being in a strange place, yet close to home, when she accompanied her mother to Winnipeg department stores across the Red River from their home in Franco-Manitoban St. Boniface as a child.⁶ She was experiencing a different culture. In southern Manitoba’s Mennonite settlements, the distinction between Ditsied and Jantsied was not one of culture, nor of economic rivalry, but simply that of the relative location of two large Mennonite communities separated by the Red River. The main external economic relations and connections of the two reserves were not across the Red with each other, but each separately to Winnipeg. To this day, such a distinction continues.

Once roads were improved, the Eaton’s bargain basement in central Winnipeg, with its restrooms and nearby seating, provided a comfortable place for Mennonite folk from both reserves to mingle socially when visiting the metropolis. This became known as “Winnipeg in the basement” (Vinnipek enn tjalla). In each reserve there was general underlying respect for accomplishments in Jantsied. However, when acquaintances or relatives from the two reserves met to chat in Eaton’s, or elsewhere in Winnipeg for that matter, tongue-in-cheek Low German bantering and humorous mutual disparagement between Ditsied and Jantsied soon began, and thrusts such as “You’re from Jantsied, what do you know!” (“Dü best von Jantsied, wout weest dü!”) were exchanged.

Individual Manitoba Mennonites will have their own versions of how they use Distsied and Jantsied. I will give further experiences from Lowe Farm. We had family friends at Rosenort on the Morris River, also, of course, living on our side of the Red River, but the term Ditsied was never used in reference to where they lived. An aunt, uncle, and cousins lived in Arnaud, southwest of the ER. They were on the other side of the Red River, but we did not travel to Jantsied when we visited, because Jantsied referred specifically, in my mind at least, to the Mennonite communities of the ER, and to parkland rather than the open prairie landscape of Arnaud. The instant I became a Steinbach resident, all Mennonite communities on the west side of the Red River – whether Rosenort, Lowe Farm, or the WR – became Jantsied. In short, there are no consistent, hard and fast rules, because the expressions Ditsied and Jantsied are space shifters, their use depends on where you live and your life experience.

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In both reserves creative regional voices emerged. Print and stationery shops play a vital cultural role in small towns, and their newspapers reflect life and stimulate it. Soon after I arrived in Steinbach, the local printery, which published the German-language Steinbach Post, became for me an important focus of cultural life, a stimulating place to visit and exchange ideas. The Post connected a widespread Mennonite German-speaking community that extended well beyond Canada into Central and South America. It also served the local Mennonite area, but despite some excellent correspondents and contributors, it was not really a regional weekly for southeast Manitoba. In 1946, Eugene Derksen, of the family which owned the printery and produced the Post, founded the Carillon News. He purposely named the new weekly after the large southeast Manitoba electoral district of Carillon, signalling the region he hoped to cover and serve. The paper quickly achieved this goal.

In Altona, D. W. Friesen’s small stationery shop, concentrating on school supplies, grew into one of Canada’s largest printers of high-quality books (known today as Friesens Corporation), guided by his sons. When I was a youngster, I remember entering the stationery shop with my father, a friend of D. W. Friesen, on a visit to Altona. The shop was crammed with the kind of paper stock I never saw in Lowe Farm. In 1941, son D. K. Friesen founded the Altona Echo, which in 1955 became the Red River Valley Echo after absorbing the Morris Herald. Like the Carillon News, it became a successful regional weekly, serving an area well beyond Altona. Television, the internet, and social media have been hard on newspapers everywhere, especially small-town papers, and the Echo published its last issue in 2020. The Carillon News continues, although it is no longer locally owned. However, the two papers had important cultural roles in helping establish a sense of regional feeling in their respective areas.

Within Canada, the two reserves are Mennonite homelands. Creative writers vitally reinforce and enrich feelings for a homeland and belonging. Authors from both reserves have described life in the communities they know personally, and non-Mennonite writers provide perspective by depicting life in adjacent areas. For a comprehensive analysis of Manitoba Mennonites and the creative arts, readers should turn to Magdalene Redekop’s recent book Making Believe: Questions About Mennonites and Art. I will focus on what both Mennonite and non-Mennonite authors tell us of the geography of Mennonite culture areas, first in the ER and then in the WR.

The parkland between the forest and prairie, which runs through the ER and continues westward to the Manitoba Interlake and the Saskatchewan River country all the way to the Rocky Mountains, is an ecological transition zone. Parts of the parkland in southeast Manitoba are good farmland, but large tracts in the transition to woodland are marginal for agriculture. It is the home of a varied population, including First Nations, Métis, Mennonites, French Canadians, and Ukrainian Canadians.

In 1969, Mort Forer (1922–81), a Winnipeg writer and social worker, published The Humback, a novel describing the difficult life of a Métis community east of the ER (probably based on Richer), dependent on occasional jobs in the woods and welfare. Forer writes that none of the life under the shelter of the forest “dares, on threat of eternal death, peer past the ridge onto that garden of the prairie that lies a thousand miles sweet to the west.”⁷ Only the northern part of the ER is in that “garden of the prairie,” but nearly all of the WR enjoys its endowment. The ER is not mentioned in the novel, although it is clear that a central character, Abe Epp, who owns the pulpwood outfit on which the community depends, grew up there.

The Humback is a tragic symbolic portrayal of the lives of Indigenous peoples in southern Manitoba whose lands were taken by settler Canadians, including Mennonites. Today, Canada is finally coming to grips with how dispossession affected Indigenous communities, and the grievous harm of assimilationist policies, especially through the residential school system. In one sense Mennonites were immigrants; in another, they were colonizing settlers furthering imperialism, and that is how, in part, they were seen by Lord Dufferin – it was the underlying reason for his visit.

Arnold Dyck (1889–1970) published stories in Low German filled with humour and hard truths about a pair of farmers named Koop and Bua living in hardscrabble parkland south of Steinbach. In these stories, Dyck acquainted his Mennonite readers with the wider society around them, encouraging them to reflect on it. The stories were first published in the Steinbach Post beginning in 1932 and then in his literary journal Mennonitische Volkswarte. A four-volume collection of Dyck’s writing was published in 1985–90. The stories in Low German are accessible to few Manitoba Mennonites today, but Mennonite scholars have summed up Dyck’s insights into Mennonite life in English introductions to the collected works and in scholarly articles.

Outside social forces have always affected Mennonites, no matter where they lived. These forces include deeper interactions with neighbouring non-Mennonite societies and with non-Mennonites who move into the Mennonite communities. In the last decades of the twentieth century, a younger generation of ER Mennonite authors began to write about this changing society. They range from a local historian to internationally known authors. None directly experienced the farm villages that once existed in the ER.

In the novel Sarah’s Prairie (1995), historian Delbert Plett reconstructs life in a farm village in the northern, most productive, part of the ER. It is the only novel we have that describes economic activities and daily social life in the ER farm villages. Attention is given to internal tensions as evangelical missionaries attempt to convert conservative Mennonites, and to the traumatic effects of the machine age, especially as the motor car enters a horse-and-buggy society. If anyone thought that life in Mennonite farm villages was simple, this book, almost like a sociological treatise, shows there is no hiding from either the outside world or the cultural changes amongst Mennonites themselves.

Patrick Friesen, in his poetry collections the lands i am (1976), The Shunning (1980), You Don’t Get To Be a Saint (1992), and St. Mary at Main (1998), reveals the searing cleavages and conflicts that result when a more open and liberal world intrudes on a patriarchal society, especially as these clashes have often played out in individuals, families, and Mennonite churches.

David Bergen, in his novels A Year of Lesser (1996) and See the Child (1999), catches the fundamental landscape contrasts between the ER’s productive fertile clays and the stony bushland where farmers such as those depicted by Arnold Dyck lived. The underlying conflicts between modern ways and older conservative Mennonite values barely register in these books: the fast-paced life of today’s urban North American society, including its evangelical extremists, already dominates. We see the increasing Mennonite interaction with the neighbouring French-Canadian communities, as well as the constant movement made possible by the highway and motor car, not only within the region but within southern Manitoba and the adjacent US.

In 2000, Miriam Toews, a Steinbach native, wrote a gentle memoir of her schoolteacher father, a manic-depressive who took his own life. In Swing Low: A Life, she adopts his voice, writing the book as if her father was composing it. What poignantly emerges is everyday life in Steinbach, where until recently everyone knew who everyone else was, and compassionate people were willing to overlook personal shortcomings. Toews’s incidental comments on Ditsied (Ditzied) and Jantsied (Yantzied) are astute: “The Mennonite communities on this, the east side of the Red River, are called Ditzied, in Low German meaning ‘this side.’ The Mennonite communities on the other side of the Red are called Yantzied, meaning ‘that side.’ Of course, to the Mennonites living on the west side of the river, it is just the opposite. Both sides believe that those from Yantzied are less sophisticated and more religiously conservative. Naturally it’s an argument with no end.”⁸

Andrew Unger in Once Removed (2020) reflects on clashing views on what is worth preserving in a growing Mennonite town, one that originated as a farm village, in the face of urban economic progress. Protecting particular aspects of Mennonite material culture, including the former home of a noted local novelist who has left for the city, is juxtaposed against the penetrating power of today’s consumer society. Serious topics are approached with humour. The occasional Low German words and place names evoke the sense of deep roots in a Mennonite culture area.

In the territory west of the Red River, authors have written about life outside and inside the WR. In 1933, Frederick Philip Grove published Fruits of the Earth, set in the flat flood-prone lands between the Pembina Mountains and the Red River. It is a landscape typical of much of the WR, and extends from there to Lowe Farm and beyond. Land drainage made this flat clay area productive. Grove did not describe Mennonite settlement or life, though he knew Mennonites, having lived in Haskett and Winkler. He examined the universal theme of obsessive ambition for more material possessions, in this case land, at the cost of family and community relationships. From Grove you get a feeling of the sparse landscape during the early stages of settling the prairie, and the need for shelter belts. These conditions were also experienced by Mennonites, and as Kropotkin noted they nurtured trees in their farm villages as they had done on the southern Ukrainian steppe. You also get a sense of the close link between land and town, essential for life in the Prairies as agricultural settlement developed. The introspective description of the prairie landscape, seen through the eyes of Grove’s central character, is reminiscent of Russian author Anton Chekhov’s evocation of the spirit of the steppe in his long story The Steppe, set in a region where Mennonites had settled.⁹

Sandra Birdsell, of Mennonite and Métis descent, grew up in Morris near the Red River. Her collection of short stories The Two-Headed Calf (1997), is set in a place called Agassiz, modelled on Morris. The stories have few Mennonite characters, but we learn about ordinary life in the ethnically mixed communities that form part of the new larger Canadian society. As generations pass, numerous Mennonites have integrated into such communities, living a cross-cultural existence. Birdsell takes us into their human core. Love, comfort, bewilderment, disdain, estrangement, the complexities of life – all are there. Literary critic Philip Marchand compares Birdsell’s grotesque title, referring to the uneasy coexistence of Mennonites and Métis, to Hugh MacLennan’s term “Two Solitudes,” a phrase widely known in Canada that encapsulates the relationship of English and French Canadians.¹⁰

Di Brandt grew up in the farm village of Reinland. Her early poetry collections questions I asked my mother (1987), Agnes in the Sky (1990), and mother, not mother (1992) poignantly illuminate the wrenching, highly personal family upheavals that occur when a conservative generation is confounded, made sorrowful, and infuriated by the social changes that envelop and change its children. Family members love, but do not understand one another. Some families cope, adjust, and mutually accept change; in others there is rigid dismissal and cleavage. Brandt conveys the usually unexpressed anguish that cultural transformation so often brings.

David Elias, raised in part in Haskett near WR farm villages, has published two collections of connected short stories, Crossing the Line (1992) and Places of Grace (1997). The stories are set in a Mennonite farm village of the 1950s located right on the US border. We get a sense of the great cottonwoods sheltering the village street in the midst of endless level grain fields, trees now old that had so impressed Kropotkin. To the west, the Pembina Mountains provide a welcome backdrop, and even though the hills are not high, they provide the same sense of romantic contrast for Mennonite farmers that the Rockies do for Alberta ranchers on the shortgrass plains. Close across the international boundary, at the foot of a village street, is the harsh outside world of the new atomic age in the silos of alien ICBM weapons, inserted into fertile North Dakota farmlands. Seemingly, life is serene in the village, but there are hidden conflicts. The general pastoral congeniality of farm village life for children growing up contrasts all too soon with the looming claustrophobic, restrictive side of a patriarchal closed community. Without pressing the issue, Elias gives a sensitive picture of social change in Mennonite life as it comes to terms with the larger society.

Armin Wiebe, in three comic novels – The Salvation of Yasch Siemens (1984), Murder in Gutenthal: A Schneppa Kjnals Mystery (1991), and The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst (1995) – mainly set in an imaginary Low German-speaking WR farm village, and also in his later collection of more introspective stories, Armin’s Shorts (2015), shows that in our present age of cars and pickup trucks the young generation in rural areas moves about as restlessly and energetically as urban youth, and is as fully capable of producing its own fun. He describes the contemporary rural activities of the young in densely settled farm villages located somewhere in the Altona/Gretna area: farm work, wheels, fastball, getting to know girls, robust fun, local politics, religious revivals, breaking rules, and occasional visits to railway towns and distant Winnipeg. Wiebe’s frequent humorous use of Low German (in his usage, “Flat German”), occasional Low German word order, and vivid English versions of Low German words deftly envelop you in this distinctive rural Canadian society, still speaking a vernacular language in a sea of English. Pungently, Wiebe presents the unstifled, good-humoured, earthy side of the community. You can’t hold these young people down. The traditional local Mennonite culture is handled affectionately even if humorously, but this is set against a cutting satire of evangelical activities in the villages, local political shenanigans, and home truths about class distinctions. Hurtling around in pickups and courting on the fly stand out against a more sedate traditional Mennonite culture.

Through the art of these creative writers we learn about geographical individuality and sense of place in different parts of the southern Manitoba Mennonite culture area. However, a common powerful thread that runs right across these lands on both sides of the Red River, where Ditsied and Jantsied are still understood and used, is the impact of North American society and harrowing local cultural change. In both the ER and WR, Mennonite novelists and poets evoke a Mennonite culture where deep conservative roots are implicit, and are affected by outside and internal forces, both secular and spiritual. These influences create tensions between young and old generations, challenge patriarchal values, and create family and community ruptures.

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The ER and WR do not exist in isolation. They are connected to the outside world through the Canadian urban system represented by the urban centres and the railway lines converging on Winnipeg. The connections take many forms, far more than the few briefly considered here.

In the almost century and a half since the ER and WR were established in southern Manitoba, populations, landscapes, and life have changed significantly, and the changes continue. Clearly, however, the ER and WR remain Mennonite homelands, recognized not only by Mennonites but also by non-Mennonite Manitobans even if by other names. But to Mennonites, this distinctive two-part culture area has long been perceived and imaginatively bound together across the Red River as Ditsied and Jantsied.

Though there is no significant economic or administrative association between them, the cultural and spatial bonds represented by Ditsied and Jantsied reinforce the idea of a common Mennonite cultural heritage in the two areas, based on language, kinship, and social experiences. Intangible and elusive as the expressions Ditsied and Jantsied are, together they add to the sense of place, the attachment and the sense of belonging possessed by Mennonites in southern Manitoba.

Mennonite settlement in Manitoba is not as closely interwoven with the Red River itself as it is with the broader Red River basin, in which the lands that comprise the ER and WR are located. Nevertheless, the river has crucial, symbolic space-defining importance. Ditsied and Jantsied are mental constructs, hinged on the Red River, that emerged quite naturally out of Mennonite life in Manitoba. They have an imaginative regional dimension, an indeterminate spatiality since no specific place is implied. If more exact location information is required, and usually it is, one immediately turns to existing specific place names that can be located on a map. There is as well a largely unconscious combination of distance and time that is part of Ditsied and Jantsied. Travelling to Jantsied implies a journey of some length, at least half a day there and back.

In everyday conversation, use of Low German continues to decline, and thus also the colloquial use of Ditsied and Jantsied. That these space-shifting terms have lasted this long points to their practical geographical utility for Low German speakers. As long as Low German is understood and used in Manitoba, the two expressions will be a subtle cultural bonding force, helping to give regional identity within the province to the lands on either side of the Red River re-settled by Mennonites in the nineteenth century.

Today, Manitoba Mennonite writers still use Ditsied and Jantsied, and if this keeps on there is hope that the words will survive beyond the memory of older folks, history books, and the academy. Certainly, Andrew Unger’s satiric blog The Unger Review (formerly The Daily Bonnet) gives the expressions life. So does Erin Koop Unger in her blog Mennotoba on local history, geography, and culture. Since the words make no sense to non-Manitoba Mennonites, it is unlikely that Ditsied and Jantsied will ever enter Canadian English dictionaries. But wait. If the terms continue to be used by bestselling authors setting stories in the southern Manitoba Mennonite culture area, Ditsied and Jantsied may become Canadianisms, included in dictionaries of Canadian English beyond their current representation in the late Jack Thiessen’s Mennonite Low German Dictionary.

John Warkentin is a professor emeritus of geography at York University and the author of several books on the settlement and regional geography of Western Canada.

1. I am grateful to Germaine Warkentin for making the connection with Lewis Carroll in the title. ↩︎
2. Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, My Canadian Journal, 1872–’78 (London: John Murray, 1891), 332–36. ↩︎
3. Peter Kropotkin to James Mavor, Sept. 21, 1897, University of Toronto, Fisher Rare Book Library, Fisher MS 119, box 10B, file 5. ↩︎
4. Peter Kropotkin, “Some of the Resources of Canada,” The Nineteenth Century, March 1898, 403–5. ↩︎
5. See Ernest N. Braun and Glen R. Klassen, Historical Atlas of the East Reserve (Winnipeg: Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society, 2015), 106. ↩︎
6. Gabrielle Roy, Enchantment and Sorrow: The Autobiography of Gabrielle Roy, trans. Patricia Claxton (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987), 1–8. ↩︎
7. Mort Forer, The Humback (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969), 11. ↩︎
8. Miriam Toews, Swing Low: A Life (Toronto: Stoddart, 2000), 8. ↩︎
9. Frederick Grove, Fruits of the Earth (Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1933), 160–66; Anton Chekhov, The Steppe, in Anton Chekhov: The Complete Short Novels, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 2005), 6–8, 41–3. ↩︎
10. Toronto Star, June 14, 1997. ↩︎