Challenging the Nationalist Hegemony: The Third Generation Displaced Persons and New Approaches to the Difficult Past

Recent years have seen the emergence of critical studies pro-
duced by third- generation Displaced Persons (hereafter DPs),
questioning ethno-nationalist historical narrations, hegemonic
in the community. Yet, in the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, such
studies have been absent. Kassandra Luciuk’s current study is
written by someone raised in the political elite of the Ukrainian
ethno-nationalist community, in dialogue with and challeng-
ing the historical memory that her parents dedicated their lives
to promote. Her study reads like a Bildungsroman of a young
person whose eyes were opened to an ostracized rivalling leftist
community tradition. In the process, she started to question the
Nationalists monopoly of defining what it means to be Ukrainian in
Canada. Her still-unpublished 2021 dissertation sheds new light
on ultra-nationalist political violence in Canada and the central role
of Ukrainian Nationalists in establishing normative multiculturalism
in Canada. The Nationalist hegemony in the community was es-
tablished through the erection of monuments, a politicized folklore,
and the development of an elaborate victimization narrative of
Soviet genocide abroad, Canadian concentration camps and “lin-
guistic genocide” at home. Through claiming a share for Galician
Ukrainians in the settler colonialist project, Ukrainians insisted on a
special status as a “founding people” on the Canadian prairies