Do you participate in the Canmore Museum Stories of Canmore Book Club? Do you want to learn more about the themes highlighted in the monthly books? Do you need a way to spend more time with your Canmore Book Club friends? If so, please join us for our Stories of Canmore: Topic Deep Dives where guest speakers will add different perspectives to the themes brought up in our monthly book choice.
Dr. Lubomyr Luciuck provides insight into the Ukrainian experience of internment in the Bow Valley.
Our book for our January book club meeting is Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of Western Canada’s National Parks by author Bill Waiser and so for our first set of deep dives we will be hearing from different experts on Internment in the Bow Valley.
For our first Deep Dive we warmly welcome Dr. Lubomyr Luciuck a professor at the Royal Military College in Canada. This lecture is made possible by a grant from The Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund.
Born in 1953 in Kingston, ON, to Ukrainian displaced persons parents, he came of age at a time when Ukrainian Canadians were clamouring for a free and independent Ukraine. While the land of his parents has always held a cherished place in his heart, It was while In university that a young Luciuk, himself a product of the Third Wave, met a man of the First, who told him he was interned at Fort Henry during the First World War. It was a part of history Prof. Luciuk had never heard about.
Sensing a chance to inform himself and Canada, Prof. Luciuk made it his mission to immerse himself in the matter, writing scores of books, papers, op eds and letters to the editor, co-creating activist and effective organizations like the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association to have the matter argued In public, and pressuring the government and the media on the matter.