Silent Ethnicity: The Dutch of New Brunswick

Richard Wilbur is Supervisor of the Legislative Research Service at the
New Brunswick Legislature and author of The Rise of French New
Brunswick.

This slim volume is based on even slimmer scholarship, leaving this
reviewer to wonder why it was ever published. The author says it was a
“chance discussion in 1985” with a fellow academic that “led him
to examine the settlement of the Dutch in New Brunswick.” Van den
Hoonaard and his research team spent two summers interviewing Dutch
immigrants and their descendants. Besides collating the results from 446
households, they carried out seven interviews “involving fifteen
people” and mailed out 65 questionnaires. These activities were aided
by one grant from the Secretary of State, three from the Department of
Employment and Immigration, and one from the New Brunswick Department of
Labour. The end result was 65 pages of text, 10 pages of appendixes, and
an 8-page bibliography.

While acknowledging “the substantial contributions of the Dutch to
the development of New Brunswick,” the author is “hesitant to assert
that such contributions are ‘typically’ Dutch.” Indeed, based on
the “external facets . . . we might conclude that they are indeed not
Dutch.” However, “studied in the proper cultural context which is
intangible, these contributions are moored to the Dutch sense of moral
geography, freedom of expression, civic responsibility, and the value
placed on home and family life.”

This limp conclusion contrasts sharply with the statement of a senior
official in the New Brunswick Department of Agriculture, himself of
Dutch ancestry, in which it was noted that the greatest contribution of
the Dutch was to the dairy industry, 30 percent of whose members “are
of Dutch origin.” This would be acknowledged by most informed New
Brunswickers, regardless of their ethnicity. So much for research based
on surveys and questionnaires.