The Mennonites: A Biographical Sketch

T.D. Regehr is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan.
He is the author of Mennonites in Canada, 1939–1970: A People
Transformed, The Beauharnois Scandal: A Story of Canadian
Entrepreneurship and Politics, and Remembering Saskatchewan:

This is an exceptionally attractive portrait of the Old Colony
Mennonites in Ontario and Mexico. The author is a talented and creative
photographer whose many black-and-white photographs offer human-interest
insights into the religious, social, cultural, and economic lives of a
small and unique branch of the larger Mennonite denomination. Unlike
most other Canadian Mennonite groups, and like the Old Order Mennonites
and the Old Order Amish in Ontario and the United States, the Old Colony
Mennonites have clung steadfastly to their traditional, simple, rural
lifestyles. Yet they were also obliged to adapt to changing
circumstances as they tried to establish themselves in new settlements.

The Old Colony Mennonites trace their history of the last two centuries
back to Russia. Their ancestors came to southern Manitoba in the 1870s
and 1880s with the intention of building their own churches, schools,
and villages. They wanted to minimize contact with the rest of society
and established flourishing farming communities in Manitoba and
Saskatchewan. But provincial school legislation in the early 1920s made
it mandatory that they send their children to approved “national”
Canadian schools. Many of the Old Colony Mennonites in Manitoba and
Saskatchewan opted instead for immigration to Mexico where they were
promised religious concessions that seemed threatened in Canada.

Serious economic difficulties (due mainly to crop failures),
mechanization, and rapid population growth that left many of their
younger members without sufficient land to establish themselves as
farmers caused some Old Colony Mennonites who had retained some Canadian
citizenship rights to return to Canada as migrant farm laborers.
Eventually, the returnees established fairly permanent communities in
labor-intensive farming communities in southern Ontario, Manitoba, and
Alberta.

The author/photographer kept a thoughtful and reflective diary during
the time he spent with the Old Colony Mennonites in Ontario and Mexico
between 1990 and 1999. He describes the text accompanying his remarkably
free and candid photographs as “a train of thought composed of
flashbacks and fixations drawn from dairy notes and the silt of
memory.” He acknowledges some of the problems and challenges these
people face, but also captures magnificently joyous experiences of their
lives. There is a brief historical introduction and several maps,
followed by numerous full-page glossy black-and-white photographs of
everyday Old Colony Mennonite life, occasionally interspersed with short
vignettes of people, places, and circumstances encountered by the
author. His book is a respectful, informative, personalized, and
realistic tribute to a small and unusual group of people who are trying
to perpetuate their cherished way of life in modern and often difficult
and intrusive settings.