On 17-20 June 2010 the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund’s Endowment Council is sponsoring a weekend-long symposium in Kingston, Ontario at Queen’s University (Donald Gordon Centre), bringing together some 50 community activists, scholars, archivists, museum curators, internee descendants and artists to develop initiatives that will commemorate and educate all Canadians about what happened during Canada’s first national internment operations of 1914-1920. The event will conclude with a memorial service at Fort Henry, Canada’s first permanent internment camp, on Sunday, 11h00, with wreaths being laid by conference participants and diplomats representing a number of the countries from where the internees came, including Austria, Ukraine, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia and Hungary. The Speaker of the House of Commons, the Honourable Peter Milliken, MP (Kingston and the Islands), is also expected to present a memorial wreath hallowing the memory of the internees.

The symposium’s local organizer, Professor Lubomyr Luciuk, said: ” This meeting represents the culmination of many years of effort on the part of many of those attending. We hope the Kingston Symposium will lay the groundwork for helping the Endowment Council ensure that what happened to Ukrainians and other Europeans during this country’s first national internment operations becomes part of the educational curricula of every province and is recalled through film, artwork and historical markers across Canada. Our fellow citizens need to become better aware of what the internees suffered – not because of anything they had done, but only because of who they were, where they came from. This violation of the civil liberties and human rights of thousands of innocents remains an historical episode in Canadian history that is scarce known. We are beginning the process of recovering this historical memory to help ensure that, in future periods of domestic or international crisis, no other ethnic, religious or racial minorities in Canada suffer as needlessly as the „enemy aliens” of the First World War period did.”

The Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund was established in 2008, with a $10 million endowment by the federal government. In addition to the Ukrainian community–which suffered the most during Canada’s first national internment operations–representatives of the Croatian, Hungarian and Serbian communities also form part of the Endowment Council.

Canadian authorities interned 8,579 men, women and children–primarily from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire–and branded them as „enemy aliens” between 1914 and 192o. 

Please click on the following link to see the event’s poster: Kingston_Symposium_Poster .