Image credit: Royal B.C. Museum

By Mel Rothenburger

Armchair Mayor

ROTHENBURGER: The turbulent era that led to an apology to the Sons of Freedom

Mar 2, 2024 | 9:15 AM

THE SONS OF FREEDOM Doukhobor community received an official apology and $10 million this week for the removal of children from their homes in the 1950s.

Without question, it was a traumatic experience for those kids, a heavy-handed response to a social problem rooted in religious radicalism. At the time, though, attitudes were different. I was the same age as many of those children, and I remember some of the events surrounding it.

Premier David Eby’s apology made reference to the seizure of communal property “for community member infractions including school absenteeism.” That doesn’t even scratch the surface of the story — what the children went through was part of a much larger environment of disorder.

The Sons of Freedom were a small sect of the Doukhobors who mass migrated to Canada beginning in 1898-99, with the financial help of novelist Leo Tolstoy, to flee persecution in Russia.

The Sons of Freedom, or Freedomites, as they were sometimes called, lived a rural, vegetarian, pacifist and communal existence. Over time, most of them moved from Saskatchewan to the Kootenays, establishing communities there, the best known of which is Krestova.

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Many of their beliefs clashed with mainstream Canada. As pacifists, they were exempted from military service but they were also against public schools, materialism, registering their land, taking an oath of allegiance and, basically, all government regulation. In protest, they sometimes burned their own money and their own homes, and marched in the nude. Sometimes, they even burned the homes of other Doukhobors.

Although their pacifism prevented them from taking up arms in times of war, it didn’t stop the Sons of Freedom from arson and bombings as a form of civil protest.

A 1948 Royal Commission was called to investigate arsons and bombing attacks. Among other things, the commission decided all Doukhobor children must attend public school.

In 1953, the first of large numbers of Sons of Freedom children were removed from their homes and put in a live-in ad hoc school at New Denver in a process that would last several years. A chain link fence was put up around the grounds. An Ombudsman’s report in 1999 pointed to objectives that went beyond giving the children an education: “protecting” them from their religion and culture, as well as to punish their parents. The report also outlined physical and psychological mistreatment at the institution.

Arsons and bombings escalated. A large number of homes were burned in the Krestova area in the same year as the opening of New Denver. It seems ridiculous today, but many Freedomites were sent to jail for the simple act of public nudity.

We should pause to make note of the fact that throughout the Sons of Freedom troubles, a good many other Doukhobors did abandon communal life, bought property and lived on their own in various towns including in the Okanagan Valley. A good school friend of mine was a Doukhobor and we often played together at each other’s houses.

It’s common these days to say all Doukhobors were unfairly disparaged as trouble makers and I’m sure there was some of that but it isn’t my recollection from the time. Though the situation

must have caused incredible stress to moderate Doukhobors, I think there was a common understanding that the issue was with the violent brand of civil disobedience carried out by the Sons of Freedom.

RCMP made arrests for arson and “counselling criminal acts” but it didn’t stop the violence. A railway bridge was bombed in Nelson. I remember seeing newspaper photos of a transmission tower that was blown up. An attempt was made to destroy the Nelson court house with fire bombs. A CP Rail line was blown up. Schools were torched.

Nelson wasn’t the only community that experienced attacks. Grand Forks, Castlegar, Trail, Kelowna and Creston were also hit, as were post offices in my home town of Oliver and in Osoyoos a few miles to the south. The bomb at the Oliver post office was shoved through an outside letter drop in the middle of the night and caused serious damage to the interior. Five Sons of Freedom members were later arrested.

As a youngster, I didn’t fully understand the background of what was going on but my sense is that the public at large supported the government’s actions against the Sons of Freedom. People were angry and afraid. There was vigilante talk.

The RCMP created a special squad that built a list of suspects with the help of orthodox Doukhobors, and about 270 Freedomites were eventually jailed in connection with the bombings. Gradually, the violence died out. When parents finally agreed to send their children to public schools, the kids were released from New Denver.

I don’t for one moment suggest that what I’ve outlined above adequately summarizes the complicated, turbulent history of the Sons of Freedom. Several books have been written about it, including a controversial best-seller by Vancouver Sun reporter Simma Holt called “Terror in the Name of God, The Story of the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors.”

The government of the day should never have sent those children to New Denver. It believed they needed to have access to education but taking them from their parents and putting them into a make-shift school wasn’t the answer and, as stated in the Ombudsman’s report of 1999, there were other apparent motives.

Robert Bonner, the attorney-general in W.A.C. Bennett’s Socred government, insisted it wasn’t up to British Columbia to accommodate the Sons of Freedom, but the other way around. In the face of public demands that something be done about “the problem,” the Bennett government chose to take a hardline approach that, in some respects, was needed but in others went way too far.

Sadly, the children paid a price for it.

Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.