After the Poker Rally
If you read my blog, this is the church whose parking lot (the foreground) had been plowed the week before for a Poker Rally to raise money to preserve the church.
According to the 2016 Census, there are nearly 1.4 million people in Canada (about 4% of the population) who claim Ukrainian ancestry, although that is undoubtedly an undercount. Though the largest numbers live in Ontario and Alberta, they form over 13% of the the population in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Throughout the Prairies you will find these rural Ukrainian churches, many built in the first wave of immigrants who came between 1891 and 1914. Ukrainian immigration was encouraged by the Canadian government, and especially by Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior, who notoriously lauded Ukrainians as "stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats, born to the soil". These agricultural immigrants were encouraged settle on the Prairies and did so in large numbers.
As with all of my trips over the last five years or so, I wrote a blog post about this trip. If you'd like to see some behind the scene shots and read some stories about the trip I took to shoot these images, take a look.
This was my seventh trip to the Prairies in winter. If you'd like to see images from all those trips, take a look at my Canadian Prairies in Winter album. I have been photographing the Canadian Prairies in one or two trips a year since 2013. If you'd like to see all those images, take a look at my Canadian Prairies album, as well.
After the Poker Rally
If you read my blog, this is the church whose parking lot (the foreground) had been plowed the week before for a Poker Rally to raise money to preserve the church.
According to the 2016 Census, there are nearly 1.4 million people in Canada (about 4% of the population) who claim Ukrainian ancestry, although that is undoubtedly an undercount. Though the largest numbers live in Ontario and Alberta, they form over 13% of the the population in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Throughout the Prairies you will find these rural Ukrainian churches, many built in the first wave of immigrants who came between 1891 and 1914. Ukrainian immigration was encouraged by the Canadian government, and especially by Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior, who notoriously lauded Ukrainians as "stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats, born to the soil". These agricultural immigrants were encouraged settle on the Prairies and did so in large numbers.
As with all of my trips over the last five years or so, I wrote a blog post about this trip. If you'd like to see some behind the scene shots and read some stories about the trip I took to shoot these images, take a look.
This was my seventh trip to the Prairies in winter. If you'd like to see images from all those trips, take a look at my Canadian Prairies in Winter album. I have been photographing the Canadian Prairies in one or two trips a year since 2013. If you'd like to see all those images, take a look at my Canadian Prairies album, as well.