Some random notes on a Mennonite history conference

Posted on November 3, 2026 by doradueck

How I ended up at “Long-Distance Relationships: Communication and the Mennonite Diaspora,” a conference hosted by the Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies in Winnipeg, Oct. 23-24, 2026: Way, way back — in June 2000 to be exact — I heard history professor Gerald Friesen share some interesting ideas concerning time and space and communication transitions as a model for looking at Canadian history. Any history, in fact. This excited me, especially ways communications media and the dynamic of immigration might intersect. I ended up doing my MA thesis on the discourse of, and communication in, the Zionsbote, an early Mennonite periodical, between 1884 and 1906.

I’m long out of the academic world, but when I noticed that communication was the theme of this year’s conference, I got excited again, thinking it might be my last kick at the can for this sort of thing, so why not submit a proposal? I cast about for something. Ah, my grandparents’ letters! More than 140 of them, between 1913 and 1918. Love letters. Grandfather Heinrich Harder was in the forestry service in Russia, and then, without a break, sent to the Caucasus front during the First World War, and grandmother Helena Derksen was at home with her parents in Fischau, Molotschna Colony, Russia (today’s Ukraine). He proposed by letter, she eventually said Yes by letter. I analyzed the correspondence in the context of the war, in the context of courtship customs of the time, and in terms of words-on-paper versus face-to-face.

An opening keynote address and 27 presentations (15 minutes each): Steven Nolt of Elizabethtown College gave the keynote. The title of his address was “‘A Phone Is as Righteous as Its Owner’: Old Order and ‘Plain” Mennonites Navigate Digital Communication and the Internet.” As the title suggests, Nolt went through various Old Order groups to show their allowings around media, and their resistances. I was struck by one of the principles he found in his research: “Human limitation is not a problem to be conquered.”

Interestingly, just this morning I heard writer Zadie Smith, in an interview by Matt Galloway on CBC, say, in response to his question what it means to be human, “To be human is an acknowledgement of limits.” Life has limits, she went on to say, and the techbros, the AI world, have no conception of that, don’t think there should be limits.

There were quite a few papers on letters: Benjamin Eby’s letters to other ministers, women’s “epistolary labour” in Fürstenland, letters across the Iron Curtain, the courtship letters mentioned above, and the challenge of navigating KGB interference in letter writing. There were also papers on radio, newsletters, cassette tapes (audio letters), and travelogue accounts in the Rundschau.

Re cassettes: since my husband and I used to exchange cassette conversations with his family in Paraguay, especially with one of the sisters, I felt briefly rueful during the presentation and discussion about cassette communication, for I recently got rid of the remaining tapes in my possession. Were they of historical interest? I don’t think so. Would my children listen to them? I didn’t think so. If I was wrong about that, it’s too late now.

Newspapers/periodicals: Saturday contained two sessions of four papers each on Mennonite newspapers/periodicals and how they’ve linked Mennonites, how they’ve created what Benedict Anderson called “imagined community.” I really enjoyed these, as I agreed so thoroughly on their role in creating belonging for their reading community, having myself worked at a Mennonite periodical for some years.

Rosemary Vogt, in “Early Formation of Networked Belonging” asked “Why would a people committed to standing apart build such sophisticated systems for staying connected?” She spoke further of the claim that belonging is produced, not just expressed.

The thing is, we don’t just want to stay connected, but historical circumstances like migration and exile and missionary work have scattered Mennonites all over the world.

I was super proud of our niece Caroline Dueck de Klassen, archivist at Colony Fernheim, Paraguay, and her presentation on the first five years of the Mennoblatt. Mennonites had barely settled in the Chaco before beginning, under the leadership of Nikolai Siemens, a newspaper which connected people within Fernheim but also represented the fledgling settlement to the larger world.

In 1933-34, in what was called the Neufeld debate, colonists discussed that representation in the Mennoblatt. It was not about the fact that Fernheim struggled, she said, for that was definitely a fact, but how, and how much of, that struggle should be communicated.

Another amazing paper: Die Mennonitische Post, in its 50 years, has been a vital connector for the scattered colonies (across the Americas) of so-called Low German Mennonites. Until recently, former editor Kennert Giesbrecht said, it was “maybe the only growing printed newspaper.” It has always carefully structured and adapted itself to the particular needs of its reading community.

Speaking of Low German, historian and author Andrei Fast of Kazachkstan, who doesn’t speak English, presented his entire paper, “A Century of Separation, Silence, and Reunion: The Story of the Fast Famiy between Canada and the Soviet Union” in the Low German language. Is this a first, I wonder? Fortunately, for those who don’t understand Low German, or understand it poorly as I do, slides with his content translated into English were projected on to the wall.

It was a genuinely interesting conference, with a variety of communication angles, many more than I can elaborate here. Like the connection between Mennonites and Tolstoy, for example, and a policeman’s story of “Communication, Policing, and the Arrival of Dietsche Migrants in Southern Alberta”. And topics of women’s suffering or sex/gender or the environment in Mennonite newspapers/periodicals; the Mennonite Centre in Molochansk; Canadian Jewish Archives; Canadian Mennonites and the Screen Arts. And so on, and more.

Communication continues to change. Several times in the past, I attended conferences like this and reported on them for Mennonite magazines. When those magazine reports came out, it was hoped that people who couldn’t attend would get at least a glimpse into what had transpired. Now such pressure to report, in any kind of comprehensive way, is lifted. I can be personal and random. 🙂 People were able to attend by livestream, and anyone curious about any of the papers can watch both days of presentations on YouTube. I think that’s a good thing.

Fate unknown

Posted on August 22, 2025 by doradueck

This week I attended, with my sister and brother-in-law, an exhibit at the Mennonite Heritage Museum, Abbotsford, B.C., called “Unearthing the Vanished: Mennonite Experiences in Stalin’s Great Terror.”

It tells the stories of some of an estimated 9000 Mennonites — generally men — arrested during the Terror of 1937-38 in the Soviet Union. These stories are but a sampling of the 9000, and the 9000 itself but a portion of the number in the larger population who were affected in that period. (See, for example, books like Solzenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.)

Janet Boldt, one of the writers/researchers of the exhibit, whose own relatives were taken in the Terror, gave us an excellent introduction to the exhibit.

In panels of text, photos, art, and poetry, and materials like a boy’s begging cloth and copies of trial documents, the exhibit presents the background to the Terror, details of arrests and interrogation and sometimes (if known) outcome, as well as faces in a 3-panel Wall of Sorrow. Even starker than photos are simply names with “profile cutouts.” In many cases, all that can be said is “Fate unknown.”

“Take a moment to gaze at their faces,” the exhibit guide advises. “[A]ll were part of the fabric of society, all were part of what it means to be family.”

A wail of lament

The exhibit also addresses the affect of these arrests and disappearances on women and on children. Collectively, it’s emotional; it’s moving. It’s a wail of lament.

I can’t help thinking of a 1912 funeral photo (below) of my grandfather’s family (he’s the second from right in the back), at the time of his father’s death. Of these siblings, only he and one brother, far left, would later manage to immigrate to Canada. What was the fate of the rest of them? A few letters in the early 1930s speak of Verbannung (exile) and great hunger.Of her family, my grandmother wrote, “If only I knew where all our family members are…. What happened to them all?”

It’s also impossible to look at this exhibit and not think of images and videos we see in the news every day, not arrests into a “Black Raven” vehicle at midnight but masked and often unidentified ICE agents seizing people in broad daylight. Reports of terrible treatment in places like Alligator Alcatraz are emerging. There seems no recourse in these grabs to lawful procedures or justice. It’s neither alarmist nor conspiracy theory to draw parallels between the “disappeared” of my heritage and today’s new masses of the “disappeared.”

Ten Sentences about Mennonite/s Writing Ten

Posted on June 18, 2025 by doradueck

On the flight home from Winnipeg to Vancouver, I scan my notes and discover they’re so pathetically cryptic, they’ll be useless for saying anything meaningful about the conference sessions.
Nevertheless, I can state the facts: this was # 10 in a series of conferences called Mennonite/s Writing, held every 3 years or so, and this time at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Manitoba, June 13-15, under the theme “Words at Work and Play.”
The conference happened against the news of nearly 300 dead in an Air India crash, Israel attacking Iran, ongoing National Guard/ICE craziness in Los Angeles, yet here we were, maybe 110 (?) of us, thinking and talking about writing, for in her keynote, Julia Spicher Kasdorf said her response to global concerns is to become more local, and these days, this was our local.
I really enjoyed the conference — the sessions and keynotes of course, but also the collegiality, the many conversations with old and new friends, a happy sense of belonging because even though I don’t label myself a “Mennonite writer” (what does that actually mean, never mind these regular gatherings trying to figure it out) I still know that in some real way this is my tribe and besides, they’ll have me, which is always a happy and satisfying thing.
The keynotes were highlights: Magdalene Redekop in an almost poetical trail of insights and juxtapositions on “translation” — a task we all take up in our lives — and David Waltner-Toews tackling “the meaning of everything” via science, that is, each of us “an unstable patchwork at our very core” yet interconnected, and Julia Spicher Kasdorf ruminating on Mennonite identity, noting “identity politics reduces complexity” and “identity work can wear a body out” yet calling us — stirringly — to commit to writing as practice and conversation.
I very rarely — honestly — notice what people are wearing, though there were several memorable, if minor, exceptions this time, for I glimpsed a well-known writer in his pyjamas in the residence hallway and I think they were blue and white, and Di Brandt wore a garland of (cloth?) red flowers and leaves on her head during her presentation, and my longtime friend Sarah Klassen looked classy in a neat, belted teal dress, but I do notice space and felt the conference metaphorically balanced by having parts in the aged, wood-toned ambience of the Great Hall and its connecting corridors and other parts in the newish light-filled Marpeck Commons.
Most of the sessions ran concurrently with others, which meant that every choice meant missing something else, but the personal program I selected began wonderfully with David Elias on his grandfather’s brother and Elsie K. Neufeld on her work as a personal historian and Linda Umble on reading Mennonite texts, and ended as wonderfully Sunday morning with three poets — Jeff Gundy, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Ann Hostetler — reading their work, and in between I presented too (“Thinking about Oneself: Desire and Discovery in the Personal Essay and Memoir”) alongside Mary Ann Loewen who gave a memoir talk about herself and her granddaughter, both of which went well, we thought, and provoked some good discussion..
A good number of younger people attended, and some presented, as in a session I attended featuring readings by Joelle Kidd, James Bergman, and Geoff Martin (whom I had “met” before, in a manner of speaking, when essays we’d written sat side-by-side in The New Quarterly — his was the winning one!) and it was great to hear new and younger voices in the mix.
On the Thursday evening before the conference began, In Search of a Mennonite Imagination, edited by Robert Zacharias, containing key texts in Mennonite literary criticism, was launched at McNally Robinson Booksellers and I bought it, all 700+ significant pages of it, and later some other books besides, not as many as I may have wished but more than I could carry in my full backpack, but then a friend who lives in the next town over kindly offered to transport some of them, including the massive tome, in his luggage.
The conference included an optional “literary tour” of Steinbach, which I selected to do, and it was interesting to see places associated with writers such as Miriam Toews and Patrick Friesen and ended with a delicious faspa at the Mennonite museum, where my final “Mennonite” sight of the weekend was a sculpture of the famous Dirk Willems story, which makes me wonder — in terms of two words Julia Spicher Kasdorf set against each other — whether it represented, and could be told, as “continuity” rather than “rupture.”