The Mennonite experience in Manitoba during the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a story of resilience, change, and cultural adaptation, detailing the community’s transformative journey in a new land.
John A. Macdonald, having brought Manitoba into Confederation in 1870, quelled the Red River Rebellion, and signed the Stone Fort Treaty (Treaty Number 1) in August 1871, which pushed the First Nations onto reserves, found himself in a dilemma.
Some of the first people the Mennonites encountered in Manitoba, already at the time of the visit by the Mennonite delegates in 1873, were the Red River Métis, who constituted the majority of the population at the time.
The Manitoba demographics census of 1870 provides a window into what Manitoba looked liked just three short years before the arrival of the Mennonite delegates in 1873.
Beginning in 1874, Mennonites emigrated to Canada to safeguard their way of life, which faced threats in Imperial Russia.
The second year of Mennonite immigration to Manitoba began earlier than in 1874. The first group to arrive at the confluence of the Rat and Red River, May 12, 1875, had overwintered in Ontario.
At about midnight July 31, 1874, in what would be the first large bloc settlement of Europeans in the new province of Manitoba, the first boatload of 332 Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites aboard the paddle-wheeler International of the Kittson line passed the confluence of the Red and Rat Rivers and continued to Winnipeg.
The relief felt by the first Mennonites upon arrival at the immigration sheds in August 1874 morphed into disappointment when they realized there was no reliable water supply.
Mass migration across about 20,000 kilometres of land and sea was, until the 1870s, a daunting proposition, given the time, expense and logistics involved.
The lands on which the Mennonites settled were the ancestral lands of First Nations peoples.
