Heritage on display

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This article was published 05/10/2019 (2481 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Teacher Jesse Hofer hopes Manitobans can see the beauty and serenity of colony life through the eyes of Hutterite schoolchildren.

“Because we tend to live in fairly isolated communities and not everyone gets a chance to visit, people have stereotypes about how we live and that we’re very different,” says the junior high and high school teacher at Silverwinds School, near Sperling.

“By showing the ordinary life through students’ art, you can see a peaceful way at its best.”

Hofer collected 250 pieces of art by Manitoba Hutterites, about half created by students from 14 schools, showing various aspects of colony life of the Christian sect where families live and work together on colonies.

The exhibit runs until Saturday, Nov. 9, at the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery, located on the campus of Canadian Mennonite University.

Intended to celebrate a century of Hutterites living in Manitoba, the exhibit depicts both routine and special aspects of colony life, including children fishing and riding their bikes, a woman braiding a young girl’s hair, and memories of a 1970 royal visit to the Milltown community near Oakville.

“It’s kind of ordinary, it’s everyday things,” says art teacher Serena Maendel of Fairholme School, who teaches art classes to Hutterite schools through teleconferencing.

“These pieces are full of joy and exuberance and that’s also how I see community life.”

The exhibit includes small wooden carvings of grandparents serving dessert and tea, digital artwork showing young women undertaking their housekeeping chores, children at play and several collages of agricultural scenes.

“We want to show there’s life and energy in their world,” gallery curator Ray Dirks says of the mixed media exhibit.

“It’s got a good feel.”

Not only does the exhibit portray the Hutterite life to the public, it also gives Hutterite children the opportunity to see their art on a gallery wall outside of their own community, says Maendel, who plans to bring her students to see the exhibit.

“I’m hoping they see themselves validated and to embrace their cultural identity and feel comfortable in their own skin,” she says in a telephone interview.

The brightly coloured artwork shares space with a more sombre exhibit from the Kaufman Museum in Newton, Kan., including a full-scale replica of a solitary confinement jail cell from the infamous Alcatraz military prison, located on an island near San Francisco.

The Voices of Conscience exhibit tells the story of four Hutterite men from South Dakota who were jailed when they sought conscientious objector status in 1917 after the United States entered the First World War. They were held in solitary confinement at Alcatraz and then sent to Fort Leavenworth, where two of them, brothers Michael and Joseph Hofer, died from exposure and torture. The U.S. army dressed their bodies in military uniforms and sent them back to their families.

Since Hutterites are part of the Anabaptist peace tradition and do not participate in the military, the mistreatment of the Hofer brothers prompted the colonies in South Dakota to relocate to Manitoba, says historian and teacher Dora Maendel.

“It’s really the story of the reason Hutterites came to Canada,” she says of the Hofer brothers, now considered martyrs by their community.

Their Canadian story may have started as a response to war, but after a century in Manitoba, Hutterites are not as familiar as they could be with their own history of peacemaking, Jesse Hofer says. He hopes many Hutterites take the opportunity to tour the exhibit and learn their own history.

“We don’t do a great job in teaching about our non-violent heritage,” he says. “We’ve been safe and comfortable for 100 years and we haven’t had to explore our convictions.”

brenda@suderman.com

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