Spirit Lake Camp Corporation: Canada

Spirit Lake Dept: In the dead of winter, in January 1915, they were transported along the transcontinental railway from Montreal into Quebec's remote Abitibi region. The first prisoners, 109 men, were eventually joined by hundreds more, including women and children, interned not because they had done anything wrong but simply because of who they were, where they were from. Mostly immigrants from western Ukraine, lured to the Dominion of Canada with promises of freedom and free land, they were branded "enemy aliens" at the outbreak of the First World War because they had arrived in Canada with Austro-Hungarian passports, according to Montreal Gazette. Recently the Spirit Lake Internment Camp Centre officially opened. It is housed within the former Roman Catholic church of St. Viateur de Tr cesson, adjacent to where internee barracks once stood. The interpretation centre, the result of several years of effort by the Spirit Lake Camp Corporation, includes exhibits explaining how thousands of Europeans from the Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman Turkish empires were swept up because of xenophobia and wartime hysteria, suffering imprisonment, the confiscation of what little wealth they had, and other state-sanctioned indignities, including disenfranchisement. All of this was sanctioned by the very same War Measures Act that was deployed during the Second World War against Japanese-, Italian-and German-Canadians and, in 1970, against the Qu b cois. is a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ont. Offloaded eight kilometres west of Amos, at a place today called La Ferme, the prisoners could just see the shoreline of Spirit Lake, now Lac Beauchamp - from behind barbed wire. Originally their camp was to have been at Belcourt, 75 kilometres further east, but the clever merchants of the Amos Chamber of Commerce lobbied Ottawa for a closer site, then collected a quarter of a million dollars in government trade over the two years the camp operated - a bounty garnished from the injustice of Canada's first national internment operations. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.