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Holinaty, Elizabeth
Person · born 1936

Elizabeth Holinaty was born on a farm three miles from Wakaw, Saskatchewan to parents who were born in Canada. Her grandparents immigrated from western Ukraine. Her maternal ancestors came from Horodenka. Her grandfather Gabriel Holinaty came from Zalishchyky and worked as a tanner (kushnir) for the landlord. He made a kozhukh for a lady in Wakaw. Her mother Mary Kotelko Holinaty embroidered a great deal, and also sewed, crocheted and knitted. She was a collector and organizer.

Elizabeth went to Zalishchyky school near Wakaw. She remembers not knowing to speak English when she started school, crying for several days. Elizabeth studied Home Economics and Education at the University of Saskatchewan. She was a grade 1-4 teacher for several decades, moving from Saskatchewan to Alberta in the 1970s. She has a post-graduate diploma from 1970-71, specializing in reading diagnosis and reading remedial work, but she missed classroom contact, and returned to regular teaching. Before and after she retired in 1991, she tried painting, drawing, pottery, pysanky. She loves to sing and also to bake breads, but found her true calling and inspiration in weaving. In the 1980s and later, she attended many bread making classes, embroidery classes, weaving classes, pysanky workshops, etc. She participated in the Ukrainian fashion activities in the Edmonton area.

Elizabeth’s first weaving lessons were from the Cyril Flour Mill Company, near Wakaw. She bought her first 1950s loom from the Burkhailo family near Wakaw in the 1980s. Elizabeth didn’t attend the first 2-3 weaving workshops in Banff, but went to nearly all of them thereafter. Chester and Luba Kuc asked her to make Hutsul fabric, requesting she reproduce it as accurately as possible. Elizabeth prefered natural fibres then, and still does. Calmar Zirka dancers ordered some costume pieces thereafter, and her work weaving Ukrainian dance costumes snowballed after that. She did this work on weekends as a teacher at first, and continued after she retired. Elizabeth has woven many Ukrainian dance costumes for groups in Saskatchewan, and other places. Many different organizations commission weavings, sometimes based on very traditional models, sometimes adapted and contemporized. She has also reproduced historical sashes for the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, etc.

Elizabeth has attended many textile and weaving conferences across North America. Her first weaving conference and first exhibition was at “Convergence 86” in Toronto. The Ukrainian community participated in the conference, and asked her for 5 pieces for display.

Elizabeth, Kay Chernyavsky and Pauline Lysak organized a number of projects to provide interesting towels and cloths with Ukrainian themes.

Elizabeth embroiders small towels for pallbearers in the Wakaw area, now mostly for family. Sometimes she embroiders seven, because the cross bearer also receives one. She also embroiders or weaves wedding rushnyky.

Elizabeth has donated numerous family records to the Ukrainian Catholic Museum in Saskatoon (including her father’s careful accounting books and planting records, mother’s records), and some materials to the Bohdan Medwidsky Ukrainian Folklore Archives.

Lesiv, Mariya
Person · born 1978

Mariya Lesiv was born in Horodenka, Ivano-Frankivs'k region, Ukraine. Her father is a TV journalist, and her mother is a visual artist who teaches at an art college in Ivano-Frankivs'k. Mariya did her undergraduate studies at the Lviv National Academy of Arts, and graduated with a specialist degree in Fine, Applied and Decorative Arts in 2001. In 2001-2003, she did her post-graduate studies in History and Theory of Art, at the Lviv National Academy of Arts.

Mariya came to the University of Alberta to study Ukrainian folklore in 2003 where she received her MA (2005) and PhD (2011). Her doctoral dissertation is devoted to Ukrainian Paganism, a new religious and political movement that strives to revive old rural folklore while creating an alternative vision of a present-day Ukrainian nation in both Ukraine and the diaspora.

Mariya worked for the Kule Centre for Ukrainian and Canadian Folklore, University of Alberta, where she taught and was actively engaged in fieldwork and publication projects dealing with various aspects of Ukrainian diaspora culture. She married Brian Anthony Cherwick in 2008.

Mariya received a job as an assistant professor of folklore at the Memorial University, Newfoundland in 2011, and moved to St. John's with her family. Her research interests include diaspora studies; folklore and national/ethnic identity building; material culture; folk religion; new religious movements; ritual, belief, and spiritual culture; as well as modern Paganisms (Western and East European). Her first book The Return of Ancestral Gods: Modern Ukrainian Paganism As an Alernative Vision for a Nation was published by McGill-Queen's University Press in 2013.

Mariya's new research project focuses on new diaspora communities established by recent immigrants to Newfoundland from the former Socialist block.

Buzak, Leanne
Person

Leanne Buzak is a singer in Viter Ukrainian Folk Choir, and an active member in the Edmonton Ukrainian Community.

Nahachewsky, Stephania
Person · born 1933

Stephania Nahachewsky was born in a farming family in the Cudworth-Alvena area of Saskatchewan. Her father John Olynyk had emigrated from Mushkativka near Borshchiv in the Austro-Hungary (today in Ternopil' region of Ukraine) as a young man prior to WW1. She moved to Saskatoon as a young adult and finished high school at Bedford Road School. She married Ostap Nahachewsky in 1956.

Stephania has been an active member of St. George’s Ukrainian Catholic church ever since she moved to Saskatoon. She was active in drama productions as a young woman, and in the parish choir for many decades. She raised six sons, Thomas, Andriy, David, Ivan, Taras, Bohdan. She and her sisters assisted Ostap at the O&O Drive Inn in Saskatoon for several decades. The O&O Drive Inn was a Drive In restaurant on 20th Street and Avenue L in Saskatoon from approx 1961 to 1992. Inspired by A&W, the restaurant sold hamburgers and hot dogs and pop, as well as pyrohy, holubtsi and borshch.

Stephania has been very active in numerous organizations related to the church, and has contributed much to organizing their records.

Cherwick, Brian
Person · born 1960

Brian Cherwick (B. Mus. – Brandon; M.A. – Alberta; PhD. - Alberta) is a specialist in east European traditional music, diaspora cultures, ethnic identity, music industry, material culture and oral history. He was born in Winnipeg into a family that had settled in Canada a couple of generations earlier. Three of his four grandparents were born in the western Ukrainian province of Galicia, from two villages, Chornokonetska Volya and Burdiakivtsi, near the city of Ternopil. Brian’s father’s family were early settlers from the first wave, immigrating to Saskatchewan in 1903, while his mother’s family came to Manitoba during the interwar immigration in the 1920s.

Brian had music on both sides of his family. His father’s father, John Cherewyk, left the farm to become a harness maker and later a meat cutter in the town of Yorkton, Saskatchewan. But on the side, John played fiddle in a trio with his two brothers — one playing tsymbaly and the other adding a second violin. John was additionally trained as a cantor in the Ukrainian Catholic church. Brian learned the cantorial art from his grandfather (as well as other cantors) during church services each Sunday and would come back with him and hear him fiddling at home. Brian holds a position today as a cantor in his church and is active in teaching liturgical singing to fellow congregants. On his mother's side, Brian's great-grandfather was a fiddler and his grandmother even played the small bubon in the band until she was old enough to marry (it was not respectable then for mature women to play music). Brian's uncle Mike Klym played drum kit with the D-Drifters, one of the most famous Western Canadian Ukrainian bands. The D-Drifters were especially known for providing backup to Mickey and Bunny, a famous singing married couple, and for recording country western music with English and Ukrainian lyrics. Their biggest hit was a Ukrainian translation of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," and the disc sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Uncle Mike was only fifteen years older than Brian, and so Brian grew up going to practices of the D-Drifters.

Brian formed his first band with friends at age 14, and began playing violin at weddings at age 15. Instrumentation has changed with the tastes of the community, and modern bands often feature accordions, keyboards, saxes, electric guitars, basses and drum kits (such adaptation is not a new phenomena — grandfather John Cherewyk also performed on the Hawaiian-style lap steel guitar which was a rage in the 20s and 30s). At age 16, Brian acquired a tsymbaly from his brother who had gotten it from a church group. As a young musician with an entrepreneurial flair, Brian saw tsymbaly as a way to differentiate his band and their advertisements would promote the fact that they played the old tunes on traditional instruments as well as in more modern arrangements. Brian learned tsymbaly from watching the old-timers play at weddings (with over 100 first-cousins, there were plenty of family celebrations throughout the year). He also listened to regional Canadian-Ukrainian commercial recordings featuring tsymbaly-- bands such as those of the Alberta fiddlers Metro Radomsky, Bill Boychuk, and Manitoba fiddlers Jim Gregorash, Tommy Buick and Peter Lamb, as well as the Interlake Polka Kings.

Brian entered Brandon University (about 100 km west of Winnipeg) to study in its well regarded music program. Though tsymbaly was not offered, he enrolled as a pianist and percussionist. After graduating, Brian spent four years teaching music and conducting choirs at a seminary in Roblin, Manitoba, a tenure that was interrupted mid-way by an opportunity to study music for a year in Ukraine. Brian had received an invitation from the Society for Relations with Ukrainians Abroad. Based at the Kyiv Conservatory, Brian took classes in cimbalom, the piano-sized concert version of the tsymbaly that had developed in Hungary at the end of the 19th century and was taught in conservatories in Hungary, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Moldova. Adapting from tsymbaly to cimbalom requires learning a completely different tuning system, sticking technique and use of the cimbalom’s damper pedal, which is similar to that of a piano. Though his assigned teacher was Gyorgi Ahratina, who played cimbalom with the national folk orchestra, Brian learned more from Vasyl Palaniuk, an ethnic Hutsul from the Carpathians who was the senior cimbalom student at the conservatory and is today recognized as one of Ukraine's leading players. While Palaniuk played cimbalom in the conservatory ensemble, Brian would play percussion alongside of him as they accompanied highly choreographed folkloric dance presentations.

From Roblin, Brian moved to Edmonton to enroll in the University of Alberta's graduate programs in Ukrainian folklore and ethnomusicology. His doctoral dissertation focused on the influences of social conditions and popular music on the development of Ukrainian traditional music in western Canada. He is currently researching the ethnic commercial recording industry in Canada. Dr. Cherwick is Adjunct Professor of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, has taught at the University of Alberta and Athabasca University. He has worked as a researcher for the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village in Alberta and for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. He is also active as a performer, composer and music educator and has appeared in performances and conducted seminars and workshops throughout North America and Europe.

Onufrijchuk, Roman
Person · 1950-2015

Roman Onufrijchuk was born June 6, 1950 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he lived until he was 6 years old. The family then moved to Yorkton, Saskatchewan, where he spent his early youth. Over the course of his life, Roman lived and worked variously in Saskatoon, SK and Edmonton, AB, where he worked at the University of Alberta radio station, and was the first radio host of the Ukrainian program on WorldFM. Following over 10 years in print, TV and radio, he arrived in Vancouver in 1982 to attend graduate school at SFU’s School of Communication, where he taught from 1985 to 2011. He then taught at the university in Izmir, Turkey. Roman passed away June 23, 2015.