Mar 31, 2025 Around the Heritage Sask office, and in my personal life, I’ve been talking about patriotism and identity more than I can remember since my childhood. Now-former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was once lambasted for his statements on Canada as a post-national country,1 but he left office seeing a renewed flame of Canadian national pride. The tariffs and verbal attacks against Canada from the United States of America have completely flipped what felt like a passive feeling about patriotism into a newfound desire to be proud of our Canadian identity.2 In a recent meeting, someone on the call said that they “hadn’t felt patriotic, maybe ever”, but recently had begun to feel differently. Personally, same. My own experience with nationalism has always been complicated. My mother is from New Zealand, so I belong to two countries. My paternal grandparents were refugees from the Volga region of Ukraine and Russian Mennonite by culture and religion; Anabaptists, even in the earliest, pre-Menno Simons days, grated against the concept of nation states. Most of my experience with patriotism has been less emotional and more academic. “Patriotism” comes from the Latin “patria”, which literally means “father land” or figuratively “country, native land”.3 Patria is a first declension noun, the stuff of my Latin 101 class: “Patria, patriae, patriae, patriam…” I learned this by rote, through the declensions: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative etc. I also encountered patriotism in my Literary Criticism class, where our professor assigned us Dulce et decorum est by Wildfred Owen.4 Owen’s poem ironically twists a line by the Roman poet Horace - “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” meaning “it is a sweet and good thing to die for one’s country” - to illustrate the horror of the First World War. The poem ends with the quoted line: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest This is not a ringing endorsement of patriotism; the needless and horrifying death that Owen saw around him in France turned Horace’s line into “the old Lie”. Owen wrote the poem while recovering from shellshock in a hospital near Edinburgh. He died in combat, age 25, a mere week before Armistice. Wildfred Owen’s anti-war sentiment was not uncommon, especially in the inter-war years.5 A 1933 letter to the editor in the University of Alberta’s student newspaper said “... the soldiers did not give their lives: their lives were forcibly taken from them. Just as they took the lives of the men in the opposing army.”6 This was around the time the red poppy shifted meaning from an anti-war symbol to something more commemorative, militaristic, and nationalistic.7 Most of my experience with patriotism has been thinking about it as an abstract concept. Patriotism is, however, a feeling. The last time I felt, rather than thought about it - a real deep-seated pride in my country - was New Year’s Eve, around 2017 or 2018. Even this feeling was complicated and multi-layered; I felt proud of where I lived and my community, but I understand some people might dispute the label of “patriotism”. Nonetheless, I’ll paint the picture, and you can decide if you would feel the same. The scene: I went with my mother and family friends to a Scottish Hogmanay festival, Hogmanay being the Scots word for, and celebration of, New Years. There was, of course, whisky flowing and bagpipes playing the whole night! Bagpipes are often seen as distinctly Scottish, although many countries have a traditional form of bagpipes or have adopted the Scottish bagpipes through British colonization.8 Bagpipes may have originated in ancient Greece or Egypt but appear in musical traditions from Iran to Tunisia to Scotland to Estonia, and pipe bands can be found around the globe. The Germans play the “dudelsack”, and in Catalonia you’ll find the evocatively named “sac de gemecs”, or “sack of moans”. If you lived in an ancient society that had goats or sheep, someone likely turned their stomach into an instrument! Bagpipes are part of the living heritage of many cultures and communities around the world. This phenomenon is not unique to bagpipes. While writing, I was reminded of a National Film Board video where Cree fiddlers from James Bay visit the Orkneys where they both participate in and confront the musical heritage they share with the Scots islanders.9 Dumplings are another example of living heritage that many, many communities can join in talking about. We share and cross-pollinate our culture with others; Russian Mennonites, originally from the northern Germany, eat many Eastern European foods as part of our living heritage.10 Our section of the Hogmanay celebration was much more subdued than you might be picturing; our family friends don't drink at all, and my mother enjoys ale and sherry, not whisky. Any Scots ancestry I have is so distant I make no claims to it, so it wasn’t “The Old Sod” that tripped my patriotic feelings.11 Rather, it was seeing a happy (though tired) looking woman wearing a hijab watching her two kids dancing to the music, both wide-eyed and absolutely loving the bagpipers. The kids were as close as possible to the stage and completely enraptured. It occurred to me that in all likelihood not all the pipers had Scottish ancestry, but like me just enjoyed the music. My Kiwi mother and I have at best tenous ties to Scotland, and our friends, who enthusiastically joined us for the evening, are the descendants of Pennsylvania Dutch families who left the United States during the Revolution. Whatever our individual relationship to the Scottish heritage being celebrated at the Hogmanay, everyone present was united by the tangles of living heritage, coming together in Canada, a place we call home. Wherever we came from we were safe, and happy, and together. This feeling isn’t one of “my country or bust”, which Owen’s poem decries, it’s a feeling of an equitable and open sharing of culture and identity. It isn’t about birth or ancestry, it’s about who we are, where we are, and who we want to be. Notes The title is in refernce to the song "They Call it Canada (But I Call it Home)" by German Canadian Freddy Grant (b. Fritz Grundland). https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/freddy-grant-emc 2. See for instance the Schlietheim Confession (https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Schleitheim_Confession) written prior to Menno Simons, whose writings influenced his followers and gave them their name. 3. “Nationalism” has a very similar definition and etymology; I use them interchangeablyin going forward. 4. For full text: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est 5. https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/7-posters-and-placards-from-a-century-of-anti-war-protest 6. http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/newspapers/GAT/1933/11/03/5/Ar00503.html 7. https://activehistory.ca/blog/2018/11/16/remembrance-day-poppies-the-political-history-of-a-symbol/ 8. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/podcast-pack-your-bagpipes-with-ross-jennings 9. You can watch it free here: https://www.nfb.ca/film/fiddlers_of_james_bay/ N.b. this documentary was created in 1980 and viewers may note some outdated terminology and perspectives. 10. I grew up making and eating Fleisch Perishky (http://www.mennonitegirlscancook.ca/2015/08/fleisch-perishky-pastry-meat-pockets.html) which combines the German “Fleisch” (meat) with Russian “pirozhki” (lit. “small pie”) and wareneki (http://www.mennonitegirlscancook.ca/2013/01/wareneki.html), from the Ukrainian “varenyky,” which are known by their Polish name, “pierogi”. At a farmers’ market last summer, I saw an Iranian stall selling “pirashki”, made with seasoned beef and a saffron dough; a regional adaptation of the pirozhki perhaps brought with Russian soldiers. If you’re interested in food history (and dumplings) I highly recommend What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings, which you can find in your local library: https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search?terms=What%20We%20Talk%20About%20When%20We%20Talk%20About%20Dumpling&search_type=KW 11. The title of The Spirit of the West's immigrant song (https://genius.com/Spirit-of-the-west-the-old-sod-lyrics). Shad does his own version just as well in Fam Jam (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u9JoEYxFnw).Maybe just call it 'home'?
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
