Comox Valley Ukrainian Cultural Society is offering a presentation that explores the history of Ukrainian immigration.

The public presentation will take place at 7 p.m. on April 11 at the Comox Community Centre, Room B. Ukrainians have come to Canada in what historians are calling waves of immigration. To lend perspective these waves have been categorized as three phases:

1. Historical

The First Wave, 1896-1914

The Second Wave, 1919-1939

2. Transitional

The Third Wave, 1945-1990

3. Contemporary

The Fourth Wave, 1991-2011

The Fifth Wave, 2014-2018

The Sixth Wave, 2022-

In this presentation, participants will be provided a brief overview of the situation in Eastern Europe and in Canada (and beyond) in the late 1890s that impacted the people from the area we now call Ukraine. These unlikely travellers, many of them our ancestors, left everything and everyone known to them, to emigrate more than 4,498 miles to a place where they knew no one; to a place they knew very little about called Canada.

Presenters include artist Peter Shostak - a recipient of the Queen鈥檚 Golden Jubilee Medal as well as the Taras Shevchenko Medal and numerous other awards of merit, and Eugene Hrushowy, education and cultural director of the Comox Valley Ukrainian Cultural Society.

This session will explore, through the art of Shostak, the lives of many of those early Ukrainian pioneers who settled in Western Canada. In his life and in his art, Shostak depicts with a great depth of feeling what it meant to these Ukrainian newcomers to start their lives as hyphenated Canadians. In doing so, he has enhanced an understanding and appreciation for all past lives.

Participation through family鈥檚 stories will be encouraged.

Admission: members, free; non-members, by donation at the door (all proceeds to Ukrainian newcomers).