Manoly R. Lupul’s book "The Politics of Multiculturalism: A Ukrainian-Canadian Memoir" has been made available online on the CIUS Archives website

The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) is pleased to announce that founding director Manoly R. Lupul’s book The Politics of Multiculturalism: A Ukrainian-Canadian Memoir (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2005) has been made available online on the CIUS Archives website.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of official multiculturalism. CIUS is marking the occasion with a series of initiatives. The first of these, the “Virtual Symposium on the Impact of Multiculturalism on Public Education,” co-sponsored by the institute’s Ukrainian Language Education Centre with other partners, already took place on 22–23 March 2021. Two other events that will follow are the roundtables “Multiculturalism in Practice: The Ukrainian Canadian Experience,” on 20 May 2021, and "Multiculturalism–Then and Now: Thoughts from the Perspective of Fifty Years” on 28 May 2021. The institute’s Contemporary Ukraine Studies Program and Kowalsky Program for the Study of Eastern Ukraine, for their part, will be launching academic events in Kharkiv, Ukraine, that focus on the project “Cultural Mosaic of the City.” Then on 12–14 November 2021, CIUS will be concluding the year of reflection on multiculturalism with the major national symposium “Reconciling Multiculturalism in Today’s Canada”—hosted in partnership with the Marcelle and Louis Desrochers Institute for Heritage Studies and Transdisciplinary Research on Francophonies and the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies.

In recognition of this landmark anniversary, the institute is making Professor Lupul’s book more widely accessible. As Wsevolod W. Isajiw, a former Robert F. Harney Professor and Chair of Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies at the University of Toronto, wrote in a review of the book, the “memoir tells us much about the policy of multiculturalism in Canada, particularly its early years, as Lupul was intimately connected with the policy’s implementation through his work on the Canadian Consultative Council on Multiculturalism.” Lupul, Professor Isajiw continues in the review (published in Canadian Ethnic Studies 39, nos. 1–2, 2007) “deals with the shifts in multicultural policy under the different political parties in power, with the efforts to entrench multiculturalism in the repatriated Canadian constitution in the early eighties, with multiculturalism, on the provincial and urban levels, with the political backlash against multiculturalism, and multiculturalism’s decline, beginning in the late eighties and into the nineties.” Indeed, the discussion “contains much detail, the kind that one would not find anywhere else in the literature on the history of multiculturalism.”

Manoly R. Lupul served as the director of CIUS from 1976 to 1986. In 2003, he was awarded the Order of Canada. The citation at the Governor General of Canada’s website for the national order reads in part: “A fervent believer in the principles of multiculturalism, he helped to bring about educational initiatives to meet the growing needs of Canada's diverse ethnic minorities.” Dr. Lupul passed away in 2019.

Since it was founded in 1976, CIUS has gained a global reputation in Ukrainian studies through its active publication program. To date, CIUS Press has published over 200 books and 65 research reports.

Many of these works are now available online thanks to the institute’s Archival Project, which was launched in 2016.  In the spirit of the fiftieth anniversary of official multiculturalism and in memory of CIUS’s founding director, the institute invites you to explore these resources, including the 500-plus-page The Politics of Multiculturalism: A Ukrainian-Canadian Memoir, by visiting its website.