I’ll never forget how the girls stood up in the sandbox with their long cotton skirts blowing in the prairie wind. How they gently shook the sand from their aprons and then, raising a hand, shaded their eyes from the sun so they could see whose car was approaching their country home.
Or how they walked toward us after hoisting their littlest siblings onto their small hips, their curious blue eyes framed dramatically with black, polka-dotted scarves tied neatly beneath their chins. The children’s pace picked up speed and their faces broke into warm, welcoming smiles when they recognized one of their visitors.
“It’s George! It’s George!” they shouted enthusiastically to one another. By this time, a few boys in black pants and suspenders were following tentatively behind.
Photographer George Webber has been documenting Hutterites in Alberta for the last decade and has become a trusted friend to these children and their families. Their relationship is unique, as Hutterites prefer to have minimal contact with the outside world while embracing the life of their ancestors—producing much of what they need to live and, for the most part, shunning the West’s consumer and technology-driven culture.
This place, the Rocky View Hutterite Colony, is located 45 minutes northeast of the intensity that is downtown Calgary, tucked in behind cow pastures and fields of yellow canola. Their world may be a mystery to most Albertans, but the outsiders’ world is making its presence felt on the colony. The Rocky View settlement will relocate this spring due to development pressures stemming from Calgary; colony leaders sold the property last year after listing it for $25-million and purchased a new parcel of land five times larger near Claresholm.
Because I arrived with Webber and because we would visit the colony together again, the children warmed to me relatively quickly. “Nice to meet ya,” they offered politely, one after the other, with noticeable German accents.
In this world, we are considered “the English people.” Hutterites—whose history originates in 16th-century Austria with founder Jakob Hutter, a man who encouraged self-sufficiency and pacifism among his followers—speak German until they’re 5, when they begin to study English at colony-based schools. An estimated 40,000 Hutterites currently live on 400 colonies throughout North America, two thirds of which are in Canada’s prairie provinces.
Field boss Mike Hofer tells me that soaring real estate prices have made it impossible to expand the community, home to 35 people, a chicken and egg operation and fields of windblown barley, wheat and canola. “There’s no future here with this amount of land,” he explains. “[But] it makes no difference where we live. Our choices are all about the future of our children.”
Hofer’s wife, Ruth, on the other hand, allows that she’ll miss the colony garden. “It’s been very fruitful,” she tells me of the large roadside plot featuring a wide array of fruits and vegetables including raspberries, pumpkins, lettuce and carrots. “The soil here is very fertile. We barely had to weed this year.”
As an outsider, and as a mother raising two kids in Canadian society with all of the accompanying temptations (the toys and video games and TV programming, which aren’t permitted among the Hutterites), I’m gobsmacked by how resourceful, helpful and happy these children appear to be.
They’re so hard working, their teacher informs me, that last summer they “broke into” the schoolhouse—actually snuck in through an unlocked window—in order to clean, polish and prepare the classroom for the start of September classes. “When does that ever happen?” their Airdrie-based teacher Laurie Pfaffinger asks.
Meeting these children has restored the teacher’s faith in humanity. “They aren’t inundated with media messages,” she says. “They still play together. They are so friendly, so kind, so giving. They’re truly wonderful little human beings.”
Pfaffinger has worked around the world as an English as a Second Language instructor and says she’s never seen such a strong work ethic among such a young population. “They’re not mollycoddled,” she says. “They learn, from as young as 3, that work is valuable. One of the girls begged me to let her wash my car. It’s part of their DNA. When the men on the colony have an injury, if they’re laid up in bed for a day or two, they go stark raving mad.”
An intimate observer at the colony, Pfaffinger has noticed that friends and family are enormously important to her students, “even [to] the youngest of children. I don’t want to say it’s something ‘spiritual,’ but it feels that way. It’s all very hard to describe.” The only request made of her by colony leaders, she says, is to stay away from issues related to human sexuality.
Hutterites have a strong religious tradition. They will tell you, as one colony man tells me, that the outside world sometimes mistakes their culture for an ideology. In fact, he says, he and his community follow a way of life based on faith or, more specifically, a life based on the Old Testament.
“We’re taught from the minute we are born that we don’t work for our own cause but for our fellow man,” he says. “A Hutterite colony is like a family that never parts. And if people don’t submit to the spiritual command of ‘loving thy neighbour, tolerance and understanding,’ living this way can become unbearable. This is why some people leave. Many have left. No one is forced to stay. But I know one thing for sure. When people leave the colony, they are Hutterites until they die.”
During my initial visit to Rocky View, I was invited into the home of a mother of four. Her house was meticulous; she pointed to furniture that was handmade on the colony and to a closet full of clothes she sewed herself.
“I like to work,” she tells me. “That is what we do. I can’t stand not to be busy.” To supplement her income, she makes pot scrubbers and saskatoon-berry pies. She knits socks and sews feather pillows and duvets. Many of her wares are sold at the farmers market in Crossfield.
Asked if she’s ever considered a life off the colony, she replies: “What would I do? Who would I talk to? I would be so lonely. I’m taken care of here. If I’m ever sick, it’s okay for me to take time to get better. And when people are sad, they talk to each other. I want for nothing. This is where I belong.”
Of course, her children don’t watch television—there are no TVs or radios in individual homes on the colony—so when asked about her favourite pastime, this woman’s 9-year-old daughter insists that it’s “cleaning bedrooms, of course.”
I’m astounded that a world such as this exists so close to my own. It would be easy to idealize what I see (“We’re are not perfect,” one colony member reminds me. “We’re human like everyone else”) but I, or any other observer, would have to be foolish not to consider the beauty and—given the harried life most of us “English people” lead—the enviable simplicity of Hutterite life.
“You don’t have to join us, we just ask that you understand us,” says one Hutterite father, adding that it rarely happens that an outsider successfully comes to live on a colony. “You have to be born Hutterite.”
Author Mary-Ann Kirkby received a great deal of press and acclaim for her recent self-published book I Am Hutterite. She says her people are “in the world, but not of the world.” She adds, however, that the computer age is starting to challenge the more liberal colonies. “Now the whole world is coming into our living rooms,” she says. “Causing some disturbances. We try to embrace modern technology as it applies to agriculture and work while keeping our way of life and our way of dress the same.”
Her book—the story of how her family left the Fairholme Colony in Manitoba when she was 10 and how she reclaimed her heritage as an adult—challenges mainstream society’s assumptions about Hutterite culture. For example, she debunks the criticism that women are not permitted to be colony leaders and that divorce is not allowed.
“Hutterite women are stronger than you think,” Kirkby says. “The men are the head of the house, but I would argue that this is the case in many homes of ‘regular’ Canadians. What we say is: ‘The women are the neck and the neck turns the head.’ If women are unhappy, they can act collectively to get things changed.”
“In mainstream society, I see women suffer quietly,” she continues. “There may be abuse in the home or the husband drinks. With Hutterites, the community would get involved. There is safety there that doesn’t exist in the outside world.”
Kirkby says that when she goes home, it’s no different than an emigrant revisiting their home country. Life is that different. And though people outside the colonies are often reluctant to get to know their Hutterite neighbours, Kirkby insists her people have a highly social streak and encourage visitors.
“Don’t try to change our way of life, just experience a really special afternoon. We have a tremendous sense of curiosity. It is interesting for us to see what is out there, but we do not envy,” she explains. “To me, growing up, the English people seemed so stressed. They weren’t able to have afternoon naps. We would have naps and wake up to fresh baking and pie. They just go and go and go and go. They had many more worries than we did. This compensated for our differences.”
John Hofer, leader of the Rocky View colony and brother of field boss Mike Hofer, insists that his people’s beliefs and passion help them survive. Throughout the 1800s, Hutterites were persecuted for their pacifist beliefs and forced to move around Europe. After several hundred Hutterites travelled to North America to put down new roots, their populations began to flourish.
“When I get up in the morning, we all got our jobs to do,” says John Hofer. “I don’t have to sit in a truck and warm it up and go to town to work. I get to eat with my wife in the dining room. When it’s lunchtime, I see my children. And when the day is done, my family is together,” says the colony’s leader. “This is how we survive. It comes down to love. Love and working together. If we find someone is down, we help out. This is how we survive. It’s not an easy road, but we have got to stick together.
“We’re not here to be [rich]. We’re here to survive off the land and [make] a future for the next generation. This is why we’re moving. I may live in a house where I can see the mountains, but what would my grandchildren have if I stayed here?”
Like the resident teacher, I have trouble finding words to describe my time at the Rocky View colony. While they struggle with many of the same imperfections as “English people,” Hutterites appear to nurture the best of humanity. Loyalty. Trust. Hard work. Caring for elders. Trying to live sustainably. Could it be that, just as our world offers technology that makes Hutterite farming practices more competitive, we have something to learn from them?
A warm jar of fresh-roasted sunflower seeds that one young woman, smiling shyly, slipped into my hand before I left for Calgary. A beautifully knitted pale purple scarf offered as a token of friendship. The best homemade stew and sweet buns I’ve ever tasted. These are a few of the memories from my time with George Webber at this colony. Mostly, though, I’ll remember the children from that first visit. Children stepping forward at first cautiously but then with unbridled enthusiasm to meet their visitors. Lovely girls in cotton skirts, little girls with little girls on their hips.
Kim Gray is a Calgary Herald columnist. Her writing has also appeared in The Globe and Mail, Canadian Living and Avenue.
Photography by George Webber
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