The settlers of other settlers: B. Nobbs-Thiessen, ‘Latin American Migration, Settler Colonialism, and the Unfinished Business of Canadian Mennonite Belonging’, Canadian Jewish Studies, 36, 2024, pp. 268-275 | settler colonial studies blog

The settlers of other settlers: B. Nobbs-Thiessen, ‘Latin American Migration, Settler Colonialism, and the Unfinished Business of Canadian Mennonite Belonging’, Canadian Jewish Studies, 36, 2024, pp. 268-275

28Jan24

Excerpt: For those Low-German speaking Mennonites who sought to live apart from the world and historically resisted conscription, national schooling, and political par-ticipation, David S. Koffman’s “audacious” question was frequent and fraught across centuries of diasporic mobility. In the 1870s, facing compulsory military service in the Russian Empire, Mennonite delegations traveled to the United States and the Dominion of Canada with that question on their lips. Their investigations on both sides of the 49th parallel did not produce a consensus. For the majority, opportunities in the Mennonite Commonwealth they had established over the preceding century in imperial Russia outweighed concerns about encroaching Russification. Life there, particularly with the option of alternative service, offered a better home and would until the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War prompted a new round of emigration in the 1920s.

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