Quote:
Originally Posted by Mouldy Old Schmo
What about the most anti-hippy Canadian towns? Would Steinbach, Manitoba be one?
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Well, I can tell you some things about Steinbach although it isn't my home town. However I am an "insider" in that I am Mennonite and about as familiar with the town as an outsider-insider can be.
Steinbach is in Manitoba's Bible Belt, which includes other towns like Morden and Winkler on the west side of the Red River. It probably has more churches than any other town in Manitoba, maybe in Canada. What many people don't realise is that within the Mennonite umbrella, there are almost as many variations on the theme as there are within better-known Protestant faiths.
However, anyone who pictures Steinbach as a backwards kind of town would be mistaken. It is also a wealthy town and housing prices keep sky-rocketing. There are a variety of businesses in Steinbach, including medical research and just this year Walmart opened up a Super Centre (or whatever they call it) store. Steinbach is the smallest community to have a Walmart. (I'm not saying I think this is good - just reporting the facts).
Miriam Toews is one of Canada's literary lights and her book,
A Complicated Kindness is supposed to be a (semi) autobiographical book about growing up in Steinbach in the 70s. It was published to much acclaim and tsk-tsking about her depressed view of the town. One of Canada's best poets, Patrick Friesen, is from Steinbach and one of his books is called
The Shunning which has been made into a play. His poetry focused on the practise of shunning, as some Mennonite groups used it, and the impact on family and community. Neither writer has a particularly positive view of Steinbach in their writings.
But some of that has to be traced to mental illness in Toews' family, and I think Friesen's family belonged to a strict church. And some of it is simply about how some people don't fit into wherever they are born, regardless of country or ethnicity or religion. I take apostate literature with a large grain of salt.
Steinbach was primarily known for it's car dealerships and still calls itself "The Automobile City."
In the last twenty years there has been a large influx of Germans, Russians, and Mennonite-Russians into the area, to the point where 39 percent (according to Wikipedia) cite a language other than French or English as their first language. (I am betting the number is higher because Mennonites of a certain generation were beaten in school for speaking their own language and some of them might have ticked off "English" on a census form because they have not used their mother tongue for so long).
Before that, pretty much everyone was Mennonite, with an influx of "boat people" coming from Vietnam, sponsored by local churches and individual families. After Biovail opened a factory there, Filipinos followed.
When you walk down the street or into a store it is common to hear Mennonite Low German, standard High German, Asian languages and Russian and Ukrainian.
So anti-hippy? Well, I don't know that hippies are all
that popular anywhere. It's a materialistic world out there. People want stuff and people have stuff. There are kids running around with tattoos and pink hair and everything pierced that can be pierced just as anywhere else. Anyone thinking that because it is a Mennonite town people are sombrely dressed in long dresses would be wrong. These are not horse-and-buggy Mennonites.
There's a Mennonite Village Museum which is well worth a trip - it is a town set out with old buildings, including a school and a general store, houses, streets and vegetable gardens. There is an example of the sod hut in which many immigrants lived for their first winters when they first immigrated. They also have some kind of harvest thing, in which they thresh with horses to show people how things used to be done. There is also an old-fashioned blacksmith on the premises. It is a lovely place to stroll and see how things used to be, whether one is Mennonite or not.
Steinbach strikes me as an upwardly mobile city of almost 14,000, where the dollar is as important as the church. Church is important in Steinbach, but I think it serves as much as a social outlet and place to connect for more materialistic reasons than simply faith. And I think it probably helps your business to belong to a church. And, as I've mentioned in another post on another thread, it is also the home of the Southland Church, a mega-church in the American tradition.
It is also the home base of Vic Toews, son of a Paraguayan Mennonite Brethern pastor (the Mennonite equivalent of a Baptist), Tea Party wannaber, hard-line conservative, show-no-mercy kind of guy, proponent of "family values" in his public life, and not such a family guy outside of it as Vikileaks showed (and which wouldn't
matter if he was even
slightly inclined to show mercy to others) and personal thorn in my intellectual side. For some reason he keeps getting elected. I have NO idea why.
(A couple of years ago I came across a would-be hitchhiker in the parking lot of a store there shouting at the top of his lungs that Steinbachers/Mennonites considered themselves
soooo Christian and they were a bunch of hypocrites because no one would give him a ride to Winnipeg. He was still ranting when I came out of the store. So I offered him a ride. When he saw my two German shepherds smiling at him from my vehicle he changed his mind.
)
As far as I can see, this Wikipedia article is pretty accurate.
Steinbach, Manitoba - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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