Family Environmental History

May 27, 2025 By: Shelsey Ambrosi

My grandparents left the Soviet Union in the 1930s, where they were small-scale farmers in a Mennonite community in the south. At this time, millions were dying from starvation under Joseph Stalin. My grandparents rarely talked about their lives there but often shared fond memories about life in Canada. After leaving the Soviet Union, they started their new lives in Drumheller, Alberta, where my grandfather and his nine siblings and parents lived on a farm. Although they had land and room to grow food, supporting a family of 11 was difficult. They had a couple of cows and grew a simple garden of cabbage, potatoes, and onions. They lived off of very little. Drumheller appealed to them since they came from a Soviet Mennonite colony, and Drumheller had a growing Mennonite population.

Not long after arriving in Canada, my grandfather, at age 9, got his license so he could deliver wood and coal and contribute his income to support his family. At this time, many people were employed in mining and resource extraction, especially males. The coal mines employed my male family members while the girls took on domestic roles. Drumheller was a coal mining town, and because of this, the population boomed until the great depression hit. The area would also become a tourist attraction as a dinosaur fossil hotspot and its unique landscape with hoodoos and various sage species covering the grounds. Indigenous Tourism Alberta shares that the Blackfoot and Cree had known about the fossil beds for a long time, and through the area was a graveyard for giants. By the late 1940s, my grandfather met and married my grandmother, moving from Drumheller to Calgary in the early 1950s with my mother and uncle.

The 1950s and 1960s would bring far more excitement for my family. Times were less tough; my grandfather played in a hockey league and began operating a crane where he helped build the University of Calgary and the Calgary Tower and made a decent living. As women were much more welcome in the workforce at this time, my grandmother began her career with the Alberta Mental Health Association, where she worked for decades. Until my grandparents retired, they lived in a community in N.W Calgary called Bowness. The Bow River ran through the community and was an important source of drinking water until the 1960s. It eventually provided hydroelectric power, significantly impacting the river’s flow and the surrounding ecosystem. There was no longer a food shortage or a need for large families to help maintain the farm. Calgary was booming with substantial population growth between the 1950s and 1970s. The city also hosted the Olympic Games in the 1960s and the Winter Olympics in the 1980s. Over the decades, the railway, farming/agriculture opportunities, and the rise of oil and gas triggered massive growth. The increased population and urban expansions resulted in the loss of grasslands surrounding the region (Calgary), impacted wildlife populations, and resulted in habitat fragmentation. My parents also resided in this community, and I did as well until moving to Vancouver at the age of 20 and then eventually to interior BC.