I entered
Canada in the dead of winter, on January 9, 1969, arriving by airplane from
Miami, Florida, my home town. I asked for landed immigrant status at
the airport, and, after a short interview with a immigration official, I
was granted this status. I was joining my boyfriend who had immigrated
to Canada from Florida, too, in the autumn of l968. He and I had become
acquainted through the American Studies Program at Florida State University.
He received his B.A. in American Studies from FSU in the spring of l968,
I, in December l968.
Why did I come
to Canada in l969? At one level, I was a risk-taker and eager for an
adventure. I was twenty-two with no compelling career path in view.
And I was in love. My boyfriend was a draft dodger (we didn’t say draft
resister then), and he had landed in Montreal (after being rejected by the
British for landed immigrant status at the London’s Heathrow Airport--officials
found his draft letter in his pocket). At another level, I felt somewhat
disconnected from my family (my parents were divorced, and my father was
destroying himself through alcoholism) and profoundly disillusioned with my
country, a society I judged harshly as racist and imperialist. I had
studied international politics at American University in the School of International
Service in my freshman year; history and American Studies at Florida State
University in my sophomore and senior years; and history and the German language
at the University of Freiburg, in Freiburg, West Germany, in my junior year:
I had a strong sense of the “immorality” of U.S. foreign policy, especially
in relation to its prosecution of the Vietnam War and felt disinclined at
that period of my life to remain in my country to try to change things.
With hindsight,
I see that my decision to leave the United States was a blend of impulsiveness,
youthful defiance of conventionality, and idealism. My gender figures
into the equation, as well. I had firm left-leaning political convictions,
and I was against U.S. prosecution of the Vietnam War, but, as a woman,
I could not be drafted. By “following my man” to Canada I was witnessing
my convictions. It made me feel that I, too, was “making history.”
One year after
my lover had come across the border, on a Sunday morning about 10 a.m.,
two plainclothes members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) made
a visit to the apartment my lover (by now my husband) and I shared.
We had been warned by others that such an event might occur. “We are
just here to check on his immigration papers,” one young man said to me.
After they had had a look at my husband’s landed immigrant card and saw that
all was in order, they prepared to depart. But I stopped them, asking,
“Aren’t you going to look at my papers?” The officers looked nonplussed,
and one said weakly, “But you’re his wife, aren’t you?” To which I
replied, “Yes, but I wasn’t his wife when I came across the border and asked
for landed immigrant status myself.” The young men, neither of whom
had mentioned the Vietnam War, were embarrassed, and one mumbled something
like “Well, it doesn’t matter, good-bye now,” and off they went. It
was the practice in those days, as we understood it then, for the RCMP to
check on certain individuals who had emigrated to Canada, those indicted for
failure to appear for their draft hearings in the United States, that the
Federal Bureau of Investigation identified by name. The RCMP always
made their visits for this purpose one year give or take a few days from the
date a draft dodger entered the country. I do not know if anyone has
studied this aspect of Canadian-American relations in this era; perhaps it
was a fluke or perhaps a practice unique to Montreal in this era.
A strong support
system for draft dodgers and deserters existed in Montreal in the late
sixties and early seventies. In fact, a former FSU philosophy graduate
student who had evaded the draft by coming to Canada and had been settled
in Montreal for some time, helped my boyfriend when he first arrived. Others
offered help and friendship, too. In addition to a large group of expatriate
Americans, most of whom came to Canada in response to their anti-war convictions,
there existed a kind of subculture of politicized intellectually-inclined
young people who were the children of European immigrant parents, a proportion
of whom were Holocaust survivors. I felt connected to both groupings.
All of us worked and socialized together, and most of us pursued graduate
studies, as well, notably at McGill University and Concordia University.
While most of
the Americans I knew did not engage in public political activity, women in
this circle formed a consciousness-raising group in which I participated
in the early 1970s. Most of us were intellectuals. Later, some
of the women I knew either from this group or from my wider social circle
formed a “thesis support group” in order to facilitate discussion of and
completion of our dissertations which included the disciplines of history,
English literature, and sociology. All seven of us completed our dissertations
within several months of each other.
I moved away
from Montreal in l979 to pursue my academic career. I became a Canadian
citizen in l981. I have dual citizenship and visit the United States
regularly. But Canada is my home. One academic study of
U.S. draft resisters in Canada estimates that 60,000 young people, women
and men, came across the border in the late sixties and early seventies.
A slight majority of these immigrants were women. I am glad to count
myself among their number.
~Rosie*
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