History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 259

during the Depression of the 1930s, when tobacco farmers were able to survive
largely because of combined family labour and financial resources. The oral history
survey compiled by the Multicultural History Society of Ontario in the Delhi tobacco
belt in 1977 indicated that almost 90 percent of Belgian tobacco growers had been
farm labourers when they arrived and that they had emigrated to improve their
financial status. Family ties were most important; scarcely any gave political
considerations and none gave religious reasons for choosing Canada over other
destinations. About two-thirds had come as family units, conscious of the need for
labour and capital, and two out of five respondents said that they had not intended to
remain permanently in Canada. The family units were most inclined to remain.
The role of women was particularly crucial in mining and agriculture. In addition to
running boarding-houses for single men, they tended the kitchen gardens, did the
domestic work, cared for the children, and organized the social life of the ethnocultural
enclaves though their names do not survive in most archival records. Women’s
sustaining role was never better demonstrated than during the Depression on prairie
farms. They made clothes from whatever material was available, watered the surviving
vegetables, cared for the chickens and pigs, milked the cows, and strove to maintain
family morale. Because the traditional concept that a man should provide for his family
was upheld, the men desperately sought supplementary work in lumber camps or
mines. Guy Vanderhaeghe in the collection Man Descending (1982) has captured the
complete demoralization of his Flemish father in these years as he lost his
employment and then his self-esteem.

Religion
From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Belgians/Cornelius J. Jaenen

From colonial times, Belgians have participated in Roman Catholic missionary work in
Canada. Recollets of the Franciscan order were the first to evangelize the “upper
country” around the Great Lakes in the early seventeenth century. They also laboured
in the parishes of New France, served as chaplains at military posts in the interior, and
ministered to fishermen and Micmac on the Gaspé peninsula. The Belgian Recollets
Zénobe Membré, Louis Hennepin, Luc Buisset, and