Walking the Land: The MIR Centre For Peace Castlegar, British Columbia

Abstract

The Kootenay region of British Columbia lies about 350 miles due east of Vancouver in the narrow mountain valleys of the Selkirk range. The region is both physically and psychically
distant from the major urban centres of the province. It has always been a place of retreat, often enough of exile, for the peoples who have found their ways here: the First Nations
who followed the Columbia and Kootenay river systems as traditional fishing grounds, the Japanese Canadians who were interned in “ghost towns” in the early 1940s, the young American war resisters of the 1960s and 1970s and members of the counter culture from many nationalities who came here seeking simpler more sane existences, and of course the
Doukhobors who began coming to the Kootenays almost 100 years ago now and developed one of the most impressive communal-pacifist societies in North American history. Our story, and the brief history of the MIR Centre for Peace, is bound up with all these peoples and their histories, embedded in the many layers of history which make up the social reality of this unique area of British Columbia. But in order to understand what the MIR Centre for Peace stands for, and what it might become, we must first move back from the larger levels of public history and begin with a personal story.