Abstract

The Makortoff Family Collection consists of 153 photographs taken in the Doukhobor communities in the British Columbia Kootenay Mountains from the 1920s, through the 1950s. The Collection was compiled in 2002 by Teryll Plotnikoff, who selected the images from her family’s pictures to be added to the Doukhobor Historic Collection at Simon Fraser University. By engaging with these family snapshots and the accompanying guide, this thesis brings to the fore the role of personal agency in negotiating between assimilation and resistance within the Doukhobor communities in British Columbia. This reading contributes to the history of the Doukhobors, a Russian Christian group that originally relocated to Canada in the 1890s, and its role in the development of Canadian multiculturalism. The family snapshots in the Makortoff Family Collection represent a state of transition from the traditional Doukhobor way of life, narrating aspects of modernity adopted by the community; they are thus speaking to a doubled sense of resistance, simultaneously to the Canadian mainstream and to the Doukhobor traditions brought from Russia. By insisting that their subjects continue to maintain agency, I choose to view these snapshots not only as historical documentation, but also as active participants in the acts of reading and writing of their own histories.