23 Blood and Salt

The time is World War I, and Canadian soldiers are proving their worth in the trenches of Europe. But on the home front, Ukrainian Canadians are being sent to internment camps, Canada's Gulag. Bood and Salt is about this forgotten part of Canadian history. They had committed the crime of being unemployed in bad times. Or simply of having come from lands ruled by the Austrian empire. They became "enemy aliens." Taras Kalyna, a young man who deserted the Austrian army to search for his lost love, Halya, becomes one of these men. Imprisoned with hundreds of others in Banff National Park, he helps build a highway from Banff to Lake Louise. Conditions are brutal, the food poor. Taras has no way of knowing when, or even if, he'll be free again. But even imprisoned, he never stops thinking of Halya. Blood and Salt is a work of fiction, grounded in actual details about the Banff-Castle Mountain internment camp. It explores the search for a new life and the search for love and all the while asking what it is to be Ukrainian.