Intangible Cultural Heritage

Latvians arrived on Canadian shores with scant material possessions but an acute awareness of their great intangible cultural heritage and the responsibility for safeguarding it. Their resolve was strengthened by the knowledge that the Latvian nation, together with its language and culture, was under attack in Soviet occupied Latvia, and its very survival was threatened. People were being deported to Siberia as knowledge systems and cultural institutions were gutted. Mass deportations designed to break the nation were carried out again in March 1949.

The UNESCO Convention on the Intangible Cultural Heritage was not implemented until 2003, but the Latvian exile community implicitly understood the meaning of the concept. 

As their labour contracts came to an end in remote locations across Canada, the new Latvian Canadians gravitated to towns and cities in search of better employment opportunities and began to develop communities. While churches and societies were the first to emerge, choirs, folk dance groups, theatre groups, and other clubs and interest groups followed rapidly. At its zenith, the annually published Latvian Credit Union Yearbook listed several hundred organizations in Canada.