Holocaust survivors are elderly and dying. There will soon be no more first-hand accounts. After hearing Nate speak, I felt the need to somehow acknowledge these extraordinary people who endured and survived unbelievable mistreatment and to find a way to preserve the personal nature of these memories. The connection between holocaust and residential school survivors that had emerged for me, as a settler in Saskatchewan with its notorious history of residential schools, were the impetus behind including portraits of residential school survivors in this project. I thought that listening to that history and those stories could be a small personal step toward the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls for action, listening and bearing witness. All the residential school survivors who chose to participate entrusted me to share their story, through portraits, with integrity, for which I am deeply grateful.

Beginning with a chance encounter, Tim Smith has been documenting and building relationships with Hutterite communities in Manitoba over the past twelve years. An Anabaptist group whose roots trace back to the 16th Century Reformation, Hutterites live communally on colonies throughout western Canada and the north-western United States. Their culture continues to be preserved through deliberate separation from mainstream society and economic self-sufficiency.

The Hutterites are currently in the midst of one of the most successful periods of their approximately 500 year history. Facing no overt threats from the outside world they have prospered and grown to approximately 50,000 members living on colonies throughout North America. Members are provided for throughout their entire lives and on the whole experience less of the loneliness and isolation prevalent in the modern world. The importance given to engagement in family life, social life and spirituality, and the defined purpose for their lives means Hutterite communities meet many of the requirements to be considered Blue Zones; area’s where health, happiness and life expectancy rates are higher than average.

However, this period of peace has its challenges as well. There are concerns amongst colony leaders that too much prosperity is eating away at the fabric of their society and too much contact with the outside world is watering down their culture. Each colony must decide how rigidly they cling to their traditions verses how much they adapt to the increasingly connected outside world. Conformity to the larger group is unofficially policed by the group as a whole. The Minister is burdened with ensuring the colony stays on a path to godliness rather than worldliness. As Hutterite author Paul S. Gross wrote “We cannot please the world and God at the same time … Either we take this world with all it offers, including trouble, mental stress, sorrow, and death at the end; or else we take a better way.” Despite challenges the Hutterites continue to be the most successful model for communal living in modern western history.