During the 1870s, 7,000 Mennonites - descendants of Dutch and German Anabaptists - arrived in Canada to settle in the newly created province of Manitoba. While in Europe, they had steadily moved eastward under pressure of persecution and governmental restrictions until they settled in "foreign colonies" in New Russia (Ukraine) in 1789.

Generations of living as non-citizen settlers under special arrangements with the ruler had reinforced their separatist understanding of what it meant to live in nonconformity with the world.

Adolf Ens's volume traces the tensions of Mennonites becoming full citizens in the participatory democracy of Canada through the crucial steps of immigration, settlement and naturalization, implementing local municipal government, and becoming part of the public school system. This process was greatly complicated by the outbreak of the First World War and the intolerance it produced toward those who were pacifist, German, and different.

Almost 8,000 of the descendants of this immigrant group left for Latin America in the aftermath of the war, becoming subjects once again. The rest gradually accommodated themselves to being full Canadian citizens.