The Freedomite movement split-off from the Doukhobors, a community of Spiritual Christians who began a mass migration from Russia to Canada in 1898.
The Freedomite movement first appeared in 1902 in what is now Saskatchewan, and later most moved to the Kootenay and Boundary Districts of British Columbia.
The ideals of the Freedomites emphasized basic traditional Russian communal living and action — growing food, building homes, living a peaceful rural life, ecstatic religious doctrine when agitated for protest, and anarchic attitudes towards external regulation.
[3] Although Canada at first provided a more tolerant religious environment than the Russian Empire, conflict soon developed, most importantly over the schooling of children and land registration.
[1] Among the reactions of the British Columbia and Canadian government was taking away Freedomite children and placing them in an internment center in New Denver.
When the government made a decision to seize the Sons of Freedom children, it was in an attempt to respond to the widespread civil disorder happening in the Kootenays.
[14] In the years leading up to the creation of the residential schools, the Sons of Freedom had become a concern for the province of British Columbia as a whole; they seemed to have a problem with any sort of government, in addition to the laws and policies that were being enforced.
Public alarm was increasing, based on the fears that the unruly incidents of nude protests, burning of homes and buildings and bombings of bridges and railways, were not being attended to by the RCMP.
[14] "It was between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. and Elsie Ericson's mother had just begun lighting the stove when four RCMP officers barged into their tiny wooden home in the village of Krestova, B.C.