Lögberg-Heimskringla - 22.07.1994, Blaðsíða 12

12 • Lögberg-Heimskringla • Föstudagur 22. júlí 1994
The lcelanders in Manitoba (cont a.)
When they arrived in Canada, nothing
was ready for them. They spent a year
in Kinmount, Ontario before heading
west. They crossed Lake Superior in a
fierce storm, then made their way to
St. Paul, Minnesota and travelled
down the Red River. In Winnipeg,
they hired three barges, enormous
flatboats, which they dragged down
the Red river until they reached the
mouth. There, they were met by the
Hudson bay company steamer, the
only steamer on Lake Winnipeg. They
were on their way to the Icelandic
River, but it was late in the year and a
fall storm came up. The Captain cut
the barges adrift and they floated in to
shore. They landed by a giant white
rock, the only large white rock on the
south side of Lake Winnipeg, and the
first Icelandic baby in the new world
was born there in the shelter of the
rock.
The first winter was the coldest
winter in history, and the settlers had
to live in tents given them by the
Hudson Bay Company and rough log
cabins which they built although it
was so late in the season that the
ground was frozen and they had trou-
ble finding mud to chink the cracks. It
was difficult time for these settlers.
They were unused to axes. Iceland
had no trees. They didn’t know how
to fish under ice. In Iceland, the ocean
didn’t freeze.
The next summer there was a great
small-pox epidemic, and one hundred
and two people died. The epidemic
lasted for over a year, and the commu-
nity was tested by isolation and fear
when it was quarantined. No one was
allowed in or out. Families were sepa-
rated and there was almost no help for
the dying. Over the next twelve years,
there were nine years of flood and a
plague of locusts. It should have been
the end, but it wasn’t. The people
named all the farms, more settlers
came, and the community thrived.
My own memories of growing up
are tied to that act of naming. I was
bom at Espihóll, a fárm whose name
echoes a famous farm from the
Njálssaga. My grandfather farmed
Mýrar and Grænamörk as well. To the
south of us was Bölstaður and to the
north Staraskógur.
Most of this story told to children
is factually true, but more important, it
is also mythically true. Both
metaphorically and literally cut adrift,
the Icelanders make an accidental
landing at the wrong place, which is
nevertheless signalled to be the proper
place by the miraculous white rock.
They face a purification by disease, a
testing by flood, a plague of locusts,
an act of naming. They undergo the
same process of claiming a country
that is described in the old Icelandic
Landnámabók, the book that
describes the discovery of Iceland.
There is even more. A fierce reli-
gious dispute split the community in
two. The Reverend Páll Thorláksson
and the reverend Jon Bjarnason led
the opposing factions, the Páls Menn
and the Jóns Menn. Páll Thorláksson
represented the stricter Evangelical
Icelandic Lutheran group, associated
with the American Norwegian Synod,
while Jón Bjamason led the more lib-
eral Icelandic Lutherans, many of
whom later became Unitarians. Páll
did not like the Gimli settlement. He
admired the American system and
mistrusted the British. He felt that
Icelanders would do better to assimi-
late in the United States than they
would in their own settlement in
Canada. He led his followers to
Argyle, and from there to
Saskatchewan and North Dakota. An
Icelandic diaspora in the new world
had begun.
Like any other group, the
Icelanders came to Canada to settle.
The numbers, the dates, the place
names, the maps are all available to
the historian. But the facts are not the
story. My point is that geography is
not an unmediated presence, a set of
simple, undeniable truths about the
world. Any understanding of a land-
scape is an understanding mediated
by culture and experience.
So the Icelanders who moved to
Manitoba played out a version of the
founding of Iceland in their founding
of New Iceland. They settled on Lake
Winnipeg. It would be easy to argue
that Icelanders are fishermen, and so
they chose to live on a lake. But they
were not lake fishermen. They had to
leam to fish all over again, setting nets
instead of trolling them, fishing at
least for part of the time through four
feet of ice. They were taught to fish by
the Indians, and they developed a very
special relationship with the Indians
through that experience.
The floods that wiped out their
work again and again were accepted
as necessary and inescapable, a new
testing. The more practical Ulcrainians
who came after 1897 immediately dis-
mantled the beaver dams on the ridge
west of the settlement which were the
source of the flooding, and put an end
to it.
The truth of some of my details
might be disputed. Perhaps things did
not happen in just such a way. In fact,
the Icelanders were probably not cut
adrift and left to land in the storm.
More likely, they were hauled through
the channel to the quiet waters of the
lagoon behind Willow Point. But I’m
not interested in some narrow historic
truth here. I’m more interested in a
good, serviceable mythic truth.The
Republic of New Iceland lasted for
twelve years, from 1875 to 1887. It
was incorporated into an expanded
Manitoba in 1881, but it didn’t lose all
its special rights immediately. It main-
tained its system of govemment until
1887. Only Icelanders were allowed
into the area until 1897, when it was
finally opened to other settlers. The
new settlers tumed out to be mostly
Ukrainian and Polish, peasants with a
feel for farming. The Icelandic settle-
ment tumed out to be basically urban.
There was no equivalent in Iceland for
the large isolated farm, and when the
Ukrainian farmers arrived, many of
the Icelanders breathed a sigh of
relief, sold off their homesteads and
moved into towns and cities. They
largely abandoned the countryside to
the Ukrainians. This tumed out to be
a workable system. The Ukrainians
who came were a socially uniform
group. They were only farmers. The
Icelanders became the group of mer-
chants who served the new communi-
ty-
The Icelandic community is one of
the oldest ethnic communities on the
prairies. Only the Mennonites who
arrived at about the same time have as
long a history. And yet, in spite of the
fact that the communities have largely
dispersed, that the old settlements like
Gimli and Riverton and Arborg are no
longer even largely Icelandic, there
continues to exist a large and vital
Icelandic presence on the prairies.
The Icelanders continue to publish a
newspaper. They have several active
cultural institutions such as the
Icelandic Frón and the Icelandic
National league. Where later immi-
grants to Manitoba such as the
Norwegians, the Swedes and the
Germans have largely been so inte-
grated that there is little sign of their
cultural presence, the Icelanders con-
tinue to form a significant cultural
group. The source of this cohesiveness
is the myth of beginnings, a myth
shared by Icelandic-Canadians and
Icelandic-Americans as well. We look
backward, not to some lost haven
across the sea in Iceland, but to our
roots as a people in a new land. When
we hold our celebrations, we honour
the old country but we celebrate the
new as well. When we tell our epic
stories, they are stories located in the
new land, stories like the horrors of
the Smallpox epidemic, when the
bodies of children were stacked on
the roofs of houses so that wolves
would not get at them until they could
be buried in the spring. Or even
lighter stories, like the marriage of
Caroline Taylor and Sigurður
Kristófersson, which took place on
Netley Creek, the happy couple on
one side and the Metis minister in a
boat in the middle of the creek shout-
ing out the ceremony. We even have
our own anthem, Guttormur
Guttormsson’s poem Sandy Bar, a
powerful evocation of the sadness of
the pioneer experience, and a poem
more important to Icelanders in
North America than any of the great
Icelandic medieval epics.
And finally, we have our own car-
nival, our special celebration,
íslendingadagurinn. For many years, it
has been the central event of the
Icelandic experience in North
America. Firmly located in time and
space: Gimli, the first Monday of
August, it is the focal point of our
thinking of ourselves as a group. Here,
we are ruled by our Fjallkona, the
maid of the mountain, not some
young girl celebrated solely for her
physical beauty, but an older woman,
earth mother, celebrated for her con-
tribution to the community as a
whole. It is a wonderful and entirely
unique position, a creation of the
community here and not an imported
ceremony from Iceland. (The
Fjallkona had been a somewhat differ-
ent figure in earlier ceremonies in
Iceland, though the role had pretty
much disappeared there. Her success
in the new world revitalized her as a
figure in Iceland.)
At íslendingadagurinn, we gather
from all over the continent, we renew
acquaintances, we hold family
reunions and, most importantly, we
renew the myth of our beginnings,
and in that myth we find a sense of
community that holds together a dis-
persed people who have entered thor-
oughly into the national mythologies
of Canada and the United States.
Because of the hold of that myth, it is
possible to think of yourself a New
Icelander even if you speak no
Icelandic and have never been to
Iceland
Even more importantly, the myth
of beginnings ties together the
Icelandic community of north
America with the other communities
of Manitoba which help us celebrate.
For the Ukrainians the Poles, the
British, the Germans and all the other
races and groups that make up the
community of the Interlake, the
founding myth is also their story,
íslendingadagurinn also their celebra-
tion. As contemporary North
Americans we live in many cultures at
the same time. We wish to protect our
own, but also to share it. íslendin-
gadagurinn and the myth of begin-
nings it celebrates is important to
Canada. It gives us one more valid
way of being Canadian without evok-
ing ancient dreams of Empire.