The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2004, Blaðsíða 13

Vol. 58 #3
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
107
pain. Braid has recently discussed how nar-
ratives provide important cognitive tools
for making experience meaningful.
Theorists of nationalism - Anderson,
Bhabha, Giddens, Hobsbawm and Ranger
and Lowenthal - have demonstrated how
the narration of national histories plays a
significant part in creating national and eth-
nic identities. Hobsbawm convincingly
argues that nationalisms come before
nations: they arise as self-conscious
attempts to privilege the past’s interpreta-
tion as the inevitable unfolding of an imma-
nent national consciousness. History and
memory now carry a heavy burden: they
have become the pre-eminent means by
which people orient their sense of self
towards larger collectivities.
National and ethnic histories are selec-
tive. As is evident in the story of Ramsay, a
man who gave crucial aid to the Icelanders
during the early years of settlement and
was deeply admired by them, the stories of
other nations and ethnic groups are
accessed sporadically, as long as they fit
into the myth of the historic unfolding of
the new identity, what Hobsbawm and
Ranger term an “invented tradition.” We
learn little from Icelandic written sources
about the social and cultural contexts of
Ramsay’s complex life, nor of the lives of
other Saulteaux, Cree and Ojibwa peoples,
nor of those Icelanders who married or
cohabited with Natives and then met with
bigotry. This is neither surprising nor
blameworthy. But silences need to be rec-
ognized for what they are and how they
occur, since they have
lingering effects in the
present.
National narratives
can motivate seemingly
ordinary and disparate
social practices. Iceland’s
independence movement
provided a means for
early settlers to concep-
tualize their own identity
and actions in diaspora,
through the continuation
in Canada of nationalist
political ambitions. In
Iceland, leaders of the
nationalist independence movement envi-
sioned their goal as the freeing of the
repressed heroic spirit that had once found
expression in the Icelandic sagas and
Eddas, arguably medieval Europe’s finest
literary achievement. In Canada, the
Icelanders quarried literature and folklore
for metaphors and tropes to interpret new
realities. For example, they continue to
compare their arrival on the shores of Lake
Winnipeg to Ingolfur Arnason’s settlement
of Iceland circa 874 or to Leifur Eirlksson’s
arrival in Newfoundland circa 1000. Place
names linked Manitoba’s bush to the
homeland’s unfolding narrative, in what
Anderson describes as the creation of syn-
chronic or parallel spaces. The act of nam-
ing creates and demarcates; it lays claim to
the world and orders it to fit into familiar
ways of thinking. The settlers named their
reserve New Iceland - the very name
speaks volumes - and its first town site was
Cimli, named for the heavenly hall
reserved for the good and righteous,
according to Norse mythology. The dele-
gation that chose the site for the reserve
renamed the White Mud River initially as
Icelander’s River - note the possessive
form - which soon became Icelandic River.
New Iceland soon had its own constitu-
tion; Icelanders in North America are
known, still, as West Icelanders, as those
living west of Iceland. West Icelanders
named their farms after landmarks or
places back home. The overall impression
left by these actions and narratives is one of
a new and virgin territory onto which