The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2004, Blaðsíða 26

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 58 #3
the victimhood that they, coming from a
colonized and disenfranchised land,
thought was a link between themselves and
Native peoples. At the same time, they
were in the position of colonizer, a situa-
tion some people found deeply troubling
and others found acceptable.
Forgetting is a powerful cognitive tool
for self-defence. Forgetting operates at
both individual and collective levels; it
insulates the subject from shame or culpa-
bility and from reliving traumatic events. It
is an interim strategy for physical and emo-
tional survival. But if we dismiss the past
and its injustices, we fail to recognize the
persistent relevance of history and memory
in shaping present-day identities. Today,
First Nations peoples in Canada struggle
against powerful forces of forgetfulness.
These forces operate throughout Canadian
society, in Canada’s judicial, educational
and political practices, in the attitudes and
behaviours of Euro-Canadians and in First
Nations communities. Yet the guarded
optimism of the late anthropologist Sally
Weaver does not seem out of place. She
describes the emergence of a “permanent
organic relationship,” which recognizes
that “cultures change and evolve over time”
without leading towards convergence or
assimilation (cf. Brydon 1987, 1990a/b,
1991). Initiatives in anthropological and
historical research have sought to decolo-
nize the writing of Canadian culture and
history, to document the existence of many
histories, many narratives told from differ-
ing perspectives.
In the first years of Icelandic settle-
ment there was acrimonious debate, trig-
gered by hardships, over whether the
choice to come to New Iceland had been
the right one. During the next decades, not
all Icelanders bought into the myth-mak-
ing about a more congenial past, which
community leaders found conducive to
their economic and political interests. But
the dissenting voices remain locked in
diaries and letters written in Icelandic and
hidden in several archives in Canada and
Iceland (Olafsson and Magnusson). A
young generation of historians in Iceland is
only now turning to these stories. No par-
allel initiative is emerging in Icelandic-
Canadian scholarship, although alternative
histories and difficult truths have been told
through fiction and poetry. The early short
stories by W.D. Valgardson shocked his
contemporaries by their frank telling of
suffering, alcoholism, poverty and suicide.
Gunnars’ literary works (1980; 1983),
based on her archival research into
Icelandic settlement in Canada, evoke the
psychic pain that the proximity of death
must have caused the early settlers. Her
writings evoke a bush of ghosts, the fear of
which could only be tamed by recognizing
that - unlike Sigtryggur Jonasson’s stories
of nomadic Indians - the Saulteaux experi-
enced their lives and their sense of identity
through a deep attachment to the land
being taken from them. Such a potent
attachment to place would have resonated
with the reality Icelandic settlers had left
behind in the homeland, where identities
are connected inextricably to farms and
landmarks. Gunnars came to Canada from
Iceland as a young woman and was not
socialized into a standard story of
Icelandic-Canadian history; this may help
explain her perspective.
Can the Icelandic practice of dream
interpretation generate other interpreta-
tions of Trausti’s dream about John
Ramsay and his wife’s grave? For
Icelanders, as for the Saulteaux, the bound-
ary between human existence and the ani-
mate qualities of other orders of being was
quite shadowy. Dreams are thought to give
access to an external, immanent reality that
is difficult to contact in a waking state.
Certain features can have direct meanings
or can be prophetic: dream of a bear, be
wary of meeting a powerful man.
Sometimes people dream of the hidden
people (huldafolk) who co-habit the island
and choose when to make themselves visi-
ble to ordinary people, from whom they
will typically extract a favour. In dreams,
the dead return to let loved ones know of
their passing and to say goodbye. Many
deaths in pre-modern Iceland occurred at
sea, when open boats would capsize and
the people fishing from them - mostly men
- disappeared forever. These dreams seem
to provide a closure or finality to death that
the body’s absence would have left unfin-