The Icelandic Canadian - 01.11.2006, Page 26

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 60 #3
I 12
white and Anglophone, their histories
(including my own) were based primarily
on English language texts (medical jour-
nals, magazines, diaries, newspapers and
archival documents). As a result, these
histories presented mostly the stories of
Anglophone settlers from the mid-1800s to
the 1920s but excluded the stories of
European, Chinese, Japanese, or black
immigrants who also contributed to the
remaking of Canada.
Although the story of Gudrun
Goodman represented a small piece in my
earlier work, she remained part of my
imagination. I wanted to know who she
was, why she came to Saskatchewan, and
where she learned her skills. In this article,
I recount my search for Gudrun Goodman
with Stella Stephanson, who drew on her
local knowledge of the Canadian-Icelandic
community and culture both in finding
Gudrun Goodman and in making sense of
the cultural context in which Goodman
practised. In the process, through our
research and conversations, I began to see
other ways of ‘doing history’—outside of
the archive-—where meaning is created in
the everyday practices of remembering.
These insights first emerged not from
the mandatory review of the literature but
when Stella and I were walking around two
Icelandic cemeteries (Leslie and Bildfell)
looking for the gravestone of Gudrun
Goodman. Our experiences of this walk
were quite different. For me, it was a pleas-
ant stroll, an amiable way to spend the
afternoon framed within my desire to find
Gudrun Goodman. But as Stella wan-
dered around the tombstones, she would
mention that she knew this individual or
that individual or their family. For Stella,
the gravestones evoked wistful and fleeting
memories of family, friends, neighbours,
and acquaintances. It became clear to me
that cemeteries invoked remembering in
two senses.7 The most common and obvi-
ous meaning is that they are places of
mourning, representing ruptures with the
past; yet simultaneously they are places of
continuity where the dead are remembered
by the living. The second and less appar-
ent understanding is that cemeteries dedi-
cated to a particular group of people'—the
Icelandic settlers in this case—are a materi-
al way of reconnecting or re-membering a
community, and not just individuals.
These Icelandic cemeteries are sites of col-
lective memory that have emerged out of
the historical experience of immigration
and settlement to which the gates of the
Bildfell cemetery attest. On one gatepost a
plaque reads “In Memory of the Pioneers
Resting Here. Money Donated By Bjarni
Thordarson.” The other post indicates that
the land was donated by Gisili Bildfell,
1895, an early settler who lived in the area.
When Stella and I first found
Goodman’s gravestone in the Bildfell
cemetery that summer day in 2001, we had
a ‘eureka’ moment and Goodman became
immediately more real than Lindal’s story.
Gravestones are concrete, material mark-
ers, monuments to a body interred while
the memory of the individual is etched in
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