The Icelandic Canadian - 01.11.2006, Síða 32

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 60 #3
I 18
We are a
Funeral Company
For
Discerning People
Focussing on
Integrity and Value
984 Portage Avenue at Aubrey St.
www.nbardal.mb.ca
Mennonites, articulated through its recol-
lections of being victims of Stalinist
oppression and women’s gender specific
experiences of wartime rape which were
erased from this master narrative.35
Similarly, the gap between official and
unofficial histories is revealed in a story
recounted by Stella on numerous occa-
sions. While Stella was in hospital, she
served as a translator for a group of elderly
female patients who spoke only Polish.
After Stella earned their trust, these women
confided that they did not regret the death
of their husbands who had treated them no
better than animals. One woman recalled
that her husband made her sleep in the barn
in the middle of winter because she had
placed ‘the pisspot’ on the wrong side of
the bed. These hardships—associated with
humiliation and degradation—contrast
dramatically with the ennobling discourse
of hard work that features prominently in
the settlement narratives. Both forms of
sacrifice contributed to the re-making of
Canada but only stories that bestow hon-
our make their way into ‘official’ history
books; the morally repugnant, based in this
case on patriarchal violence, are erased.
The remembering of Saskatchewan’s
history within the twin narratives of set-
tlement and multiculturalism is predicated
on the active ‘forgetting’ of colonization
and the selective inclusion of Aboriginal
peoples. The concepts of ‘founding years’
and ‘settlement’ discursively presuppose
that nothing existed or more precisely no
one inhabited the land prior to the arrival
of the settlers. The absence of Aboriginal
peoples, most notably the Cree and
Saulteaux, is evident in the opening para-
graph of They Came From Many Lands.
As far as is known, there was no settle-
ment in the area covered by this book until
the early 1880’s, although for many years
the area had been traversed by fur traders,
adventurers, and surveyors.36
In this first chapter, only fleeting refer-
ences are made to a history of Aboriginal
peoples, as traders with the Hudson’s Bay
Company, as dependents upon the net-
work of forts when the buffalo declined,
and as beneficiaries of government policy
encouraging settlers to produce much