The Icelandic Canadian - 01.02.2007, Side 37

Vol. 60 #4
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
163
uation.”50 Indeed, as I have shown, the
story of Gudrun Goodman has been resur-
rected several times over the years to fulfill
the needs of various presents. In 1922,
Goodrun Goodman’s obituary appeared in
the Almanak, as a gesture of mourning and
a public acknowledgment of her contribu-
tion to the community. In 1955, Walter
Lindal singled out her story as a way of cel-
ebrating the contributions of Icelanders to
the building of Saskatchewan: Gudrun
Goodman represented the embodiment of
the pioneer spirit that Lindal wished to
extol. This same story is then excerpted in
A Harvest Yet to Reap, one of the first col-
lections of Western Canadian feminist his-
torical writing, whose main goal was to
recover and celebrate women’s contribu-
tions to their communities. Gudrun
Goodman exemplified the newly emergent
image of women within feminist dis-
course—she was a pioneer woman who
exhibited strength of character, autonomy,
and skill and who was woman-centered,
caring for other women against extraordi-
nary odds. In the 1980s, Gudrun
Goodman’s story is once again repeated in
the family history of the Halldorson clan.
In this story, she is remembered as part of
the foundational moment in the identity of
the Halldorson family at a time when a
direct connection to the early pioneers is
disappearing. Finally, there is my own
recovery project in which the story of
Gudrun Goodman is recalled to illustrate
the limitations of earlier feminist histori-
ographies of midwifery. These narratives
represent forms of collective memory
through which the past is transmitted to
the narrator’s present.
This project began as a seemingly sim-
ple biography, but evolved into a journey
that led to reflections on ‘doing history,’
the nature of historical artifacts, and their
relationship to memory. It is also a story
about my relationship with Stella
Stephanson. My research with Stella was a
reminder of the importance of local knowl-
edge that resides in the anecdotal, in the
everyday and in cultural practices—the
places and spaces where individuals and
communities create identity.
Consequently, I was forced to alter my
perception of gravestones, obituaries, local
histories, and genealogies as something
more than sources of information but as
material objects and texts that have mean-
ing for their creators or those who have
direct links to them. Not only do we, as
historians, sometimes forget this as we
trammel our way through ‘the data,’ but
understanding the emotional attachment to
these memory sources may provide insight
into the construction of self, family, com-
munity, ethnic identities and the ways in
which these are mediated through vernacu-
lar and official cultures.
It would be tempting to privilege local
knowledge as the authentic site of memory,
particularly since it provides an avenue into
the gendered nature of memory practices,
and to the ‘split memory’ of women’s expe-
riences which contradict the social memory
of a particular ethnic group. But, like
other memory sources, the local needs to
be interrogated. As this analysis shows, no
easy distinctions exist between the local
and the nation-state, between collective
memory and individual biography,
between vernacular and official cultures,
between memory and history, between les
lieux de memorie and les milieux de
memoire. In order then to understand the
ways in which commemorative practices
are constituted and constitutive of myth-
making, we need to examine the ways in
which vernacular and official cultures
intersect; and under what circumstances
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