The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2009, Side 44

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #3
Depression and War? Do you want to
establish lasting prosperity and peace? The
power is yours! . . . Social justice will pre-
vail when women have accepted responsi-
bility with men in the political and govern-
mental field.”
Beyond these petitions to Anglo-
Canadian women, Halldorson’s pacifist
appeals to Icelandic Canadian women in
Icelandic appear even more subversive,
particularly in their omission of the
Canadian nationalist language which char-
acterised her English discussions of
Icelandic Canadian political participation.
Her work also stood in stark contrast to
the activities of other Icelandic Canadian
women such as the members of the Jon
Sigurdsson Chapter of the Imperial Order
of the Daughters of the Empire who dedi-
cated their time to creating publications
such as Minningarrit Islenzkra Hermanna
1914-1918 (Memories of Icelandic Soldiers)
and organizing knitting drives to supply
woollens to the Canadian Armed Forces.
Although it appears that the majority of
Icelandic Canadian women chose not to
openly oppose the war, Halldorson was
joined by Eaura Goodman Salverson in her
attempts to fan Icelandic Canadian paci-
fism. Salverson's 1937 book The Dark
Weaver: Against the Sombre Background
of the Old Generations Flame the Scarlet
Banners of the New was well-received by
Anglo-Canadians and even won the
Governor General's prize for literature.
Unlike Salverson, Halldorson incorporated
both English and Icelandic into her cam-
paigns. Although she spoke out against the
war in English, one of her undated
Icelandic speeches reveals that she reserved
some of her most radical sentiments for
Icelandic-only forums. Her disdain for tra-
ditional female expressions of patriotism in
wartime, reminiscent of the activities of the
Jon Sigurdsson IODE, is particularly com-
pelling.
Women have asked me recently
whether we couldn’t rally together
and oppose this war . . . One woman
was a member of a(n) organization
whose goal it was to work for peace in
the world. She said 30 was considered
a good turnout at a meeting. But 1300
women in Winnipeg flocked to a
meeting in the blink of an eye the
other day, to form a group to knit and
sew for the army. It is so much easier
to knit than to think about the busi-
ness of our nation.
This Icelandic appeal also included a
more subversive usage of Icelandic ethnici-
ty than her Anglo references to the “pio-
neer settlers from the land of the Vikings”.
Icelanders now, she said, needed to learn to
fight like Audur, wife of the fugitive Gxsli
in GIsla Saga. This 13th century story
describes Audur's defence of Gfsli when
she is approached by a cruel bounty hunter
seeking information about his where-
abouts. Au ur pretends to accept a bag of
coins as a bribe and then shames and
injures him by using the bag to break the
bounty hunter’s nose. As Kristin Wolf
asserts in her work on the influence of
nineteenth-century romantic nationalism
in Icelandic Canadian culture, the sagas
continued to play an important role in self-
definition for Icelanders following settle-
ment in Canada, although the more subver-
sive implications of these stories is seldom
recognised by community historians. By
invoking the story of Audur, Halldorson
hoped to appeal to the most fundamental of
Icelandic cultural values, values which she
saw as both opposed and superior to
wartime Canadian nationalist rhetoric.
Moreover, the story of Audur is one which
celebrates female physical resistance and
even violence, an example that Halldorson
probably did not plan to follow, but one
which she used to construct a tradition of
Icelandic Canadian female radical resis-
tance. Although her speech frequently
drew upon themes surrounding women,
Halldorson intended this lesson from the
Sagas to challenge both men and women in
the community who had accepted the
advent of war. "It is especially important,”
she wrote, “for all men and all women to
stand up for good and defend it with all our
might, just as Audur did in her time,
because this war which is now beginning
has its origins in hatred, vengeance, cruelty
and greed.”
While this speech suggests that the