The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2001, Side 6

44
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 56 #2
Editorial
by Stefan Jonasson
On the eve of the First World War, my
paternal grandfather arrived in Canada as a
young boy. By then, the migration of
Icelanders to North America had slowed to a
trickle, the settlement patterns in their new
home had been well established, and the
dream of a "New Iceland" (where the expatri-
ates would dwell together) had all but been
abandoned.
My grandfather was brought to this new
land—where he would eventually grow to
maturity, work hard to establish himself and
his family, and eventually be laid to rest—by
his mother and step-father. My grandfather's
step-father—"Old Jonas" as he's known in our
family—can hardly be described as a willing
immigrant. He brought his adopted family to
Canada after his store in Bolungarvik burned
to the ground. Old Jonas would now be char-
acterized as having been an economic refugee
—a fact that gives me pause when I hear so
many of my hard-hearted neighbours casually
dismiss those who still seek to build new lives
in this grand country of ours as economic
refugees, as if those who have come here have
ever been anything but!
Old Jonas rebuilt his life from the scorched
earth upwards, establishing a dairy at Selkirk
before acquiring the Oak Dairy in East
Kildonan. This enterprise shared a telephone
line with the A.S. Bardal Funeral Home,
something that must have left his customers
wondering about the quality of the milk!
Old Jonas never really settled into
Canadian life - his heart longed for the home-
land. It was his considered opinion that
Canada was a good place to live and work . .
. but he wouldn't have wanted to die here. So,
in 1932, he returned to Iceland with my great-
grandmother. By then, his three step-sons
were well established here and not even the
effects of the Great Depression could lure
them to return to the land of their birth.
In contrast to Old Jonas, one of my great-
great-grandfathers, Elias KjsemesteS, came to
Canada with the intention of remaining here.
Before he left his home in Iceland, he paid a
genealogist to trace the family tree, for he
knew that he would never return to the old
country but he wanted his two daughters to
have a record of their rich ancestral heritage.
Elias was fifty years old when he sold his
Icelandic farm in 1881 and embarked upon
the ocean voyage which carried him to the
Muskoka district of Ontario by way of
Glasgow and Quebec City. He abandoned his
Muskoka home two years later, settling on a
farm at Husavik, near his brother who had
immigrated to Manitoba a year after the initial
settlement of New Iceland.
The common hardships of pioneer life took
their toll on Elias. Within a decade of his
arrival in Canada, his youngest daughter
noticed him "trudging with a stoop, tired-
looking, slow of foot. This kind of a life ages
a man . . . before his time." Years later, she
recalled asking herself, "Is this my father? Is
he getting old?" So she averted her eyes and
hurried away before her father noticed her
presence. "I could not account for it," she
wrote, "but I would have been ashamed to
have him see that I realized that his Viking
strength and spirit were declining."
These two figures from my own family's
past are representative of the tension between
the two different ways that those of Icelandic
descent have come to understand their identi-
ty. As a youngster, I remember people using
the terms "Western Icelander" and "Icelandic
Canadian" almost interchangeably. In recent
years, however, there has been a periodic
debate among members of the Icelandic com-
munity in Canada about which term more
accurately reflects our identity. Old Jonas was
a "Western Icelander," pure and simple, who
looked affectionately to Iceland as not only
the land of his birth but also as what Dorothy,
in The Wizard of Oz, would have called "the
land of his heart's desire." In contrast, Elias
allowed Iceland to become an artifact of his