An Experiment in Immigrant Colonization: Canada and the Icelandic Reserve, 1875-1897 by Ryan Christopher Eyford A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of The University of Manitoba in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of History University of Manitoba Winnipeg Copyright © 2010 by Ryan Christopher Eyford Abstract In October 1875 the Canadian government reserved a tract of land along the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg for the exclusive use of Icelandic immigrants. This was part of a larger policy of reserving land for colonization projects involving European immigrants with a common ethno-religious background. The purpose of this policy was to promote the rapid resettlement and agricultural development of Aboriginal territory in the Canadian Northwest. The case of the Icelandic reserve, or Nja Ísland (New Iceland), provides a revealing window into this policy, and the ways in which it intersected with the larger processes of colonization in the region during the late nineteenth century. The central problem that this study addresses is the uneasy fit between "colonization reserves" such as New Iceland and the political, economic and cultural logic of nineteenth-century liberalism. Earlier studies have interpreted group settlements as either aberrations from the "normal" pattern of pioneer individualism or communitarian alternatives to it. This study, by contrast, argues that colonization reserves were part of a spatial regime that reflected liberal categories of difference that were integral to the extension of a new liberal colonial order in the region. Using official documents, immigrant letters and contemporary newspapers, this study examines the Icelandic colonists’ relationship to the Aboriginal people they displaced, to other settler groups, and to the Canadian state. It draws out the tensions between the designs and perceptions of government officials in Ottawa and Winnipeg, the administrative machinery of the state, and the lives and strategies of people attempting to navigate shifting positions within colonial hierarchies of race and culture. ii Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the generous financial assistance that I have received from many sources, including doctoral scholarships from the University of Manitoba, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and RANNÍS, the Icelandic Centre for Research. My supervisor, Adele Perry, also provided financial and material support in her capacity as the Canada Research Chair in Western Canadian Social History. My thanks go to Adele for her sage advice and direction, and for providing me with the freedom to chart my own path. Gerry Friesen and Royden Loewen, the other members of my thesis committee, also offered important encouragement and guidance. Gumundur Hálfdánarson of the University of Iceland offered helpful feedback in his capacity as my Icelandic supervisor under the RANNÍS scholarship. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, and benefitted from the comments of Esyllt Jones, Wendy Mitchinson and four anonymous reviewers. I have received considerable assistance from the faculty and staff of the Department of History at the University of Manitoba. I would especially like to acknowledge the singular contribution of graduate secretary Carol Adam in shepherding me through the doctoral program. The fellows and staff of St. John's College provided a collegial work environment during my four years as a Research Fellow. Being at a university with a Department of Icelandic and a large collection of sources in the Icelandic language was an enormous asset for this project. My thanks go to Department Chair Birna Bjarnadóttir for her interest and encouragement, to Helga Hilmisdóttir for her iii skills as a language teacher, and to Sigrid Johnson for her help in accessing the collection's resources, and for providing a workspace in the collection. Librarians and archivists at the Archives of Manitoba, Library and Archives Canada, Landsbókasafn Íslands, and the National Archives [United Kingdom], have provided vital assistance with research. Thanks also to Nelson Gerrard, Bob Christopherson, and the late Donna Skardal for sharing manuscript material from their private collections. The roots of this project extend back to Vogar, Manitoba, a Métis village with an Icelandic name bordering a Euro-Canadian ranching community on one side and the Lake Manitoba First Nation on the other. That is where I began, and the imprint of that beginning has helped shape me as a person and as a historian. I would like to thank my family for their support and understanding during this long process. Yes, I am done. The biggest thanks go to Aleisha Reimer, my wife, partner, and best friend, for her intelligence, strength, and kindness. On many evenings and weekends we are also study companions, sometimes managing to find common ground between history and microbiology, but far more often succeeding in creating a supportive environment that has helped sustain and advance our quite different research endeavours. This dissertation is dedicated to her. iv Table of Contents List of Figures vi Introduction – “A Special Experiment of Immigrant 1 Colonization” Chapter 1 – Northern Dreamlands: The Convergence of 37 Icelandic Mass Migration and Canadian Expansionism Chapter 2 – Broken Townships: New Iceland, Colonization 75 Reserves and the Dominion Lands System Chapter 3 – The First New Icelanders: Family Migration and 122 the Formation of a Reserve Community Chapter 4 – Quarantined Within a New Order: Smallpox and 154 the Spatial Practices of Colonization Chapter 5 – “Principal Projector of the Colony”: The 187 Turbulent Career of John Taylor, Icelandic Agent Chapter 6 – Becoming British Subjects: Municipal 221 Government, Citizenship, and the Vatnsing Chapter 7 – “Freemen Serving No Overlord”: Debt, Self- 257 Reliance, Liberty, and the Limits of Exclusivity Conclusion – New Iceland and Liberal Colonization 291 Bibliography 300 v List of Figures 0.1 – Reserved Lands in Manitoba, 1870-1886 4 2.1 – Reserves and Surveyed Land in Manitoba, 1875 76 2.2 – Dominion Land Survey Township Grid 87 2.3 – John Taylor’s “Plan Proposed for Icelandic Village,” October 1875 109 2.4 – Benedikt Arason’s map of Víirnesbygg, January 1879 117 3.1 – Sslur divisions in Iceland during the emigration period 130 4.1 – “Quarantine Map of Manitoba and Keewatin,” 1877 176 6.1 - New Iceland showing the four byggir (settlements) 240 vi Introduction: “A Special Experiment of Immigrant Colonization” On 18 September 1877 the Canadian Ministers of Agriculture and Interior and their top deputies visited New Iceland, a reserve for Icelandic immigrants on the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg. Two weeks later the Toronto Globe published an account of this “ministerial inspection” that also included an overview of the troubled history of this “special experiment of immigrant colonization”; since the arrival of the first group in the fall of 1875, the Icelandic colonists had endured hunger, crop failures, and disease, including an outbreak of smallpox that resulted in the colony being placed under rigid quarantine for almost ten months. The anonymous Globe correspondent noted that even though the Department of Agriculture’s Immigration Branch had “spent and loaned…large sums of public money…to establish this settlement” its future was still in doubt. He explained that the Ministers were there to assess the situation for themselves, and to determine whether government support for Icelandic immigration and colonization should continue into the future.1 This was a matter of politics as well as policy; opponents of Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberals had cited the Icelandic colony as an example of the government’s failed colonization policy. These critics accused government officials of making a grave error in the choice of colony site, and accused the Icelanders of being an “effete and unprogressive race…not equal to the struggle of life on this continent and must inevitabl[y] succumb to the fate of the “least fit.”2 1 Globe, 2 October 1877. 2 Manitoba Daily Free Press, 25 September 1877. See also Manitoba Herald, 11 and 18 January 1877. 2 The Globe correspondent defended the government against the accusations of incompetence and negligence and painted an alternate picture of the Icelanders as worthy colonists. “If the site and the people were altogether unsuited to each other, and that if the consequence of such error had been, not only considerable waste of public money, but the infliction of suffering and death on large numbers of innocent and unsophisticated people…then the Immigration Department and all concerned would be justly subject to severe reproach. But what are the facts?”3 He asserted that the Icelanders were an orderly, literate, and hardworking people intent on achieving social and material progress. Therefore, “the experiment of this colony may be pronounced a success.”4 Unknown to Globe readers was the fact that the author was none other than John Lowe, Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, and thus one of the people principally responsible for orchestrating the colonization scheme.5 However, Lowe’s article was not only an attempt to whitewash the failures of this one particular colony. It was also a defense of a whole mode of colonization in which the state took an active role in encouraging group immigration and settlement on reserved tracts of land. He asserted “aided colonization in communities is nothing new on this continent. It has succeeded where it has been properly looked after.”6 * * * 3 Globe, 2 October 1877. 4 Ibid. 5 A few days after its publication, Lowe sent a copy of the Globe article to Canada’s Emigration Agent in London William Annand. “I may tell you (this, however, quite privately) that I wrote the article in question.” Library and Archives Canada [hereafter referred to as LAC], Department of Agriculture fonds, RG 17 [hereafter RG 17], “English and Continental Letterboooks” series [hereafter A I 8], reel T-158, volume 1666, page 126, John Lowe to William Annand, 19 October 1877.