Icelanders in North America: The First Settlers (review)

This book by Icelandic historian Jonas Thor, aided by a grant from the Government of Iceland, offers a detailed narrative of the migration and settlement of about 14,000 Icelanders between 1870 and 1914. It reads with the authority of an official account, moving adroitly from one theme to another. It begins with the economic conditions in Iceland that 'pushed' the emigrants and the visions of a transplanted Iceland in North America that 'pulled' the newcomers. It describes the difficulties of rural settlement as well as of integration in cities like Winnipeg and Milwaukee. Political leaders, mutual aid societies, church groupings, and migration patterns are outlined in almost encyclopedic fashion. The diverse Icelandic rural geographies of North America - the well-known 'New Iceland' in Manitoba, but also settlements in Wisconsin, Ontario, North Dakota, Saskatchewan, Minnesota, Washington, and British Columbia - are outlined. And overarching a blizzard of detail is a central theme: the firm belief that the newcomers 'could find a site in North America where they would continue to live as Icelanders' (195) was thwarted by 'the psychological and cultural shock that awaited them in the New World' (264), compelling them to become champions of assimilation.

The book can be easily criticized for not engaging the wider immigrant literature in North America. It can also be cited for ignoring the variables of gender and class, or indeed cultural or social studies theories that might have helped conceptualize and interpret the wealth of detail. It can be criticized for a preoccupation with the 'great men' who comprised the migration's vanguard, who achieved success, and who built the institutions - efforts all the more noble given the succession of 'economic crisis' (43), 'black prairie' (79), 'disastrous winter' (94), 'unwholesome' dwellings (144), 'growing discontent' (146), 'strenuous' travel (230), and other calamities that faced the newcomers. And it is possible that the book's strengths might be welcomed, but not applauded. Certainly, readers have come to expect that immigration histories will be based, as this one is, on specialized foreign languages. That the manuscript is strong in presenting the details of the everyday - including the precise account of materials used to build log cabins along Lake Winnipeg, the process of fishing, and details on health and illness - will be interesting, but not historiographically significant.

Within the narrative, however, are the bits of information that can be grafted into the wider immigration history debate. In my mind the author makes several especially noteworthy, indirect contributions to immigration history. Thor creates the historical context for every aspect of the migration and in the process demythologizes a central aspect of the Icelandic migration story, the image of Mount Hecla exploding in Iceland and the formation of the Republic of New Iceland in Manitoba. Second, the author recreates a dynamic ideological conflict, between leaders wishing an isolated block settlement and those favouring close ties to the North American economy, and between those seeking a geography reminiscent of Old World physical features - cool weather, grassland, and island living - and those acquiescent to the urban lure. Third, the manuscript possesses a good balance between macro- and micro-analysis, the former by way of quantitative economic data, broad historical developments, and descriptions of the host society, and the latter with reference to leading individuals, everyday life, and household composition. Fourth, the manuscript analyses the cultural facets of the migration: religion, for example, is presented not only in terms of institutional structure but in religious teaching, cosmological understanding, and contested ethnic identity. Fifth, the author grapples with questions of ethnic 'reinvention': the last chapters, for example, speak of ethnic festivals, practiced at a time of rising inter-ethnicity, a North America-wide diaspora, political participation, and post-secondary education, but also at a time when 'Icelandic' became a subject of liberal and literary study, no longer a lived rural lifeworld.

In the end, the book offers a highly readable narrative, suffering only occasionally from lack of organization, transitional sentences, and clear cadence. It offers...