White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West by Ryan Eyford (review)

In Iceland, the story of the country's nineteenth-century diaspora is well known. After the nation was convulsed by a string of catastrophes, including the catalytic 1875 eruption of the Askja volcano, close to one-quarter of the entire population–roughly 15,000 people–abandoned the island for Europe or the New World. A smaller number migrated internally to service the country's expanding coastal fisheries or attempted–and largely failed–to break marginal land on previously uncultivated heaths and uplands. It was a time of profound dislocation. Between circa 1873 and 1914, the vast majority of Iceland's migrants settled on the northern Great Plains of Canada and the United States, particularly in the Interlake region of Manitoba (at that time, the Keewatin District). Ryan Eyford's White Settler Reserve picks up the story at the Canadian end, situating the Icelandic migration experience on the northern prairies within the ambit of the Dominion government's endeavour to promote ethnicity-specific chain migration to reserve colonies on Crown land. The idea was to fill the region with populations chosen for their seeming industriousness, probity, and compatibility with British imperial values. White Settler Reserve is chiefly concerned with the political and social instruments wielded by the Canadian state in the production of the Nýja Ísland (New Iceland) colony, particularly in relation to the government's unambiguous goal of using European agriculturalists to overwhelm demographically and culturally the region's original inhabitants, primarily Cree, Ojibwe, and Metis hunters and pastoralists.

Each of the book's seven chapters explores a facet of the Dominion government's oversight of a community in the throes of transition or examines the Icelanders' rapport with their neighbours and environment. Eyford focuses on the ideological and practical underpinnings of Canadian prairie expansionism; the development of the colonial reserve system (and the Icelanders' place in it); the incubation of the community; the hegemonic spatial praxes in relation to the 1876–7 smallpox epidemic; the emergence of a new, hybrid identity; and the ultimate integration of the Icelandic settlement into the larger cultural patterns of the Dominion. There is also a chapter on the "turbulent" career (120) of John Taylor, the notorious convicted slave trader and Baptist preacher who assumed the role of the Canadian government's first Icelandic agent between 1875 and 1884.

As a work of postcolonial analysis, Eyford's White Settler Reserve is an exceptionally nuanced and innovative articulation of how the modalities of power functioned in a space and time where the Indigenous and settler worlds collided. Eyford demonstrates how the Dominion, though sometimes hampered by significant infrastructural and political limitations, often managed to interpose itself with surprising thoroughness and vigour, frequently treating Indigenous and non-anglophone settler populations in remarkably similar ways. Indeed, though he works with historical materials related to one of the smallest European migrant communities, Eyford offers a view of settlement history that is expansive, compelling, and unequivocally important. By demonstrating how deftly the Canadian government moved pieces across the chessboard of the northern grasslands, manipulating–sometimes subtly, sometimes unabashedly–not only the material fortunes of its subjects but also their perceptions, ambitions, and expectations, he offers an extraordinary study of the levers of empire.

At the same time, for readers with a particular interest in Icelandic history, there is occasionally a sense of missed opportunity. The Icelanders who arrived in Manitoba in the nineteenth century sometimes seem abstractions, detached from the context out of which they emerged. At one point, for example, Eyford notes that the settlers discarded the political vocabulary of nineteenth-century Iceland in favour of a lexicon of self-governance that was grounded in the politics of the Viking age, preferring, for example, the supposedly older byggð to hreppur (for a settlement) and þing to sýsla (for a larger district) (150–1). In fact, as terms of political geography, both hreppur and sýsla are...