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

Reviewed by: White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West by Ryan Eyford Jane Errington Eyford, Ryan – White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016. Pp. 272. On the face of it, one might think that White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West is a retelling of the traditional story of “the opening of the West” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In this deeply researched study, Ryan Eyford certainly recounts the arrival of Icelandic migrants to Manitoba and the difficulties they confronted adapting to their new environment. But as the title suggests, this ground breaking work is really a study of the federal government’s decision to establish colonization reserves for new immigrant groups, and how this attempt to create “a new liberal colonial order” (p. 9) worked on the ground. Today, we associate reserves with Indigenous spaces. In the latter part of the century, land reserves were also a vehicle to encourage group settlement of non-English-speaking European migrants who, it was believed, needed special tutelage “before they could be entrusted with liberal rights and freedoms” (pp. 10–11) and full citizenship. As Eyford persuasively argues, New Iceland, established on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, was an “experiment” in colonization that tells us a great deal not only about the immigrant experience, but also about current understandings of race and space, and the role of the state in systematically settling the West. The volume is organized both chronologically and topically. The introduction clearly and skilfully establishes the many theoretical strands that inform Eyford’s investigation: settler colonialism, Ian McKay’s liberal order framework, the role of cultural nationalism in shaping individual and state actions, and immigrant and indigenous history. Eyford then demonstrates how the two principal actors of this story shared a northern dream, but had differing assumptions about how that could be achieved. The Icelanders sought their own distinct community where they could maintain their language and culture, but they were also determined to become full participating subjects in their new home. For its part, the state sought to create a future Canada in which “‘the hardy northern races’ would predominate in the new [End Page 388] territories” (p. 44). Eyford then deftly explains the intention and inception of the colonial reserve system, established by the Mackenzie government as part of the Dominion Lands Act. The Icelanders were but one of a number of groups granted land collectively, on the understanding that eventually individual households would be able to secure title to their own private property. But “land reservation and group settlement generated tensions between individual and collective rights, integration and segregation, inclusion and exclusion” (p. 48). Within two years of their arrival, a number of settlers sought to gain title to their land and were increasingly frustrated by the federal government’s unwillingness and inability to address their concerns. Eyford devotes a chapter to exploring who these settlers actually were, why they chose to leave home, and their experiences “carving out a niche for themselves” (p. 95) in Canada. Like other nineteenth-century agricultural migrants, they were determined to “establish a future for the next generation” (p. 75), a dream that was jeopardized by the outbreak of smallpox a year after their arrival (see Chapter 4). It was months before local officials identified the outbreak “as a problem of public health and governance” (p. 109) and sent relief supplies and doctors to the community. The government also placed the entire region under quarantine. Eyford’s analysis of this tragic episode offers an in-depth look at the relations between the state and the settlers, between the settlers and their Indigenous neighbours, and the different impact that the epidemic had on residents of New Iceland and local Cree and Ojibwa communities. The quarantine “accentuated the distance of the Icelanders, both literally and symbolically, from the wider settler community” (p. 117), and the difficulty of receiving supplies led to increased poverty and a growing disillusionment with government policy. Moreover, the epidemic did little to ease relations with Indigenous neighbours. From the beginning, the Icelandic reserve was “a...

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