Description
Book SynopsisThis innovative history of a reserve for Icelandic settlers connects the dots between immigration and Indigenous dispossession in western Canada.
Trade Review[White Settler Reserve] highlights the early and ongoing interactions between the Icelanders and Indigenous peoples, beginning with the pre-existing land claims and including the devastating impact of smallpox, adding greater depth and context to the history of New Iceland and to the history of the settlement of the Canadian Northwest.
-- Kate MacFarlane, Parks Canada * Manitoba History Journal, Issue 88 *
White Settler Reserve contextualizes the emigrant story, and triangulates what is sometimes simplified into a binary relationship between settlers and indigenous peoples, lands and humans. -- Claire Campbell, Bucknell University * Pacific Northwest Quarterly *
White Settler Reserve exposes one of those corners of Canadiana omitted from official records and federal observances of this 150th anniversary of Confederation. It is shocking and intriguing, the best kind of history.
-- Holly Doan * Blacklock’s Reporter *
White Settler Reserve is a sophisticated and persuasive consideration of the interplay of liberalism, colonization, and emigration, and of that “dialectic process between the centre and the periphery” (p.191) that was an integral part of the iconic story of the settlement of the Canadian West."
-- Jane Errington * Histoire sociale/Social history, Volume 52, Numéro/Number 106 *
Western Canada’s bloc settlements are an understudied aspect of Canadian land policies in the nineteenth century, making Ryan Eyford’s study of New Iceland in Manitoba a welcome addition to the field.
-- Sheila McManus, University of Lethbridge * Pacific Historical Review *
A particularly powerful aspect of
White Settler Reserve is the richly detailed portrait it paints of the "First New Icelanders" who formed communities in this colonization reserve. By bringing their names, experiences, and struggles to this new audience, Eyford has helped to ensure their stories will not be forgotten. -- Emma Battell Lowman and Adam J. Barker * Ormsby Review, March 2017 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1 Northern Dreamlands: Canadian Expansionism and Icelandic Migration
2 Broken Townships: Colonization Reserves and the Dominion Lands System
3 The First New Icelanders: Family Migration and the Formation of a Reserve Community
4 Quarantined within a New Order: Smallpox and the Spatial Practices of Colonization
5 “Principal Projector of the Colony”: The Turbulent Career of John Taylor, Icelandic Agent
6 Becoming British Subjects: Municipal Government and Citizenship
7 “Freemen Serving No Overlord”: Debt, Self-Reliance, and Liberty
Conclusion
Notes; Bibliography; Index
