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ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century was a time of mass migration from Europe to North America, and in the last quarter of the century, Icelanders joined the flow of European settlers. Icelanders were one of the last European peoples in this period to start sailing west, between 1870 and 1914; but, one in every five Icelanders moved to North America. This article looks at three handbooks for prospective Icelandic migrant-settlers – all published in 1875 – and the settlement plans they promoted (in Nova Scotia, today’s Manitoba, and Alaska), to analyse the information presented to prospective settlers, especially depictions of land and its inhabitants. While the texts, written or translated by three Icelandic immigration agents, vary greatly in their scope and tone, all perceive Icelanders as desirable settlers, suitable for advancing the goals of settler colonialism, and portray the areas as terra nullius, minimizing perceived Indigenous presence in the places marked for European settlement. The texts show that prospective Icelandic emigrants reading these booklets were aware that they contributed to and benefited from Indigenous dispossession, and that Icelanders and other ‘ethnic’ migrant-settlers in British settler colonies should be considered in settler colonial studies, as settler colonialism and migration policy are intimately linked.
Acknowledgements
This paper contains some reworked material that originally appeared in the second part of my unpublished BA thesis in Icelandic, ‘Leit að fyrirheitna landinu: Samanburður á þremur handbókum fyrir íslenska vesturfara frá árinu 1875’ [The Search for a Promised Land: Comparison of Three Handbooks for Icelandic Emigrants Published in 1875], at the University of Iceland (2020). I am grateful to Dr. Daisy L. Neijmann for her guidance, kind encouragement, and her vast knowledge of Icelandic-Canadian literature. Bragi Þorgrímur Ólafsson at the Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Iceland has provided invaluable archival assistance with my research, including the photographs of Jón Ólafsson’s diary for this article. I would like to thank Charles Merritt, and two anonymous reviewers who provided generous feedback on this article.
Notes
1 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), M179 Miscellaneous Letters of the Department of State, 1789–1906, Brjef til hins göfuga U. S. Grant, forseta Bandaríkjanna [Letter to His Excellency U. S. Grant, President of the United States], (2 August 1874), roll 422, image 21–31. Translation is the original translation attached to the letter, likely but not certainly the work of Jón Ólafsson.
2 Jón Ólafsson, Alaska: lýsing á landi og landskostum, ásamt skýrslu innar [sic] íslenzku sendinefndar. Um stofnun íslenzkrar nýlendu [Alaska: Description of the Land and Resources, Together With the Report of the Icelandic Delegation. About the Establishment of an Icelandic Colony] (Washington, DC, 1875), 28.
3 NARA, Brjef til hins göfuga U. S. Grant, 21.
4 Ólafsson, Alaska, 48.
5 Most Icelanders’ last names are not family names but patronymics or matronymics. This means that they are then referred to by their first (e.g. Jón) rather than last names. I maintain this tradition here, referring to Icelanders by their first names after the first mention, except in footnotes.
6 Ryan Eyford, White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016), 47.
7 In the discourse of the time, the term ‘emigrants’ was typically used about individuals who would now be called ‘immigrants’.
8 Ólafsson, Alaska.
9 See Nýa [sic] Ísland í Kanada [New Iceland in Canada] (Ottawa, 1875).
10 See Herbert Crosskill, Nova Scotia eðr [sic] Nýja Skotland: Lýsing á loftslagi, landskostum og ágæti fylksins til fræðslu fyrir vesturfara [Nova Scotia, Its Climate, Resources, and Advantages: Being a General Description of the Province, for the Information of Intending Emigrants], transl. Jóhannes Arngrímsson (Akureyri, 1875).
11 The Alaska handbook was funded by the US federal government, the New Iceland handbook by the Canadian federal government, and the provincial government of Nova Scotia funded the booklet about that province.
12 I refer to these Icelanders and other non-Anglo individuals arriving in North America in the nineteenth-century as migrant-settlers, to emphasize both the fact that their involvement in colonial settlements was often embedded in their larger mobilities (e.g. seasonal or rural-urban migration) and that they absolutely were settlers, i.e. they contributed to settler colonial dispossession on the ground. Some of these early Icelandic migrant-settlers first moved to Copenhagen or British cities, some sojourned in various places in both Europe and North America before returning to Iceland, and many became serial colonial settlers, moving from one land grant to another, typically in both Canada and the United States.
13 By settler colonialism, I mean a type of colonial ideology and practice defined by two key elements: the dispossession of Indigenous peoples (as Patrick Wolfe writes, by a ‘logic of elimination’ either through literal extermination, marginalization to small and otherwise undesirable areas, i.e. reserves/reservations, or assimilation), and their permanent replacement by European settlers. Both Nova Scotia and today’s Manitoba are clear examples of historical settler colonies, while Alaska has largely been used as an extractive or resource colony by both Russia and the United States (even though white settlers were also encouraged to move to Alaska and dispossess Indigenous peoples there, as is attested by the note of President Grant mentioned in this article).
14 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 45.
15 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 128.
16 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 [1986]), 2–5.
17 By this term I mean the reliance of the British settler colonies and their successor settler states on the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism, but with Irish and Scottish settlers also being highly valued – i.e. the hierarchy of settler desirability often seemed to be more about British origin than perceived Anglo-Saxon descent.
18 This brief period of othering is illustrated by the mythology of Icelanders being mistaken for Inuit from Greenland. While this misunderstanding certainly happened, it seems to have been easily abandoned as soon as the Icelanders’ neighbours established mutual connection based on their shared European roots and identification with whiteness. See, however, the case of Ólöf Krarer for an example of an alternative approach to this misidentification, i.e. by falsely claiming the identity of an Inuk woman to support her career in the entertainment industry. See Inga Dóra Björnsdóttir, Ólöf eskimói: ævisaga íslensks dvergs í Vesturheimi (Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 2004), translated into English by María Helga Guðmundsdóttir as Olof the Eskimo Lady: A Biography of an Icelandic Dwarf in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010); also Jay Lalonde, ‘“[O]ne of Us Little Esquimaux People:” The Identity Theft and Colonial Paradox of Ólöf Krarer’, Intersections 5, no. 1 (2022): 22–3.
19 Such as in the influential handbooks by Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000): see especially pp. 64–5 for this period; Valerie Knowles, Strangers at Our Gates: Canadian Immigration and Immigration Policy, 1540–2006 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2007): especially pp. 69–83; and the collection edited by Gerald Tulchinsky, Immigration in Canada: Historical Perspectives (Mississauga: Copp Clark Longman, 1994). While analysing ethnic settlers and the various discourses and structures of attracting, retaining, or, relatively rarely, restricting prospective settlers based on their perceived desirability is essential for tracing the origins of Canadian immigration and naturalization policies, it also downplays the ways in which these so-called immigrants were embedded in settler colonial ideology and practice.
20 Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 40.
21 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 6.
22 See, for example, the collection Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America, edited by Rani-Henrik Andersson and Janne Lahti (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2022); the 2023 special issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History entitled Nordics in Motion: Transimperial Spaces and Global Experiences of Nordic Colonialism, edited by John L. Hennessey and Janne Lahti; the collection Nordic Whiteness and Migration to the USA, edited by Jana Sverdljuk, Terje Mikael Hasle Joranger, Erika Jackson, and Peter Kivisto (New York: Routledge, 2021); and, encouraging much of this new research, the ground-breaking 2013 volume Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity edited by Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin (New York: Springer). The case of Finnish settler histories is especially interesting, as just like Iceland, Finland did not become an independent nation-state until the twentieth century, but that did not prevent Finns, or Icelanders, from being active in nationalist settler colonial enterprises.
23 For examples of the established scholarly narrative see Þorleifur Jóakimsson (Jackson), Brot af landnámssögu Nýja Íslands (Winnipeg, 1919); Tryggvi Oleson and Þorsteinn Þ. Þorsteinsson, Saga Íslendinga í Vesturheimi, 5 vols. (Winnipeg and Reykjavík, 1943–1953); Wilhelm Kristjanson, The Icelandic People in Manitoba: A Manitoba Saga (Winnipeg, 1965); Guðjón Arngrímsson, Nýja Ísland. Örlagasaga vesturfaranna í máli og myndum (Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 1997); and Jonas Thor, Icelanders in North America: The First Settlers (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2002). All these books portray Icelandic settlers as pioneers who created an exceptionally successful settlement on land that would otherwise have lain fallow, and the portrayals are limited to those of people who chose to live in Icelandic ethnic settlements. If they mention Indigenous inhabitants at all, they are described as inconvenient or threatening (in older sources) or in an exotified way (in the newer ones), with no sovereignty or claim on the land they use and occupy. The more recent monographs especially, by Guðjón Arngrímsson and Jonas Thor, re-enforce the idea of New Iceland as terra nullius, traversed by generally peaceful, but passive and ‘nomadic’ peoples: old colonial stereotypes that have long since been discredited.
24 See Ryan Eyford, White Settler Reserve; Anne Brydon, ‘Dreams and Claims: Icelandic-Aboriginal Interactions in the Manitoba Interlake’, Journal of Canadian Studies 36, no. 2 (2001): 164–90; and Laurie K. Bertram, ‘“Eskimo” Immigrants and Colonial Soldiers: Icelandic Immigrants and the North-West Resistance, 1885’, The Canadian Historical Review 99, no. 1 (2018): 63–97. While many scholars, including those mentioned in Note 22 and earlier contributions by Gunlög Fur, have recently written about the role of Scandinavian settlers in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in North America, these three works remain, to my knowledge, the only ones dealing specifically with Icelanders as settler colonial agents – and they all focus exclusively on Manitoba. Anthropologist Kristín Loftsdóttir is the only scholar who has, to my knowledge, systematically focused on Icelandic links with colonialism, especially within the Danish colonial empire. See, for example, Kristín Loftsdóttir, Crisis and Coloniality on Europe’s Margins: Creating Exotic Iceland (New York: Routledge, 2019); Kristín Loftsdóttir, ‘Dualistic Colonial Experiences and the Ruins of Coloniality’, Scandinavian Studies 91, no. 1–2 (2019): 31–52; and Kristín Loftsdóttir and Gísli Pálsson, ‘Black on White: Danish Colonialism, Iceland, and the Caribbean’, in Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity, ed. Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin (New York: Springer, 2013), 37–52.
25 See Fred E. Woods, Fire on Ice: The Story of Icelandic Latter-Day Saints at Home and Abroad (Provo: Brigham Young University, 2005).
26 Þorsteinn Þ. Þorsteinsson, Saga Íslendinga í Vesturheimi, vol. 2 (Winnipeg, 1943), 5–6.
27 Ibid., 23.
28 By 1851, over 18,000 Norwegians had gone to America. See Hans Norman and Harald Runblom, Transatlantic Connections: Nordic Migration to the New World After 1800 (Oslo, 1987).
29 ‘[A]ð flytja úr köldu landi í enn kaldara land’. (Þorsteinsson, Saga Íslendinga, 71). All translations from Icelandic are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
30 There was great interest in relocation to Brazil, however, as over 500 Icelanders signed up to travel to Brazil in 1873, but no ship was arranged to transport them, and just little more than 30 made the journey by themselves. Many of the Icelanders who signed up later moved to North America (Þorsteinsson, Saga Íslendinga, 86–7). For a detailed discussion of Icelanders in Curitiba, southern Brazil, see Þorsteinn Þ. Þorsteinsson, Æfintýrið frá Íslandi til Brasilíu: fyrstu fólksflutningar frá Norðurlandi [The Adventure from Iceland to Brazil: First Emigration from North Iceland] (Reykjavík, 1937–1938) and ‘Því mistókust búferlaflutningar Íslendinga til Brasíliu?’ [Why Did Icelandic Emigration to Brazil Fail?] by Jón Hjaltason in Ritið 14, no. 1 (2014): 21–34. For shifting ideas of migrant-settler desirability and the ways in which Brazilians of Icelandic descent now emphasize their Icelandic heritage as a way to access whiteness, see Kristín Loftsdóttir, Eyrún Eyþórsdóttir, and Margaret Willson, ‘Becoming Nordic in Brazil: Whiteness and Icelandic Heritage in Brazilian Identity Making’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research 11, no. 1 (2021): 80–94.
31 Þorsteinsson, Saga Íslendinga, 111–2.
32 See Helgi Skúli Kjartansson and Steinþór Heiðarsson, Framtíð handan hafs. Vesturfarir frá Íslandi 1870–1914 [Future Across the Ocean. Emigration from Iceland 1870–1914] (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, 2003), 102–4. Based on departure records, they counted 16,408 people, but it is clear that not all emigrants were officially recorded.
33 Ibid., 126.
34 Sveinbjörn Rafnsson, introduction to Vesturfaraskrá 1870–1914. A Record of Emigrants from Iceland to America 1870–1914, by Júníus H. Kristinsson (Reykjavík: Sagnfræðistofnun Háskóla Íslands, 1983) xx, table 1.
35 Donald E. Gislason’s booklet The Icelanders of Kinmount. An Experiment in Settlement (Toronto: Icelandic Canadian Club of Toronto, 1999) remains the only comprehensive account of the Icelandic settlement in Ontario in 1874–1875.
36 See Thorstina Jackson Walters, Saga Íslendinga í Norður-Dakota [History of Icelanders in North Dakota] (Winnipeg, 1926), or, in English, Modern Sagas: The Story of the Icelanders in North America (Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1953) by the same author.
37 See Valdimar Jakobsson Líndal, The Saskatchewan Icelanders: A Strand of the Canadian Fabric (Winnipeg: Columbia Press, 1955).
38 See Margrét J. Benedictsson, Icelanders on the Pacific Coast: Point Roberts, Blaine, Bellingham, Marietta (Seattle: The Icelandic Club of Greater Seattle, 2004).
39 Júníus H. Kristinsson, Vesturfaraskrá 1870–1914. A Record of Emigrants from Iceland to America 1870–1914 (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, 1983), 309.
40 Jóhannes Arngrímsson, ‘Úr brjefi frá Jóhannesi Arngrímssyni, er seinast var hjer til heimilis á Nesi í Höfðahverfi, en er nú kominn til Milwaukee í Vesturheimi’ [From a letter by Jóhannes Arngrímsson, whose last address was at Nes in Höfðahverfi, but who has now arrived in Milwaukee in America], Norðanfari, 21 January 1873: 11–2.
41 I have not found any decisive information about Jóhannes’s life after his time as an Icelandic agent, except that he became naturalized in September 1878. In April 1879, he appealed for the last time to premier S. H. Holmes to support Icelandic immigration and to provide assistance for eight to sixteen families a year, but this is the last decisive mention of him (see Nova Scotia Archives (NSA), MG100, vol. 167, no. 11C [1879]).
42 The General Immigration Agent for Nova Scotia at the time was M. B. DesBrisay, who is also identified as such at the end of the 1874 handbook, and who was succeeded by Duncan Campbell. Rev. Edwin Clay served as the Dominion immigration agent at Halifax. According to the provincial government’s financial returns, Jóhannes (John Anderson) was paid for various expenses and for ‘Services rendered [to the] Immigration Department’ and ‘Services on Immigration’ between 1874 and at least 1876, and he was clearly considered an immigration agent for Icelanders in the province. Many such ‘agents’ were hired to promote and organize ethnic migration to Canada, but such a role did not entail any decision-making powers or privileges, which was not always known by the prospective migrant-settlers.
43 See Archives of Ontario (AO), Diary of Jón Rögnvaldsson [1874?], Pamph. 1977, no. 116. This is an excerpt translated by Rev. Valdimar Eylands. The Icelandic original remains in a family collection.
44 Friðjón Friðriksson, who was a steadfast ally of Sigtryggur Jónasson and highly sceptical of both the Alaska and Nova Scotia settlement plans, was the loudest critic whose letters survive: he calls Jóhannes’s plan ‘delirious nonsense and stupidity’ [höfuðórar og heimska] and says that some Icelanders were so blinded by his promises that they collected their last money to send Jóhannes to Halifax to lobby the provincial government for free passage for the Icelanders. See National Library of Iceland, Lbs 4388 4to, Friðjón Friðriksson to Jón Bjarnason, 15 June 1875.
45 Under the title Nova Scotia eðr [sic] Nýja Skotland: Lýsing á loftslagi, landskostum og ágæti fylkisins.
46 D.J. Campbell, ‘Memo for Government’ in Journal and proceedings of the House of Assembly of Nova Scotia (Halifax, 1877), 5.
47 D.J. Campbell, ‘Immigration Report’, in Journal and proceedings of the House of Assembly of Nova Scotia (Halifax, 1877), 3–4.
48 See, for example, the letter by Vigfús Sigurðsson on page 55 of Norðanfari, 13 May 1875, in addition to the aforementioned letter by Friðjón Friðriksson.
49 Þorsteinsson, Saga Íslendinga, 323.
50 See Sigtryggur Jónasson, ‘Brjef fra Ameriku’, [A Letter from America], Norðanfari, 29 April 1875, 47–48.
51 Sigtryggur Jónasson to Eggert Gunnarsson, 20 October 1876, in Bréf Vestur-Íslendinga I [Letters of Icelandic Emigrants I], edited by Böðvar Guðmundsson (Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 2001), 227–9. While this particular plan never materialized, Sigtryggur also ran a store in Kinmount (with, as settlers mentioned, rather high prices), opened a sawmill in New Iceland, founded the first Icelandic newspaper in North America, Framfari, and, in 1896, became a Manitoba MLA.
52 See the letter of Brynjólfur Brynjólfsson, a settler in Markland, ‘Hversu gott það sje fyrir Íslendinga að fara til Ameriku’, [How good is it for Icelanders to go to America], in Þjóðólfur, 24 May 1876: 73–4.
53 On the life of John Taylor, who was by turns a slave trader in Barbados, a Baptist preacher, an agent of the Canadian government, and somewhat of an honorary Icelander in the popular memory, see Ryan Eyford, ‘Slave-Owner, Missionary, and Colonization Agent: The Transnational Life of John Taylor, 1813–1884’, in Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History, ed. Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 168–86.
54 Eyford, White Settler Reserve, 130.
55 In the fall of 1874, another group of Icelanders and a government representative toured the area northeast of Kinmount, which they liked (Jónasson, ‘Brjef fra Ameriku’, 48), but the idea of moving further north clearly did not appeal.
56 ‘[E]ina íslenzka byggð’, Nýa [sic] Ísland, 13.
57 Not all Icelanders agreed. Some preferred to settle individually, outside of Icelandic settlements, and some seem to have been sceptical of the descriptions of future settlement in Canada. Torfi Bjarnason, briefly a settler in Nebraska, wrote to Vigfús Sigurðsson in Rosseau, ON, that ‘[he] would rather want to come to the US with five cents in [his] pocket than with 5,000 dollars to Canada’, Thorleif Jacksson (Þorleifur Jóakimsson), Frá austri til vesturs. Framhald af landnámssögu Nýja-Íslands [From East to West. Settler History of New Iceland Continued] (Winnipeg, 1921), 45.
58 ‘[M]átulega afskekt til þess, að Íslendingar gætu þar varðveitt þjóðerni sitt, án þess að hverfa þegar í úthaf erlendar þjóðar’, Þorsteinsson, Saga Íslendinga, 330.
59 Alexander Morris, The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-West Territories (Toronto, 1880), 143.
60 Library and Archives Canada (LAC), RG17 Department of Agriculture fonds, E. Jenkins, London, England. Ontario. Agent re: Icelanders (18 February 1875), vol. 128, no. 13443.
61 Þorsteinsson, Saga Íslendinga, 331–2.
62 Rafnsson, Introduction, xx, table 1. The numbers published by Rafnsson and Kristinsson in Vesturfaraskrá are all based on Icelandic biographical dictionaries and records of Icelandic officials, and it is clear that not all emigrants were recorded as such in these sources.
63 On the topic of serial migrants, see, for example, Susan Ossman, Moving Matters: Paths of Serial Migration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). While Ossman focuses on twentieth-century migrants – who do not necessarily reflect the sensibilities towards serial migration or mobility in general in Northern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century – her analysis of serial migration ‘[s]etting the serial migrant against the image of an immigrant’ is profound, as ‘[m]ost often migration is supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime ordeal, a rite of passage that enables the migrant to occupy a new status as an immigrant’ (12).
64 Landshöfðingi was the highest Danish official in the country and the representative of the Danish king in the Alþingi (Icelandic parlament).
65 Hjörtur Pálsson, Alaskaför Jóns Ólafssonar 1874 [Alaskan Tour of Jón Ólafsson 1874] (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfa Menningarsjóðs, 1975), 22–3.
66 Ibid., 38.
67 Ibid., 60.
68 ‘Brjef til hins göfuga U. S. Grant’, 22.
69 Ibid., 28.
70 Ulysses S. Grant’s own note on ‘Brjef til hins göfuga U. S. Grant’, 31.
71 Pálsson, Alaskaför, 62.
72 Jón Ólafsson to Jón Bjarnason from USS Portsmouth, 17 November 1874, University of Manitoba’s Icelandic Collection, Æ39 Icelandic Manuscripts, box 9.
73 Walters, Modern sagas, 227.
74 Jón Ólafsson did, in fact, seem to have an audience with Grant and most of his cabinet on 19 December 1874 – a clear indication that Washington was still interested in Icelandic colonization of Alaska at least to some extent at that point. Jón Ólafsson to Jón Bjarnason, 18 December 1874, University of Manitoba’s Icelandic Collection, Æ39 Icelandic Manuscripts, box 9.
75 Pálsson, Alaskaför, 134.
76 Jón Ólafsson to Jón Bjarnason, 24 December 1874, University of Manitoba’s Icelandic Collection, Æ39 Icelandic Manuscripts, box 9.
77 Pálsson, Alaskaför, 157.
78 ‘íslenzka Stat í Bandarikjunum’ [sic]. Jón Ólafsson to Jón Bjarnason, 27 June 1874. University of Manitoba’s Icelandic Collection, Æ39 Icelandic Manuscripts, box 9.
79 See Þjóðólfur, 11 June 1875, 75.
80 Pálsson, Alaskaför, 153.
81 Jón Ólafsson to Jón Bjarnason, 28 August 1874, University of Manitoba’s Icelandic Collection, Æ39 Icelandic Manuscripts, box 9.
82 See ‘Alaska’ in London Evening Standard, 19 August 1875, 5.
83 ‘Aðvörun’, Norðanfari, 12 January 1875, 4. ‘[Ö]llum einfeldningum eða fáráðlingum frá að láta hafa sig til að fara þangað, til að setjast að innanum skrælingja og aðra villumenn, þótt þeim bjóðist flutningur ókeypis’.
84 Eyford, White Settler Reserve, 37.
85 See Úlfar Bragason, ‘Jón Halldórsson of Stóruvellir and His Reading Circle: Readings in the Farming Community in Iceland around 1870’, Scripta Islandica: Isländska sällskapets årsbok 67 (2016): 121–33. In Icelandic, see also his book Frelsi, menning, framför: Um bréf og greinar Jóns Halldórssonar [Freedom, Culture, Progress: About Letters and Articles of Jón Halldórsson] (Reykjavík, 2017) and a 2005 selection of Jón’s writing that he edited, Atriði ævi minnar [Aspects of My Life] (Reykjavík, 2005).
86 ‘Öll þessi rit [eru] full af ýkjum og ósannindum’. See ‘Lítið eitt um vesturfarir’, [A Note About Emigration to America], Norðlingur, 12 May 1877: 191–4.
87 See Jón A. Hjaltalín, ‘Vesturheimsferðir’, Ísafold, 15 June 1875: 81–3.
88 See ‘Þjóðólfur og agentarnir’ [Þjóðólfur and the Agents], Lögberg, 13 May 1893, 1, which summarizes the argument of two agents in Manitoba and an Icelandic paper that called to ban the agents from coming to Iceland and portrayed them as liars who make people move to the ‘barren prairies of Canada where everything burns and freezes’, [eyðisljettur Kanada, þar sem allt brennur og frýs].
89 On the link between settler colonialism and resource extraction see, for example, Shiri Pasternak, ‘Policing Jurisdiction, In: Infrastructure, Jurisdiction, Extractivism: Keywords for Decolonizing Geographies’, Political Geography 101 (2023), Jen Preston, ‘Neoliberal Settler Colonialism, Canada, and The Tar Sands’, Race & Class 55, no. 2 (2013): 42–59, and ‘Racial Extractivism and White Settler Colonialism: An Examination of the Canadian Tar Sands Mega-Projects’, Cultural Studies 31, no. 2–3 (2017): 353–75, and Åsa Össbo, ‘Hydropower company Sites: a Study of Swedish Settler Colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies 13, no. 1 (2023): 115–32.
90 This understanding is aligned with the most consistent feature of (the otherwise relatively unregulated) immigration policy in both US and Canada since its origins, i.e. restricting the entry of poor people or subjecting them to deportation. See Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
91 Crosskill, Nova Scotia, 31, ‘[A]ð Nova Scotia sé, ef til vill, betr [sic] löguð fyrir iðnað, en nokkurt annað land í Ameríku’.
92 Such as the biting article in Norðlingur from 26 February 1876, 153, whose author writes about the New Iceland handbook that, ‘[E]ven though it cannot be said that it is written with as much audacity as Jón Ólafsson’s account of Alaska … it is full of exaggerations and falsehoods, whether caused by the writers’ ignorance or other, worse reasons’ [Að vísu verður eigi sagt að það sé ritað með jafnmikilli ósvífni sem Alaskalýsing Jóns Ólafssonar en … það er fult af ýkjum og ósannindum, hvort sem það er að kenna vanþekkingu þeirra sem ritað hafa, eða öðrum lakari orsökum]. Another anonymous critic, whose fellow Icelanders sold everything they owned and emigrated that year, wrote in Norðanfari, 5 April 1876, 27, ‘[M]any look at the opportunities, which are said to be there in the west, but less at the drawbacks, since these are mentioned less by these emigration agents’ [líta margir á kosti, sem taldir eru þar vestra, en minna á ókostina, enda er þeirra minna getið af þessum vesturfara túlkum].
93 Especially handbooks on Alaska and Nova Scotia, which are longer and more topically-structured than the report-form New Iceland booklet.
94 Crosskill, Nova Scotia, 20.
95 See Jón’s introduction to his Alaska booklet, ‘Til landa minna’ [To My Fellow Countrymen].
96 This number seems improbably low, perhaps intentionally, as in the 1871 census, 1,666 Indigenous people are counted in Nova Scotia (about 0.4% of the province’s population as registered in the census), a similar share to those counted in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island in the same census. See Censuses of Canada 1665–1871, vol. 4 (Ottawa, 1876), lxii.
97 Crosskill, Nova Scotia, 29. ‘Skotar, Englar, Írar, Frakkar, Þjóðverjar og innfæddir menn, fá þúsund Svertingja og um 6 eða 7 hundruð Indíána’.
98 Crosskill, Nova Scotia, 29.
99 Ibid., 50, ‘meðal villumanna eða í óbygðum’.
100 Nýa [sic] Ísland, 22, ‘nefndum vér Indíana, sem búa við Winnipeg vatn … fáeinir. Ekki þarf að neinn ótti af þeim að standa, því að bæði eru þeir kristnir og siðaðir, og hinns [sic] vegar eru þeir af þeim flokki Indíana, sem friðsamastir eru’.
101 Nýa [sic] Ísland, 22, ‘þegar Íslendingar taka að byggja landnám sitt, verða og Indíanar þessir fluttir á annan stað’.
102 Eyford, White Settler Reserve, 106.
103 Ólafsson, Alaska, 9. ‘Native’ (innlendur) here implies ‘domestic’ or ‘native-born’, not necessarily Indigenous.
104 Ibid., 10, ‘friðsamir, meinlausir og eigi ógreindir’.
105 Ibid., 28, ‘skrælingjar í skinnbátum’.
106 Ibid., 41,
Ef Íslendingar næmu nú land í Alaska – segjum 10 þúsundir á 15 árum, og fjöldi þeirra tvöfaldaðist þar t.d. á hverjum 25 árum, sem vel mætti verða og ugglaust yrði í svo hagfeldu landi, þá væru þeir eftir 3 til 4 aldir orðnir 100 miljónir [sic], og mundu þá þekja alt [sic] meginlandið frá Hudson-flóa til Kyrra-Hafs. Þeir gætu geymt tungu sína, aukið hana og auðgað af hennar eigin óþrjótandi rótum, og, hver veit, ef til vill sem erfingjar ins [sic] mikla lands fyrir sunnan sig, smátt og smátt útbreitt hana með sér yfir þessa álfu, og endrfætt [sic] ina [sic] afskræmdu ensku tungu.
107 Jón Ólafsson to Jón Bjarnason, June 27, 1874. University of Manitoba’s Icelandic Collection, Æ39 Icelandic Manuscripts, box 9.
108 Ibid., 46, ‘þetta neyddi þá hvern útlending, sem inn kæmi, til að taka upp tungu og þarmeð þjóðerni þeirra, og verða Íslendingr [sic]’.
109 Ibid., 46, ‘nema ómentaðir [sic] skrælingjar, er eigi hafa borgaraleg réttindi’.
110 While this practice was common, it was disapproved by Canadian federal policy, as ‘[agents sent to Europe] were charged not to attempt to further the interests of one Province to the detriment of another’. Appendix 2, Immigration in Journal and proceedings of the House of Assembly of Nova Scotia (Halifax, 1874), 7.