For six years there was a republic on the west shore of Lake Winnipeg. It had a written constitution, an elected council, its own courts, its own schools and its own newspaper, and it was not part of any province. It was called New Iceland, and Canada agreed to it.
The arrangement is one of the odder things in our constitutional history and it is barely taught, which is a pity, because it is a better story about how this country was actually assembled than most of the ones that are.
The Icelanders came because Iceland was failing them. The nineteenth century there was a run of bad decades — volcanic ash, livestock disease, a cooling climate and a population pressing hard on land that could not carry it. Emigration followed, first to Ontario, where a group spent a miserable stretch at Kinmount, and then west on the promise of a tract of their own.
They reached Lake Winnipeg in the autumn of 1875. More followed in 1876, and across those two years more than a thousand people settled a reserve the federal government had set aside for them along the lake. The main settlement they named Gimli, from the hall in Norse myth that survives the end of the world. People who name a place that have thought about the odds.
The reserve lay north of Manitoba's boundary as it then ran, which is the detail that makes the rest possible. The land was federal, it was outside any province, and Ottawa had no apparatus there and no appetite to build one. So the settlers governed themselves.
What they then did is described by the Canadian Encyclopedia in a single line: the settlers "created their own laws, maintained their own schools, and generally managed their own affairs."
A paper that tells the settler half and not the other half is not telling the history, it is telling a family story.
Read quickly that sounds like pioneer self-reliance. It was not. It was a government.
They wrote a constitution. Sigtryggur Jónasson, who had done more than anyone to bring them there, was central to drafting it. The territory was divided into districts, each district elected its council, and the councils handled what a government handles — schools, roads, disputes, the poor. In 1877 Jónasson founded Framfari, the first Icelandic-language newspaper in North America, and it ran until 1880. A colony of a few hundred families on a lake shore, three years in, was publishing a newspaper in its own language and arguing in print about its own affairs.
Then the smallpox came, with the second wave of settlers, in 1876.
It went through New Iceland and it went through the Indigenous communities of the Interlake, and the second of those is the part that has usually been left out. Manitoba's own heritage record does not leave it out: it describes an epidemic that "decimated settlers and Aboriginal peoples in the Interlake region".
Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing, and the order they are usually told in is the wrong way round. The epidemic did not stop at the edge of the reserve. The people who were already there, whose country this was, took it too, and the Manitoba heritage record describes an epidemic that decimated settlers and Aboriginal people alike. A paper that tells the settler half and not the other half is not telling the history, it is telling a family story. The Icelanders arrived into a populated place and the disease they brought with them did what it did on both sides of a line they had just been granted.
The colony nearly ended. Quarantine, a hard winter, crop failure and a religious schism drove people out — to Winnipeg, to North Dakota, anywhere. By 1881 the population of the area was down to around two hundred and fifty. In that same year Manitoba's boundary was extended north, New Iceland came inside it, and the republic simply ceased: provincial law applied, and the councils were redundant.
It is tempting to read that as a failure, and it would be wrong. What the Icelanders had done was hold a community together through its worst two years using institutions they had written themselves, and then hand it over to a province when there was a province to hand it to. Gimli is still there. Manitoba has the largest Icelandic population outside Iceland. Íslendingadagurinn has been running in Gimli since the 1890s. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who went on to spend more of his life in the Arctic than almost any southerner alive, was born in that settlement in 1879.
Canada did not assimilate New Iceland. It waited, and then it enclosed it, and the thing inside kept its language and its holidays and its surnames and became Manitoban anyway. That is the model this country has used more often than it admits: not a melting pot and not a mosaic exactly, but a federation patient enough to let a group govern itself for a while on the understanding that the arrangement would eventually be folded in.
The Ukrainians got no republic, and neither did the Mennonites, who had arrived in Manitoba the year before the Icelanders with their own guarantees in hand. Their stories run next in this series. But the Icelanders got the clearest version of the bargain, written down, for six years, on a lake.
This is the first in a continuing series on the peoples who settled the prairies.
