Icelanders in North America: The First Settlers

Frits Pannekoek is an associate professor of heritage studies, director
of information resources at the University of Calgary, and the author of
A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance of
1869–70.

Icelandic immigrants to North America and particularly Canada have had
an impact beyond their modest numbers. Jonas Thor traces their
migrations within North America. For example, few might know of the role
of the first Icelandic Mormon converts in encouraging the first
immigrations in the 1850s. The greatest challenge facing any historian
of migration, however, is not the detail, but how to fit the book into
the new historiography of ethnicity, gender, and class while meeting the
genealogists’ and local historians’ demand for detail and accuracy.
How does Thor measure up? First, he has failed to use some key regional
literature, such as Jane W. McCracken’s formidable Stephan G.
Stephansson: The Poet of the Rocky Mountains (1982) or Howard and Tamara
Palmer’s edited work Peoples of Alberta: Portraits of Cultural
Diversity (1985).

More important is Thor’s limited historiographical contribution.
While he does an excellent job of providing an overview, he is an
old-school historian. For Thor, the immigrants came, they were
challenged, they changed—but not too much—and they triumphed. This
is Progressive or Whig history in a nutshell. So much more could have
been done.

Stephan G. Stephansson, who gets remarkably little space in the volume
(although he does get 13 references in the index), is symbolic of the
Icelandic experience. Active in both Wisconsin and Alberta, he made
intellectual contributions to Icelandic culture that were largely shaped
by his North American experiences. His stature in the homeland grew over
time. Although the cultural role of West Icelanders was never really
appreciated, an analysis of their impact would have been interesting.
Also, issues of class, gender, and ethnicity are not really dealt with
in the wider community context. Was Stephansson’s isolation from the
Canadian cultural mainstream as real as we now think? What were the
contributions of Icelanders to the North American cultural fabric? Given
the significant number of Icelanders who came to North America, did
their continued interactions with their homeland change Iceland itself?
These were Thor’s lost opportunities.