Quarantined Within a New Order
- Icelandic Roots
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Historian Ryan Eyford (I564866) is a keynote speaker at the 2025 Icelandic National League of North America Convention held in Gimli, Manitoba, May 1-4, 2025. The convention celebrates the 150th anniversary of the New Iceland settlement in Manitoba. On Wednesday, April 30, 2025, he will be presenting a webinar for Icelandic Roots on the settlers who came to North America looking for a new start, but instead were faced with the devastating impact of the smallpox epidemic that gripped the fledgling community.
The following excerpt from Eyford's book, White Settler Reserve, introduces the themes he will present in the webinar. The passage is from the chapter "Smallpox and the Spatial Practices of Colonization."
"On 24 September 1876, the Reverend James Settee conducted Sunday services at Sandy Bar in the northern portion of New Iceland. In his capacity as a Church of England missionary, Settee was a regular visitor to the Indigenous settlements around the lake, and he counted several converts among the Indigenous people who lived within the area now designated an Icelandic reserve. That day, the congregation included not only the Indigenous Christians Settee knew well, but also Icelandic immigrants from the Large Group who had recently settled among them.
"Settee said prayers in Cree, Ojibwe, and English, and one of the colonists provided an Icelandic translation. Settee’s sermon was drawn from the First Epistle of John, a passage emphasizing God’s infinite love and the duty of God’s children to love one another. The missionary probably chose this particular passage as part of an effort to diffuse tensions between the Indigenous residents and the settlers; the arrival of the Icelanders earlier that summer had triggered a tense confrontation over land that almost became violent. Still, their joint attendance at Reverend Settee’s service suggests that the two groups had a complex relationship; fear, suspicion, and resentment did not preclude co-operation and friendly interaction in specific circumstances. However, in this context, as in many others, the mixing of Indigenous and immigrant populations had unanticipated consequences.
"Smallpox broke out in the fall 1876 and within two months had decimated the Indigenous residents of the reserve. A doctor sent by the Canadian government reported that their numbers had been reduced from fifty or sixty to only seventeen. He found the scarred survivors huddled in tents surrounded by newly dug graves. To prevent further infection, their homes and possessions were burned, and shortly thereafter dominion land surveyors arrived to plant posts marking the boundaries of the proposed Icelandic town of Sandy Bar." 1.
You are invited to view the Icelandic Roots public webinar featuring Ryan Eyford, author of White Settler Reserve, discussing the role of the 1876–77 smallpox epidemic in drawing boundaries between Indigenous and immigrant land in the south basin of Lake Winnipeg and the establishment of New Iceland.
The event will be online on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, at:
10:00 AM Pacific,
11:00 AM Mountain,
12:00 PM Central +DST,
1:00 PM Eastern, and
5:00 PM in Iceland
Join the webinar with this link a few minutes before the start time for your timezone:
Note:
This excerpt is reprinted with permission of the Publisher of White Settler Reserve, by Ryan Eyford © University of British Columbia Press 2016. All rights reserved by the Publisher.