[BRIEF NOTE] The Icelandic-Canadians

[rfmcdonald]

Patrick White's article in The Globe and Mail "In downturns, Icelanders look to Gimli", has a subject matter that really isn't surprising once you think about it.

Several generations after an economic crisis compelled thousands of Icelanders across the Atlantic to this expanse of auburn prairie and Lake Winnipeg ice, their fair-haired descendants are anticipating a new wave of financial refugees from their ancestral home.

“We've had a number of inquiries from Iceland,” said Tammy Axelsson, Gimli mayor and director of the New Iceland Heritage Museum. “I've never seen this before. They're telling me things are not going well over there and want to know about job opportunities here.”

With its government collapsing in the wake of a financial crisis that has qualified the country for International Monetary Fund loans, Iceland's economy is bleeding red ink and shedding jobs.

Such bleak prospects have prompted some Icelanders, for the first time in nearly a century, to look west, for a new home among the Manitobans they affectionately call Vestur Islandingur – West Icelanders.

“It's a trickle, not quite a torrent,” said Atli Asmundsson, consul-general of Iceland's Manitoba consulate.

“But unemployment will be hitting hard in the next couple of weeks and we may see more.”

If it's some place like home that Icelandic migrants seek, this is it. While the saucer-flat fields and calm lakefront might not look like the island nation's volcanic cones and craggy fjords, it is one of the few places in North America where you're as likely to hear góðan dag as good day.

The farmland 80 kilometres north of Winnipeg first beckoned Icelanders in 1875. A downturn in fishing and sheep farming drove thousands here by 1915. After a few brutal winters that sent some fleeing to the Dakotas, the new settlers learned to farm wheat instead of sheep and fish pickerel instead of cod, embracing the area to such a degree that they named this town after the mythical paradise of the gods from Norse mythology.

The immigrant pipeline dried up in 1915, but the Icelandic influence did not, evident in a towering Viking statue along the waterfront, an Icelandic-only tea at a local café and a constant procession of Icelandic dignitaries, including Geir Haarde, the Icelandic Prime Minister whose resignation brought down the government Monday.

“People in Iceland know more about Gimli than they do about Canada,” Mr. Asmundsson said.

Wikipedia claims that, with some eighty thousand claiming Icelandic-Canadian identity, Canada has the second-largest number of Icelanders in the world behind only Iceland itself. Multicultural Canada provides a thorough dissection of the Icelandic diaspora to Canada, such a relatively intense flow that at one point in the late 19th century Icelandic immigrants in Manitoba created the autonomous region of New Iceland. It's not surprising that Icelanders would think of Canada as a destination then--certainly people from the other North Atlantic fisheries-dependent nation of Newfoundland have found their ways here in large nunbers!