Dreams and Claims: Icelandic-Aboriginal Interactions in the Manitoba Interlake

Abstract

This essay discusses how Icelandic-Canadians narrate the story of interactions between newly arrived Icelanders and the Saulteaux people they encountered in Manitoba in the 1870s. Discrepancies between their accounts and archival records raise questions about how ethnic groups create and edit foundational myths as a strategy for group representation. Analysis focuses on one Icelander's dream about a dead Saulteaux man and the transformation of that dream into a cultural myth about harmonious relations between the two groups. This one narrative account of Icelandic-Saulteaux interactions can be examined as part of the complex process that makes history liveable. Such narrative accounts provided a strategy to suppress, displace and transmute pain during the first decades of immigration and settlement.