In 1875, the Canadian government created a reserve for Icelandic immigrants on the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg. Hoping for a better life in Canada, many of the New Iceland colonists found only hardship, disappointment, or death. Those who survived scurvy and smallpox faced crop failure, internal dissension, and severe flooding that nearly ended the project only six years after it had begun.

This innovative book looks beyond the experiences of these Icelandic immigrants to understand the context into which their reserve fits within the history of settler colonialism. Ryan Eyford juxtaposes the Icelanders’ experiences with those of the Cree, Ojibwe, and Metis people they displaced. By analyzing themes such as race, land, health, and governance, he draws out the tensions that punctuated the process of colonization in western Canada and situates the region within the global history of colonialism.

Ryan Eyford's profile page

Ryan Eyford is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Winnipeg. He has published articles and chapters in Histoire sociale/Social History, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Sport History Review, and the edited collection Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History.

White Settler Reserve exposes one of those corners of Canadiana omitted from official records and federal observances of this 150th anniversary of Confederation. It is shocking and intriguing, the best kind of history.

Blacklock’s Reporter

A particularly powerful aspect of White Settler Reserve is the richly detailed portrait it paints of the "First New Icelanders" who formed communities in this colonization reserve. By bringing their names, experiences, and struggles to this new audience, Eyford has helped to ensure their stories will not be forgotten.

Ormsby Review, March 2017

Western Canada’s bloc settlements are an understudied aspect of Canadian land policies in the nineteenth century, making Ryan Eyford’s study of New Iceland in Manitoba a welcome addition to the field.

Pacific Historical Review

White Settler Reserve contextualizes the emigrant story, and triangulates what is sometimes simplified into a binary relationship between settlers and indigenous peoples, lands and humans.

Pacific Northwest Quarterly

[White Settler Reserve] highlights the early and ongoing interactions between the Icelanders and Indigenous peoples, beginning with the pre-existing land claims and including the devastating impact of smallpox, adding greater depth and context to the history of New Iceland and to the history of the settlement of the Canadian Northwest.

Manitoba History Journal, Issue 88

White Settler Reserve is a sophisticated and persuasive consideration of the interplay of liberalism, colonization, and emigration, and of that “dialectic process between the centre and the periphery” (p.191) that was an integral part of the iconic story of the settlement of the Canadian West."

Histoire sociale/Social history, Volume 52, Numéro/Number 106