New Iceland 1967

A video clip from the television documentary series New Iceland (1967) featuring an interview with Arni Sigurdsson about the arrival of the first Icelandic migrants to New Iceland. The video’s dialogue is translated from Icelandic to English in the descriptive transcript below.

Video runtime: 7:41

Descriptive Transcript:

[The video fades from black to a man with white hair wearing a suit and tie seated in a wooden rocking chair. It slowly zooms in to a closeup of the man. The video is in black and white.]

Arni: They travelled from the east by railroad to Fisher Landing in Dakota. They stayed for a while, but not settle. Rather, they prepared for the journey from Fisher Landing to Winnipeg. They had picked four men before leaving to assess the best place to settle along Lake Winnipeg.

[The video cuts to a map showing Winnipeg, Selkirk, and the southern end of Lake Winnipeg. It pans upward to show the New Iceland settlement on the western shore of Lake Winnipeg. Gimli is also labeled on the map.]

Arni: Sigtryggur Jonasson led the group. The immigrants could rely on him for many years. They picked the area along the lake where they thought was best for the migrants to settle.

[The video cuts back to a closeup of the same man]

Arni: There was fish in the lake, and many of the migrants were used to fishing in Iceland. So it was a suitable kind of landscape for them to settle by the lake.

Interviewer: How big was the group that settled by the lake?

Arni: At first there were over 250 people.

[The video briefly fades to black and then fades back to a closeup of the same man.]

Interviewer: They arrived in autumn, the first group?

Arni: Yes.

Interviewer: And how was the weather? How were the conditions?

Arni: Yes, it was late October, 1875. Prospects were poor. The sky was overcast and they didn’t see the sun for a long time.

[The video cuts to a painting of a group of people landing several boats on the shore of a body of water. They have travels trunks, tools, and other things with them. Some of the people are wearing traditional Icelandic clothing]

Arni: The day after they landed at Willow Point, a snowstorm struck. The snow that fell then never thawed that winter. Meanwhile the men got to work cuting down trees to build log cabins.

[The video cuts back to a closeup of the same man that slowly zooms out.]

Arni: That naturally took time. Meanwhile the women and children and men themselves lived in flat-bottomed boats, with canvas stretched across for shelter. They had simple stoves they had bought in Winnipeg. There was plenty of firewood, of course. They were quite comfortable.

Interviewer: And the long, cold winter was followed by a hot summer?

[The video begins to slowly zoom in again until it reaches a closeup of the man.]

Arni: Yes, it was. The worst thing in the hot summer was the mosquitoes. It’s difficult to imagine now. The land was marshy, and that’s why there were so unbelievably many. Children and youngsters suffered especially. There faces, and any other part the mosquitoes got to, were a mass of swelling. They were scarred for life durign those first years.

[The video cuts to a body of water with the shore and trees in the background and pans left. It stops when a wharf and two boats appear on the left side of the image.]

Narrator: 285 Icelanders sailed up to Lake Winnipeg in 1875. Five years earlier, a few had emigrated to Wisconsin in the United States. Larger groups came west from Iceland in 1873 and 1874. They were headed to Wisconsin. Some of them, however, changed their plans and went to Central Canada to found New Iceland along the west shore of Lake Winnipeg.

[The video then shows a montage of contemporary views of the New Iceland area including farmlands, roads, houses, and the lake.]

Narrator: Most in the group of Icelanders were farmers. Others fished on the lake. Soon, the Icelandic settlers faced the same task as Icelanders back home: to set up a system of laws. New Iceland was governed by the Icelanders themselves, answerable only to the government in Ottawa. The regional council was led by Sigtryggur Jonasson. After the Icelandic colony was absorbed into Manitoba, he was the first Icelander elected to the Manitoba legislature, in 1896.

[The video fades to black.]