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Resurfacing landscapes of trauma: Multiculturalism, cemeteries, and the migrant body, 1875 onwards
From: Home and Native Land
$2.20
Icelandic immigrants arriving in Canada in 1876 contracted smallpox in the Quebec City immigration sheds en route to Manitoba and transmitted the disease to their Aboriginal neighbours, the Sandy Bar Band. The migrants and band members were in the midst of a heated land-claims contest before the disease overwhelmed and killed 70 per cent of the band and about 10 per cent of the Icelanders. In 2006, bones from some of the bodies of people who died during this epidemic were still visible in nearby wetlands. How can we account for the neglect of nineteenth-century skeletal mementos of catastrophe and the pervasive twentieth-century celebration and commemoration of migrant suffering? How and why are certain bodies, histories, and spaces of trauma celebrated, while others are ignored and forgotten? This chapter explores the role of the nineteenth-century Canadian migrant-settler’s body in both the colonial project and multicultural depictions of the past.
