Louis Riel

Photo: Toronto Public Library

Orator, revolutionary and author, Riel remains ambiguous in Canadian history. To some, he is heroic; to others, traitorous.

The Manitoba Act was passed in 1870, providing for about one and a half million acres of land to be used by the Metis.

The previous year, as the North-west territory was being handed over from the Hudsons Bay Company to the two-year-old nation of Canada, the Metis, led by Louis Riel, stopped the surveyors from working and seized Fort Garry (site of modern Winnipeg.)

They issued a people's declaration, set up a provisional government headed by Riel, and imprisoned a group of Canadians who had organized armed resistance. In Ottawa, the delegation arranged for the Red River Colony to enter Confederation.

In this first Northwest Rebellion, the newly declared government of the Catholic Metis executed surveyor Thomas Scott, who had mustered Scottish Protestant settlers to fight Riel's people.

The two groups had very different lifestyles. The Roman Catholic Metis, who were descended from French settlers and aboriginal people, followed the buffalo for part of the year, while the Scottish settlers of the Red River Colony were Protestant farmers who fenced their lands. Meanwhile, the buffalo herds were dwindling, threatening the livelihood of the Metis and other local tribes.

In the summer of 1870, the government sent a military expedition, a "mission of peace" to the Red River Colony. Riel, denounced in the capital as a murderer, now had a $5000 price on his head. He fled to the U.S. for a temporary period of self-exile. 

In 1873 and 1874, Riel was elected by his people and went to Ottawa; however, the anti-Catholic Orangeman Mackenzie Bowell, (later a Prime Minister), raised a motion to have him removed from the House. Though Riel was re-elected, he did not attempt to take his seat in Ottawa again.

Riel, who had become a kind of visionary demagogue, led a second rebellion in 1885. However, the now completed railway and the newly formed Royal North West Mounted Police meant it was easy for the government to suppress this opposition in the formerly isolated and inaccessible West.

The fighting lasted only two months before the final defeat at Batoche, and Riel was tried for treason in Regina and hanged. He has remained a divisive and controversial figure in Canadian history, representing historical and cultural divides between Catholic and Protestant, French and English, European and Aborignal. 

In 1971, to celebrate Manitoba's centenary, a monument to Louis Riel was erected in front of the Legislature. Before the controversy that arose over the validity of his own aboriginal heritage, Canadian author Joseph Boyden wrote a book about Riel and his lieutenant, Gabriel Dumont, reviewed here in the Globe and Mail.