Louis Riel
Louis Riel was a Canadian politician, a founder of the province of Manitoba, and a political leader of the Métis people. He led two resistance movements against the Government of Canada and its first prime minister John A. Macdonald. Riel fought to defend Métis rights and identity as the Northwest Territories came progressively under the Canadian sphere of influence.
The first resistance movement led by Riel was the Red River Resistance of 1869–1870. The provisional government established by Riel ultimately negotiated the terms under which the new province of Manitoba entered the Canadian Confederation. However, while carrying out the resistance, Riel had a Canadian nationalist, Thomas Scott, executed. Riel soon fled to the United States to escape prosecution. He was elected three times as member of the House of Commons, but, fearing for his life, never took his seat. During these years in exile he came to believe that he was a divinely chosen leader and prophet. He married in 1881 while in exile in the Montana Territory.
In 1884 Riel was called upon by the Métis leaders in Saskatchewan to help resolve longstanding grievances with the Canadian government. He returned to Canada and led an armed conflict with government forces: the North-West Rebellion of 1885. Defeated at the Battle of Batoche, Riel was imprisoned in Regina where he was convicted at trial of high treason. Despite protests, popular appeals and the jury's call for clemency, Riel was executed by hanging. Riel was seen as a heroic victim by French Canadians; his execution had a lasting negative impact on Canada, polarizing the new nation along ethno-religious lines. The Métis were marginalized in the Prairie provinces by the increasingly English-dominated majority. A long-term effect of these actions was the bitter alienation felt by Francophones across Canada, and their anger against the repression by their countrymen.
Riel's historical reputation has long been polarized between portrayals as a dangerous religious fanatic and rebel opposed to the Canadian nation, and, by contrast, as a charismatic leader intent on defending his Métis people from the unfair encroachments by the federal government eager to give Orangemen-dominated Ontario settlers priority access to land. Riel has received among the most formal organizational and academic scrutiny of any figure in Canadian history.
Early life
The Red River Settlement was a Rupert's Land territory administered by the Hudson's Bay Company. At the mid-19th-century the settlement was largely inhabited by Métis people of mixed First Nations-European descent. Their ancestors were for the most part Scottish and English men married to Cree women, and French-Canadian men married to Saulteaux women.Louis Riel was born in 1844 in his grandparents' small one-room home in St-Boniface near the fork of the Red and Seine rivers. Riel was the eldest of eleven children in a locally well-respected family. His father, who was of Franco-Chipewyan Métis descent, had gained prominence in this community by organizing a group that supported Guillaume Sayer, a Métis arrested and tried for challenging the HBC's historical trade monopoly. Sayer's eventual release due to agitations by Louis Sr.'s group effectively ended the monopoly, and the name Riel was therefore well known in the Red River area. His mother was the daughter of Jean-Baptiste Lagimodière and Marie-Anne Gaboury, one of the earliest White families to settle in Red River in 1812. The Riels were noted for their devout Catholicism and strong family ties.
Riel began his schooling at the age of seven, and by age ten he attended St. Boniface Catholic schools, including eventually a school run by the French Christian Brothers. At age thirteen he came to the attention of Bishop Alexandre Taché, who was eagerly promoting the priesthood for talented young Métis. In 1858 Taché arranged for Riel to attend the Petit Séminaire de Montréal. Descriptions of him at the time indicate that he was a fine scholar of languages, science, and philosophy. While a good student, he was also hot-tempered, extreme in his views, intolerant of criticism and opposition, and not opposed to arguing with his teachers.
Following news of his father's premature death in 1864, Riel lost interest in the priesthood and withdrew from the college in March 1865. For a time, he continued his studies as a day student in the convent of the Grey Nuns, but was soon asked to leave, following breaches of discipline. During Riel's period of mourning of his father, he believed that Louis Riel was dead and he himself was David Mordecai, a Jew from Marseilles, and as David, he was not eligible to the immense inheritance of his father. Seized with religious fervour, he announced that he was going to form a new religious movement. He remained in Montreal for over a year, living at the home of his aunt, Lucie Riel. Impoverished by the death of his father, Riel took employment as a law clerk in the Montreal office of Rodolphe Laflamme. During this time he was involved in a failed romance with a young woman named Marie-Julie Guernon. This progressed to the point of Riel having signed a contract of marriage, but his fiancée's family opposed her involvement with a Métis, and the engagement was soon broken. Compounding this disappointment, Riel found legal work unpleasant and, by early 1866, he had resolved to leave Canada East. Some of his friends said later that he worked odd jobs in Chicago, while staying with poet Louis-Honoré Fréchette, and wrote poems himself in the manner of Lamartine, and that he was briefly employed as a clerk in Saint Paul, Minnesota, before returning to the Red River settlement on 26 July 1868.
Red River Resistance
The majority population of the Red River had historically been Métis and First Nations people. Upon his return, Riel found that religious, nationalistic, and racial tensions were exacerbated by an influx of Anglophone Protestant settlers from Ontario. The political situation was also uncertain, as ongoing negotiations for the transfer of Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company to Canada had not addressed the political terms of transfer. Bishop Taché and the HBC governor William Mactavish both warned the Macdonald government that the lack of consultation and consideration of Métis views would precipitate unrest. Finally, the Canadian minister of public works, William McDougall, ordered a survey of the area. The arrival of a survey party on 20 August 1869 increased anxiety among the Métis as the survey was being carried out as a grid system of townships that cut across existing Métis river lots.In late August, Riel denounced the survey in a speech, and on 11 October 1869, the survey's work was disrupted by a group of Métis that included Riel. This group organized itself as the "National Committee of the Métis" on 16 October, with Riel as secretary and John Bruce as president. When summoned by the HBC-controlled Council of Assiniboia to explain his actions, Riel declared that any attempt by Canada to assume authority would be contested unless Ottawa had first negotiated terms with the Métis. Nevertheless, the non-bilingual McDougall was appointed the lieutenant governor-designate, and attempted to enter the settlement on 2 November. McDougall's party was turned back near the Canada–US border, and on the same day, Métis led by Riel seized Fort Garry.
On 6 November, Riel invited Anglophones to attend a convention alongside Métis representatives to discuss a course of action, and on 1 December he proposed to this convention a list of rights to be demanded as a condition of union. Much of the settlement came to accept the Métis point of view, but a passionately pro-Canadian minority began organizing in opposition. Loosely constituted as the Canadian Party, this group was led by John Christian Schultz, Charles Mair, Colonel John Stoughton Dennis, and a more reticent Major Charles Boulton. McDougall attempted to assert his authority by authorizing Dennis to raise a contingent of armed men, but the Anglophone settlers largely ignored this call to arms. Schultz, however, attracted approximately fifty recruits and fortified his home and store. Riel ordered Schultz's home surrounded, and the outnumbered Canadians soon surrendered and were imprisoned in Upper Fort Garry.
Provisional government
Hearing of the unrest, Ottawa sent three emissaries to the Red River, including HBC representative Donald Alexander Smith. While they were en route, the Métis National Committee declared a provisional government on 8 December, with Riel becoming its president on 27 December.Meetings between Riel and the Ottawa delegation took place on 5 and 6 January 1870. When these proved fruitless, Smith chose to present his case in a public forum. After large meetings on 19 and 20 January, Riel suggested the formation of a new convention split evenly between Francophone and Anglophone settlers to consider Smith's proposals. On 7 February, a new list of rights was presented to the Ottawa delegation, and Smith and Riel agreed to send representatives to Ottawa to engage in direct negotiations on that basis. The provisional government established by Riel published its own newspaper titled New Nation and established the Legislative Assembly of Assiniboia to pass laws. The Legislative Assembly of Assiniboia was the first elected government at the Red River Settlement and functioned from 9 March to 24 June 1870. The assembly had 28 elected representatives, including a president, Riel, an executive council, adjutant general, chief justice and clerk.
Thomas Scott's execution
Despite the progress on the political front, the Canadian party continued to plot against the provisional government. They attempted to recruit supporters to overthrow Riel. However, they suffered a setback on 17 February, when forty-eight men, including Boulton and Thomas Scott, were arrested near Fort Garry.Image:ShootingThomasScott.jpg|thumb|This fictionalized depiction of Scott's execution in the Canadian Illustrated News was "conceived in the context of heightened partisanship" and "helped inflame anti-Métis sentiment".
Boulton was tried by a tribunal headed by Ambroise-Dydime Lépine and sentenced to death for his interference with the provisional government. He was pardoned, but Scott interpreted this as weakness by the Métis, whom he regarded with open contempt. After Scott repeatedly quarrelled with his guards, they insisted that he be tried for insubordination. At his court martial he was found guilty and was sentenced to death. Riel was repeatedly entreated to commute the sentence, but responded, "I have done three good things since I have commenced: I have spared Boulton's life at your insistance, I pardoned Gaddy, and now I shall shoot Scott."
Scott was soon executed by a Métis firing squad on 4 March. Riel's motivations have been the cause of much speculation, but his justification was that he felt it necessary to demonstrate to the Canadians that the Métis must be taken seriously. Protestant Canada did take notice, swore revenge, and set up a "Canada First" movement to mobilize their anger. Riel biographer Lewis H. Thomas noted that "as people then and later have said, it was Riel's one great political blunder".