38 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT • FEBRUARY 17-24, 1995

Louis Riel Biography Suiters from Its Revisionist Slant

BOOKS
Riel: A Lile
of Revolution

By Maggie Siggins. HarperCollins,
507 pp, $29, hardcover.
• Bv VERNE McDONALD

As a Canadian hero, Louis Riel
stands out from an iconography
heavy with suits, ties, and visiting
explorers from other countries.
There are also not many national
heroes who were hanged for treason
yet did not become the focus of any
subsequent political movement,
unless you count the 90-year elec­
toral drought the Conservatives suf­
fered in Quebec.
I don't know what history is taught
in Ontario, but in high school and

university in Alberta and B.C., Riel
was presente d to me as the man
whose decisiveness and determina­
tion in defence of human rights
helped found the province of Manito­
ba, but who ran afoul of central­
Canadian politics. In defending the
same principles in the 1885 rebellion,
he brought on defeat and final failure
through his vacillation and lack of a
coherent purpose, yet through the
perceived threat he posed to Ottawa
he did accomplish the wildly unin­
tended feat of causing the completion
of the Canadian Pacific Railway and
the uniting of the West with the rest
of Canada.
Maggie Siggins would have us
believe that Riel's vision of the
Northwest, with apartheid-style
homelands for Me tis, Nati ves,
Bavarians, Irish, e t cetera, was
indeed a coherent one, even if that

vision had him making up new
names for the days of the week while
British troops and Canadian militia
closed in. Siggins is seeking backing
for her thesis that Riel was a revolu­
tionary, so she tries not to dwell on
the fact that his Metis nation would
have resembled medieval Spain
more than a populist democracy.
She smooths over the contradictions
and inconsistencies of Riel's life as
much as possible to present a sim­
plistic story of a tragic hero fighting
evil enemies.
George Bowering, writing in Quill
and Quire, notes that after almost a
century of anti-Riel bias in Canadi­
an historical writing, the past 25
years have seen a wealth of new
research and more sympathetic pub­
lications. While drawing on these
in her meticulously researched biog­
raphy, Siggins seems to discount

this quarter-century of work with
generalizations such as: "Almost
every historian over the years has
c o n d em n e d t h e exe c u t i o n of
Thomas Scott [in 1870] as being
without any legal foundation, a
summary, vicious act." Of several
historians I have read, most sym­
pathize with Riel in his problems
with Scott, and none unequivocally
condemns the execution. It is as
though Siggins is trying to stake
some sort of claim as the first of
Riel's sympathizers.
Always being on Riel's side leads
Siggins into some convolutions. She
characterizes Hugh Richardson, the
judge at Riel's trial, as a patronage
pawn who "almost always" sided
with the Conservative government,
then strangely illustrates her point
with a quote from a n appeal
Richardson wrote i n 1880 asking

the government to abandon its poli­
cy o f n e glect and settle Metis
claims. Following many negative
quotes about Riel or his actions,
Siggins hurries to add disclaimers
that the statement cited was made
years after the fact or the source was
ill, or vengeful, or self-serving, and
so on. These disc�imers do not
seem to be needed for any other
statements.
Having the historian's bias out
front is better than a hypocritically
false objectivity, but phrases such as
the summing up of U.S. Indian
agent A .R. Keller as a "typical
white Indian-hater" prevent Riel: A
Life of Revolution from being the
authoritative book on Riel that it
might have been. It sometimes
se ems less an examination of a
19th-century man than a document
of the 1990s.

■

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