The North-West Is Our Mother

The Story of Louis Riel's People, the Métis Nation

Jean Teillet

• Publisher: Patrick Crean Editions
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781443450140
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

There is a missing chapter in the narrative of Canada’s Indigenous peoples—the story of the Métis Nation, a new Indigenous people descended from both First Nations and Europeans

Their story begins in the last decade of the eighteenth century in the Canadian North-West. Within twenty years the Métis proclaimed themselves a nation and won their first battle. Within forty years they were famous throughout North America for their military skills, their nomadic life and their buffalo hunts.

The Métis Nation didn’t just drift slowly into the Canadian consciousness in the early 1800s; it burst onto the scene fully formed. The Métis were flamboyant, defiant, loud and definitely not noble savages. They were nomads with a very different way of being in the world—always on the move, very much in the moment, passionate and fierce. They were romantics and visionaries with big dreams. They battled continuously—for recognition, for their lands and for their rights and freedoms. In 1870 and 1885, led by the iconic Louis Riel, they fought back when Canada took their lands. These acts of resistance became defining moments in Canadian history, with implications that reverberate to this day: Western alienation, Indigenous rights and the French/English divide.

After being defeated at the Battle of Batoche in 1885, the Métis lived in hiding for twenty years. But early in the twentieth century, they determined to hide no more and began a long, successful fight back into the Canadian consciousness. The Métis people are now recognized in Canada as a distinct Indigenous nation. Written by the great-grandniece of Louis Riel, this popular and engaging history of “forgotten people” tells the story up to the present era of national reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

2019 marks the 175^th anniversary of Louis Riel’s birthday (October 22, 1844)

Chapter 1

The Old Wolves

In 1909 the leaders of the Métis Nation met in Joseph Riel’s home in St. Vital, Manitoba. These were the men who survived the Red River Resistance of 1869–70 and the North-West Resistance of 1885. With them that evening were their younger siblings and some younger men, the next generation of Métis. These men who met in 1909 have many names: les anciens, lii vyeu, les fidèles à Riel.¹ In this book they are the Old Wolves.

The men gathered at Joseph’s home that night were on a mission to tell the truth—they would have called it God’s truth—about their people, the Métis Nation of the Canadian North-West. They were gathered that night for one purpose. They wanted to carve out a strategy that would counter the many stories of the Métis Nation and Louis Riel that were being printed in the Canadian media and books of their day. For the Old Wolves these stories were illegitimate and one-sided, a propaganda campaign that justified the government’s denial of the Métis Nation’s existence and the dispossession of the Métis from their lands.

That night the Old Wolves vowed to take action. They vowed to tell their own stories and rebut inaccuracies and attacks on the Métis Nation. They were determined to keep the Nation alive by commemorating Louis Riel, promoting their Michif language and defending Métis Nation rights. They would tell their history as they knew it and as their people had experienced it.

They were already taking action. In 1887 they had established the Union Nationale Métisse Saint-Joseph, an organization intended to keep the Nation alive.² In 1889 they were inspired to continue in their efforts when Gabriel Dumont, one of their famous hunters and military leaders, visited St. Vital and encouraged them to keep up the fight for Métis rights. In 1891 they erected a monument on Louis Riel’s grave. In 1910 they created a new national flag and a national historical committee.³ It is impossible to miss the constant references to “nation” and “national” in their institutions. They have always considered themselves a political entity, a nation.

The Old Wolves created a historical committee charged with telling their story. They focused their efforts on what Canadians call the “Riel Rebellions.” They hated the word “rebellion.” To their minds a “rebellion” was a group of people who took up arms to separate from the country or to overthrow or undermine the government. This, the Métis Nation had never done. They had taken up arms only to defend their lands and their rights. They never believed fighting for their rights was a rebellion, and this was a distinction they insisted on; it mattered deeply to them. In a letter published in Le Devoir in 1913, Joseph Riel chastised Henri Bourassa for just that transgression. Joseph insisted that the Métis were “fighting for their rights and never wanted independence or annexation to the United States, and it is not fitting for the grandson of the great Papineau to talk of struggles in such a good cause as ‘rebellions.’”⁴

The Old Wolves and Union Nationale Métisse, 28th anniversary of the hanging of Louis Riel, November 16, 1913 (Société Historique de Saint-Boniface 14482)

Such an objection might not seem, in this day, to be anything out of the ordinary. But the Métis still vividly remembered their defeat at Batoche, the final battle in the North-West Resistance of 1885. So objecting to the term “rebellion” was a calculated decision.⁵ The defeated are not supposed to throw pebbles at the victors, not even forty years later. A deferential manner is expected. But wolves are not deferential. It’s not in their nature.

It took time for the historical committee to gather their facts and to work with the legacy of fear and silence that continued to oppress their people. When Canada hanged Louis Riel on November 16, 1885, their best and brightest voice, all the Métis voices fell silent. Silence was the price of defeat. But in the minds of the Old Wolves, that silence roared with injustice. Their bones were waxing old but they would not go silent to their graves.

The committee’s first public foray was a recounting of their history of 1869 to 1870, the Red River Resistance. Guillaume Charette, the Métis Nation’s “Old Storyteller,” also a historian and lawyer, spoke to a shocked audience at the Jesuit college in St. Boniface on November 25, 1923.⁶ They were shocked because, as the editor of the Queen’s Quarterly in Kingston, Ontario, would later write,

[T]he public of our country is not yet prepared to face frankly the facts . . . and those of us who are interested in the ultimate victory of truth must be content with slow and gradual progress in that direction . . . the opinion in Ontario . . . has been largely tinged by the reports sent East by such men as Charles Mair . . . and . . . Toronto papers such as the Globe, created an attitude of mind which succeeding years have not been able to modify substantially.⁷

In 1931 when the editor of La Liberté began to regurgitate all the old lies about the rebellions and labelled the Métis defence of their rights as criminal and crazy, the Old Wolves called an assembly of all the Manitoba Métis to debate how they would respond.

The Old Wolves decided to publish their own history of the Métis Nation. The historical committee began to take sworn declarations from Métis survivors, the men still alive who had played key roles in the Red River Resistance of 1869–70 and in the North-West Resistance of 1885. There are affidavits taken in 1909, and twice in 1929 the committee visited Batoche, the site of the last battle in the North-West Resistance. Virtually the whole town came to their community meetings. They hired Auguste de Trémaudan to be the author of their history.

The Old Wolves left their papers and notes behind. There are copies of Louis Riel’s writings and Métis Nation meeting minutes from the early 1870s. There are sworn declarations from Métis. There are attempts to organize the facts of the resistance movements and to answer the questions that would eventually form the appendix to Trémaudan’s book, a 1930s version of FAQs (frequently asked questions). The committee’s original intention was to publish a simple narrative followed by a complete work supported with references. Unfortunately, Trémaudan died before he completed his task. It was a terrible setback, but the historical committee stubbornly kept editing Trémaudan’s work for years.

The committee exercised great control over the content of Trémaudan’s history book while he was alive. They demanded that he tone down some of the language in the book. It was not that they disagreed with what he wrote, but they wanted Canadians to hear their story. If the tone was bitter, too accusatory or just too anti-English, Canadians would not listen. Trémaudan resisted this instruction. He thought the book should be a direct attack on lii Canadas, the Canadian Party who so violently stole the North-West away from the Métis Nation. But the historical committee insisted that Trémaudan sweeten his words. The published version of the book describes the Canadian Party as a “band of cheats, criminals and thieves.”⁸ That is the toned-down version!

The historical committee understood the power of words. They knew that in addition to countering the “rebel” label, they had to counter the claim that Riel was insane. The Métis have always seen Riel as a man of God, a prophet and a great leader who was dedicated to his people and did everything in his power to help them. For the Métis, Riel’s sanity has never been particularly relevant. Still, the Old Wolves knew the Canadian obsession with Riel’s sanity. They knew that if Riel was labelled insane, his actions and the cause he fought for could be dismissed. This they would not allow. Louis Riel was their greatest leader, a comet that appeared on the horizon in 1868, shone brightly for seventeen years and flamed out in 1885. The Riel years have left an indelible mark on the Métis Nation, which now mostly describes itself as Riel’s people. Though the Riel years are the best-known parts of the Métis Nation’s history, they are only a small part of a history that really began in the 1790s and continues today.

On July 9, 1935, the Old Wolves proudly announced the forthcoming publication of their book, Histoire de la Nation Métisse dans l’Ouest Canadien, at an annual Métis gathering of over two thousand members of the Union Nationale Métisse.⁹

For 27 years the members of that Committee stuck together and worked consistently and arduously with the one and almost unique object in mind: The publication of what they considered a true version of . . . history. Old ones dropped out or disappeared, but new ones replaced them and kept on going and working stubbornly. Many of them cherished the idea of reading the book, their history, the history they themselves made and really wrote with their blood and sacrifices. At the same time their children and grand-children are proud and justly so of their deeds . . .¹⁰

Until that book was published, the Métis Nation’s history was passed down orally. These are the stories they told their children and grandchildren. They are the stories most Métis still know and tell today.

The Old Wolves’ book is mainly concerned with two Métis Nation resistance movements, the Red River Resistance of 1869–70 and the North-West Resistance of 1885. This book covers that same ground but benefits from access to new analyses and evidence. It also attempts to fill in more detail of the early years leading up to the Red River Resistance and continues the story of this new nation, the Métis Nation of the Canadian North-West, into the twenty-first century.

Chapter 2

The Voyageurs

SOCIAL GLUE

Glue. That is what we need to find in order to understand the beginnings of the Métis Nation. Not the white glue children use to paste pictures in school. This is a search for social glue, the circumstances, values and dreams that bound individuals so tightly that they began to see themselves as a separate and distinct collective entity. The social glue that originally bound people together to create ancient cultures is often buried deep in history and predates our written accounts and historical memories. This is not the case for the culture that named itself la nouvelle nation in 1816 and now calls itself the Métis Nation. The social glue that originally bound these people together has not been lost in the mists of history. It can be traced directly to the voyageurs—not all the voyageurs, but a subset of the voyageurs, the men of the north who married First Nation women and then “went free” in the Canadian North-West with their new families. This is where we find the social glue that created the Métis Nation.

The men of the north are the voyageur fathers of the Métis Nation. They occupy a rich and romantic spot in Canadian history. They are depicted as larger than life, courageous and powerful men who braved wild animals, freezing waters, abominable weather and starvation. They boldly voyaged where no Euro-Canadians had gone before.

The voyageurs were their own best promoters. They were famous for their stories and songs. Around the campfires at night, they would boast about their horses, canoes, friends and dogs. In their songs and stories, they celebrated their exploits, tragedies and famous deeds. Storytelling was a voyageur tradition, and exaggeration played no small part in those stories. So, the wolves and bears were gigantic, vicious monsters handled with cool expertise. Storms were always hurricane force, and any loss was a tragedy of such magnitude that it moved them all to tears. No matter that they had heard all the stories before. No matter that one man claimed to be the hero in a gallant deed one night and another man claimed the same part the next night.

This story tradition was consistent with the oral traditions of other peoples around the world. The voyageurs knew what this was all about. They never confused their tales with fact, but as consummate actors they believed them passionately during the performance. Other observers, especially the English, were cynical about the voyageur storytelling tradition, thought it all childish lies and failed to appreciate the art. But for the voyageurs, the telling of their stories, and especially the performance of them, confirmed their traditions, their uniqueness and the essence of who they were. They were voyageurs. As they said, they lived hard, slept hard and ate dogs.¹

The term “voyageur” originally described all the explorers, fur-traders and travellers in the North-West. Later it came to describe only the boatmen and canoeists. The mangeurs de lard or pork-eaters (named after the main food they ate) were the voyageurs plying the large boats on the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. Les hommes du nord, the northmen, paddled smaller craft into the lands northwest of the Great Lakes. It is the northmen who are of interest to this history.

THE VOYAGEUR HIGHWAY

The routes the voyageurs travelled are called the “voyageur highway.” The voyageurs gradually pushed the highway up the St. Lawrence River and into the Great Lakes region. Until the 1780s the Great Lakes area and what is now northern Quebec and Ontario supplied many of the furs. At that time there were approximately thirty thousand people in the Great Lakes. As the voyageurs intermarried with the Great Lakes Indigenous peoples a new group of Métis, dedicated to the fur trade, began to appear. By the 1790s, the areas surrounding the upper Great Lakes had been trapped out. The Nor’Westers relocated their main trade depot to the western edge of Lake Superior. Now the North-West began on the height of land west of Lake Superior. It was on this height of land that a voyageur took a vow of loyalty to his brothers and was baptized into the elite of the voyageurs—the northmen.

The period between 1790 and 1821 was a time of great change. The War of 1812, a new American border, over-trapping in the lands surrounding the Great Lakes, and an American law prohibiting anyone other than an American citizen from trading in the United States caused a great reorganization of the peoples of the Great Lakes. In 1821 the two great rival fur trade companies merged. Since 1670 the Hudson’s Bay Company had held a British charter of incorporation. For years its employees, mostly Orkn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Introduction
• Part One: The Birth of the Nation
• Part Two: Making the Nation
• Part Three: No Company’s Slave
• Part Four: The Red River Resistance
• Part Five: Early Life with Canada
• Part Six: The North-West Resistance
• Part Seven: Settlement
• Part Eight: Renaissance
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher