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CounterPunch
November
5, 2002
Canada's Metis:
Overdue Recognition for Its Third Founding People
by NORMAN MADARASZ
No rebel has graced the heights of Canadian history
like Louis Riel. Educated in Montreal by the Sulpician Fathers,
Riel was trained to be a lawyer. His deep spirituality had destined
him to enter into the ecclesiastical order. But Louis Riel was
Metis. And, from 1869 to 1885, he led his people in two separate
struggles, striving to have its rights recognized as sovereign
by Canada's nascent federal government. The courage of his leadership
cost him his life.
When the Hudson's Bay company relinquished
its ownership of the northwest Rupert's Land, basically today's
Manitoba and beyond, Riel petitioned John A. MacDonald, Canada's
first prime minister, to grant the Metis rights over their homeland.
Settlers were also coveting the territory, and its sale sparked
Canada's first westward venture. The dramatic events to which
it led is better known as the 1869-70 Red River Metis rebellion.
The Metis had settled, farmed and dominated
a large area of the northern prairies for close to a hundred
years. By the mid-eighteenth century, they barely numbered 10,000.
After the failure of the first revolt, Riel fled into exile.
A decade later, with rebellion in the air again, the wayward
rebel was summoned back to lead a last ditch effort at saving
the Metis' sovereign claims. Defeated, captured and put on trial,
he was found guilty of high treason and executed in 1885. Ever
since, Riel's name has hovered over Canada's history like a constitutional
ghost.
Last week, on October 21-23, the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the English-language version
of Societe Radio-Canada, beckoned that ghost to become a man
again. In an unprecedented act of political television, producer
Mark Starowicz and his team decided to stage a re-trial for the
Metis leader. In his closing testimony, Riel, played by French-Canadian
barrister Guy Bertrand, cited Canada's national anthem in French.
The opening line, "Oh Canada, terre de nos aieux,"
noted Riel, translates differently to the English rendition.
Where it intones "Our home and native land", the French
sing "Home of our ancestors".
"Who are these ancestors?"
asked Riel. The answer was to plain to hear: "My native
ancestors." No English Canadian in 1870, very few in 1960,
and perhaps only a handful in 2002, could sing this line in French
as theirs. Canada has remained a divided nation. Yet for the
Metis, this people of mixed franco-, anglo-, and indigenous origins
--- the 'half-breeds' as they were once disparagingly called
---, to be able to claim the line is testimony to their place
as one of Canada's founding peoples, the original Manitobans.
HISTORY IN
THE MAKING
The beauty of the sciences' obsession
with objectivity is that when its object begins to blossom and
wilt, to split in the way the atom once did, its outstretched
form shows just how subjective knowledge systems are. When the
atom whispered through the help of the right instrument, were
it a microscope or model, what it said was that it could still
be divided, and would be so long as humans were its observers.
When behaviorism's 'black box' model for the mind began to utter
from within its depths, it pointed to being populated with the
frictional push and pull of genetic activity. As evolution speaks,
theory shifts from selection to adaptation, when it doesn't hearken
back to the nostalgia of creationism.
Until recently, the myth of Canadian
nationhood furrowed between two founding peoples, the French
and English. The story stretched tautly over an echo chamber
within which resounded Native Indian truth. When the European
colonial membrane finally grew holes and began to breathe again
in the 1970's, a triangular reality rearranged it. Slowly but
steadily, Canada's First Nations returned to engrave their mark
on a country that was more willing to be adorned with the idea
of multiculturalism than grant them anything beyond their 'titres
de noblesse', which happened to be territorial and political
autonomy.
Canada's pedigree of nationhood now confronts
a novel step in this history of the past in the making. Few events
demonstrate as clearly how history steps backward. It spreads
from the future into the past. As far as most Canadians as concerned,
I could, or maybe should, be writing in another language. For
from the denial generally cast upon the founding role held by
the indigenous peoples, many Canadian ideologues react by embedding
self-denial into their own nationalism.
Debates to admonish patriotism rage among
Anglo-Canadians on the topic of national identity. They portray
themselves as having a hard time settling on who exactly they
are as a nation. The Anglo-Canadian brew simmers from a dash
of the American uplifted by a sprinkle of the British, all fomented
with a spice of Ire. Yet the big chunk of actual identity seems
to melt into thin speech. Oddly, it vanishes alongside with the
other flavors that have diluted the true-bred Canadian over the
last century, a mention for them not worth recalling.
And right when Anglo-Canadians were getting
accustomed to the schema of a triangular reality involving the
founding peoples, a new omen has arisen. >From atom to quark,
and now onto cords. The Metis are literally on the way to etching
out their rightful place in history. But instead of heading towards
four peoples, integers split into fractals. Unlike other numbers,
fractals describe the process of moving from one dimension into
another. Their inter-dimensional complexity only does greater
justice to the study of history. That's because once you step
outside of the hard and fast and dominant version of history,
the sagas of the conquerors and their conquests, a sense of subtlety
becomes the master.
Canada's indigenous peoples are so much
more than founders of the country. They are the soul of the land
and its soil, its air and sky. Yet until recently in terms of
the nation's actual configuration, their heritage and presence
has barely inflected its key policies since the early nineteenth-century.
The reasons for this absence have next to nothing to do with
will, desire or abnegation. Tecumseh, Big Bear and Joseph Brant
were all natives, and all participated and struggled to build
the prototype of this nation. When the moment came to commemorate
their devotion by recognizing their territorial claims, all were
dismissed when they hadn't already died in battle --- at times
in alliance with the British white man against the American,
at others against the British themselves.
At this point, the Metis' role appears
as less alienated. Like the First Nations, its people stand at
the heart of the country and continent's indigenous heritage.
They have also helped to shape Canada as a nation. With the coupling
of Indians and French, and Indians and Scots, and the further
intertwining among their descendants, the Metis formed a population
stimulated by the political and judicial behavior of the European
ancestor. That continent's innovation was to have founded nation-states
that are bureaucratic, centralized and mainly democratic in character,
divided into jurisdictional entities such as states/provinces
and counties in structure.
On the heels of Confederation's enactment
in 1867 through the union of four provinces, the Metis aspired
to be bound to the new country. They had preserved the autonomy
of the northern Great Plains in their victory against the Plains
Indians a decade earlier. More importantly, they had built a
distinct society. Even more, by the very meaning of their name
in the French language, the Metis embodied and anticipated Canada's
future multicultural fabric a hundred years before its time.
As historical details acquire their rightful
place, anglophone Canadians will probably object that the colonial
war they are accused of sponsoring against the Metis was, in
fact, fought with a broader objective. The government sought
to prevent American settlers from invading the northern Great
Plains. Their advocates would ad that the alliance system characteristic
of Canadian history, as proven by its ties with the Iroquois
especially, would have been pursued in quite different manner
were it south of the border.
In other words, the British North Americans
were protecting the Indians from the expansionist Republicans
bounding westward and north. After all, the Iroquois paid a heavy
price for siding with the British in the 1812-1814 war. Already
threatened by the advance of settlements, as the war concluded
in a stalemate between the white powers, the Iroquois would be
deported from their homeland out from the northern US.
Let the Canadian's objections stand,
then, as a reminder of their will, so long as they recognize
that the means used to achieve continental access to the Pacific
only considered the Metis' well-being as a trickle-down side-effect.
THE CBC PROPOSAL
The CBC's objective was to call on Canada's
leading legal minds so as to try Riel according to today's laws.
The trial would bear in mind the Charter of Rights and Freedoms
passed in 1982 when the Constitution was, finally, repatriated
from England. In the end, any referral to that Charter merely
played a role to lend legitimacy to the act of staging the re-trial.
For as was revealed, the legal point of contention remained then-prime
minister John A. Macdonald's decision to use an old British law
of high treason by which to charge the Metis leader. Not only
did this law not exist on Canada's books, its evident purpose
was to legally put Riel to death.
The series opened with a biographical
portrayal of the Metis leader. The re-trial took place on the
second evening, after which viewers were asked to act as jurors
and vote on-line to either convict or acquit Riel beyond reasonable
doubt. Poll results were to be broadcast in the course of the
third evening when distinguished members of the Metis people
were invited to speak of Riel, the trial and re-trial, their
history since the fateful rebellions and what the Metis expect
today. Over these three hours, our uncompromising public network
has rarely been as ambitious.
So much lay on the agenda that the name
of a most prominent political leader was left out. Yet in 1990,
the name of Elijah Harper had many a Canadian dizzy. For over
two hundred years the English and French, Euro-Canadians, had
lived in two distant and separate worlds. Two solitudes it was
once said to be. But a Siamese twin is what they come closest
to resembling. The Constitutional amendments of that time, known
as the Meech Lake accords, were meant to harmonize the life of
this bickering couple by enshrining French-speaking Quebec as
a distinct society to which exceptional collective rights were
due. Mr Harper quashed the attempt "silent, with a feather",
in the words of John Saul.
As a member of the Manitoba assembly,
Mr Harper reminded Euro-Canadians that there can be no harmonious
constitution without either the ancestral peoples of the land,
or the silenced other, the Metis. He managed to block the Manitoba
provincial government's ratification of the accords precisely
according to what the Charter of Rights grants to the nation's
founding peoples and minorities. With Manitoba's failure to ratify
the accords, though, Quebec stared in awe as if suddenly recalling
its distant cousin.
Riel was hung in a bloodsucker's bash
in Regina on November 22, 1885. In Montreal, far from its cheering
crowds, 50,000 French Canadians stormed onto the Champs de Mars,
after "Ils l'ont pendu-They hanged him" was splashed
on newspaper front pages. There was no god of war trudging this
field, but simply a man of rights. Wilfred Laurier, who would
become the first French-Canadian Prime Minister and steer the
country away from MacDonald's legacy, spoke out to the demonstration.
"Had I been on the banks of the Saskatchewan", he declared,
"I also would have taken up my rifle."
In Quebec's view a century later, history's
kiss was given from smirking lips. And for its latest Prime Minister,
Brian Mulroney, the promise being repaid to his Quebec constituency
had fallen into pieces through the device of the Manitobans.
Mulroney would still give it one last chance in 1995. By then,
the indigenous renaissance had already grown. Few were able to
see eye-to-eye on rights, and even fewer have felt like touching
the constitution since.
So the negotiating table has turned an
increment and slid into another venue. The re-trial mustered
up two primary pieces of litigation. The prosecution accused
Riel of murdering Thomas Scott, an Orangeman from Ontario, imprisoned
during the Red River rebellion. That charge was only meant to
trigger a list of wrongdoings: establishing a provisional government,
setting up a capital, Batoche, establishing a tribunal and killing
90 officers of the Canadian mounted police, dispatched there
to establish order. Riel claimed that they, as Scott himself,
had come to kill him.
The prosecution then emphasized Riel's
religious beliefs as obsessive, quoting him as "the prophet
of the new world". It tainted the wandering that followed
his initial defeat as a slide into insanity, therefore explaining
Riel's two-year tenure in a mental asylum in Montreal. Finally,
the prosecution quoted from the letter Riel sent to the Canadian
forces amassed outside of Batoche. In it he had vowed to wage
"a war of extermination" against the Canadian forces
were they not to return to Ottawa.
The defense council represented Riel's
devotion to his people. The fight he led was argued to have been
waged in self-defense. Prime Minister Macdonald was harshly scrutinized
in his desire to execute Riel. In fact, after the Metis surrender
in 1885, 76 leaders were charged with treasonous felony. Riel
alone received the charge of high treason whose only sentence
was death.
The circumstances of a further procedural
problem had arisen as well. Riel, a francophone and speaker of
'Metisian', had the right to a trial in French before a jury
comprised of his peers. But MacDonald chose to shift the trial
further west to Regina, ensuring that no Metis would be part
of the jury. Only one of the jurors was able to speak French.
Understandably, Riel acting as his own witness explained with
difficulty how "waging a war of extermination" was
merely meant as a message to intimate and scare off the Canadian
forces. There was no battle plan, no "rebellion", which
would not have been a suicidal venture to his mind, given the
Canadians' military superiority.
Based on the campaign to deprive Riel
of a just hearing, offset by the claim of self-defense faced
with the invading Canadian police and military forces, the defense
counsel then asked for the jury --- the Canadian viewers of the
program --- to decide again on a verdict beyond reasonable doubt.
RESULTS AND
LESSONS
Out of the roughly 10,000 viewers who
phoned in between 9 pm October 22 and 8 pm October 23, 9 out
of 10 voted to acquit Riel. Close to 90% of viewers had found
him innocent of the charges laid against him. Announced toward
the end of the forum in which representatives of the Metis people
were invited as witnesses and guides, the results left the gathering
profoundly moved.
One hour could not be enough to contain
their enthusiasm. Nor could any objections to its lack of legal
value override the moral legitimacy of the vote and its historical
implications. Indeed, one of the barristers participating in
the re-trial, Edward Greenspan, vowed to take the case to the
Supreme Court. Again the objection could be raised that only
those were watching who had already decided in favor of acquittal.
Still, it's quite evident that these viewers thought over the
controversy, and based on their research chose to alter the historical
verdict. In the end, the re-trial managed to raise the reasonable
doubt in face of which the charge of high treason could not be
held up in a court of law.
Even more, it isn't just Riel who has
received historical justice here. It is the Metis people he led.
They have emerged from the shadow of shame into which Canadian
history had attempted to shut them. Shame of their heritage and
shame of the unprecedented and unsurpassed violence of the clash
the Canadian federal forces led against them.
What have the Metis wanted since then?
The distinguished guests present had to keep recalling that their
status as a distinct people, distinct from French-Canadians,
English-Canadians as well as the First Nations, had been implicitly
recognized by Ottawa. Moreover, these rights are explicitly enshrined
in the UN's definition of a people. What they still expect, though,
is settlement of the pending land rights claims, left unattended
since Riel's execution. In the meantime, the Metis got a piece
of history back, however small.
There was nothing happenstance to this
implication. Anyone could feel it in the emotions expressed by
those attending. A young woman pondered: How does one define
being Metis? When returning to the history and traditions of
her ancestral people, and then especially, she could feel that
she was Metis. Rewriting the history of the conquerors into progressive
history may proceed by small steps. Its accomplishment is reached
when the feeling finally blossoms, confirming that justice has
been given its due.
TWO REMARKS
There is a brief technical note to be
made on the forum discussion. The public television channel,
its cable version Newsworld, like any other of Canada's proud
publicly built and developed cultural institutions, have also
had to resort to the use of commercial advertising due to relentless
budget slashing. Yet the most annoying management of advertising
time, and when to cut for it, prevailed throughout this forum.
So much so that participants would be cut off in the middle of
a point about their history worth more than reading 10 books
that tell the official version.
To add insult to injury, the way the
broadcast closed was atrocious. Here we have the first manifestation
on a national scale elevating the Metis to the place of a founding
nation. For over a hundred years, they as a people have been
subdued, crushed and almost erased from the historical and cultural
landscape. And what does the CBC host do? She cuts off a participant
just minutes into the proud elation she was expressing about
the results of the vote, only to break off the program with barely
a closing word --- just with a quick thank you to all for participating.
How smooth is the slide of political
television into the reality show format! The CBC has to offer
a follow-up program to continue the discussion. Otherwise, its
interests in Ottawa will simply show through. In an age of reality
shows, the CBC participated in redrawing reality, bringing it
a step closer to justice. It cannot, without letting down the
Metis, leave without a statement as to the implications of this
program.
Save for these flaws, CBC/Radio-Canada
has to be congratulated for such a powerful lesson on nation
forming. Its perspective is not only to inform, but to right
the wrongs of history, exposing Canadians to their fascinating
and complex stories. This is no small task in a nation that perpetually
downgrades its own history, considered by Canadians themselves
as, quite simply, 'boring'. Would a country be prevented from
becoming an empire by its name, deriving from a Huron word meaning
'village'? That the most interesting parts of the country's history
are often left out from the curriculum is symptomatically reversed
in the continual adulation of the US's epic representations,
be they good or not.
Author's comment: I am a first generation Canadian born and raised
in Montreal from Hungarian parents. It took me the opportunity
of studying in Europe and reading the history of European contact
with the Americas to understand that non-Anglo and non-Franco
immigrants to Canada also shared the plight of colonizing this
land and disenfranchising its native peoples.
Perhaps I'm slow, distracted and blind.
Little around, save for their walking living memory, had led
me to see our arrival differently, as my parents' generation
strove to fit into a new country and be recognized by the 'native'
Canadians. Assimilation in the case of my peers and myself, whether
in Quebec or Canada, was successful by the standards that any
state can afford to give its newcomers. Living with that need
and working through it closes historical space down. Immigrants
tend to care less about what happened a hundred years ago. And
once this problem of assimilation has been settled, the reality
of the continued colonization of Canadian land and people to
the expense of the rights of the First Nations to their own land
and traditions is only further distanced. For far from the metropolitan
hubs, Canadians know little of the living conditions of the native
populations.
The 1867 confederation brought together
four provinces: French-speaking Quebec, English-speaking Ontario,
and the split former-fourteenth British North American colony
of Acadia, from which the majority of its French-speakers had
already been deported.
The fifth to join was Manitoba, the Metis'
homeland, from whose sovereignty they were torn. Now a minority,
the Metis have found some truth, a little retribution by acceding
to the pantheon of the nation's founding peoples.
Norman Madarasz
is a Canadian philosopher. He welcomes comments at: normanmadarasz2@hotmail.com.
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