Louis Riel Review

Louis Riel The leader of two major rebellions in the Canadian West was a Metis named Louis Riel, who encouraged his fellow Metis peoples to stand up for their rights through armed conflict. Red River Rebellion, 1869-1870 (settled) North-West Rebellion, 1885 (unsettled)

The building tension that led to the Red River Rebellion, 1870 The terms of Rupert`s Land purchase did not mention the rights of the First Nations and Métis who lived in the area. The Métis feared for their land, their culture and their rights. In August 1869, surveyors from Canada arrived in Red River.

Red River Rebellion Settlement On July 15th, 1870, the province of Manitoba was created on a parcel of land that is today the southern part of the province. The Act also incorporated some of Riel's demands.

North-West Rebellion North West Rebellion broke out in the valley of the North Saskatchewan . Here had settled a number of the [Métis] of the fur-trade, on oblong farms abutting on the river. After having been granted farms of 240 acres in the Red river district, had sold out, and moved west to the Saskatchewan. To all these native settlers the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway across the prairies brought a serious threat.

North-West Rebellion They had enjoyed a monopoly of the transportation business on the western prairies; and of this the railway threatened to rob them. The government surveyors, who had come out with the railway, had proceeded to run their lines with a mathematical precision which ignored the rights of the Metis owners of oblong farms; and the [Métis] became fearful that they would be again dispossessed.

North-West Rebellion In 1884 the Métis on the Saskatchewan sent a delegation to Louis Riel.

Hanging of Louis Riel For decades afterwards, the hanging of Riel was interpreted in the province as the deep wounding of an entire people, as a supreme act of cruelty against one whose only sin was to have stood up for the rights of his people (i.e. the rights of French Catholics), as a symbol that Canada was not a land of equality between French and English Canadians but one where the French Canadians were a minority whose views and feelings could be disregarded.

Hanging of Louis Riel Both federally and provincially, the people of Quebec began to turn away from the Conservative Party, the party of Macdonald, the party of the "pendards" (the hangers). Increasingly they turned to the Liberal Party that chose Wilfrid Laurier, a French Canadian from Quebec, as its leader (1887). Essentially, for the next hundred years, consciously or unconsciously, the people of Quebec continued to punish the Conservative Party for the hanging of Riel.

Provisional Government A provisional government is an emergency or interim government set up when a political void has been created by the collapse of a very large government. When the Metis took over Fort Garry, they creates a “provisional government” and appointed Louis Riel as president.