With the help of his secretary, Will Jackson, Louis has finally drafted a petition, and it circulates through the Métis and white communities of the North-West during the autumn of 1884. This petition is read, debated, and fought over by them all, and in December, all have agreed it is fair, and it is ready. The petition is sent to Ottawa, a document that’s balanced, reasonable, and conservative in its requests. It’s the product of months of debate and collective bargaining.
Many months pass before an answer comes back, an answer so brutal to the Métis that the lieutenant governor of the North-West himself doesn’t have the heart or the stones to share it with them and so lies about what it actually says. But in the months of autumn turning to winter while the Métis wait for an answer—or even a simple telegram confirming that their petition has been delivered—they come to realize that once again, John A. Macdonald likes to ignore them. His pleasure in insulting the Métis and the rest of the settlers seems to have no boundaries.
Maybe it is the scorn of the government and the anger of the priests, combined with the newfound pressure of becoming the Métis leader once more, that trigger Louis to begin to reveal his secret. Experts on Riel, including the biographer Maggie Siggins and the American academic Thomas Flanagan, emphasize a heated discussion between Louis and a priest named Father Valentin Végréville in early December of 1884. The day after a wedding celebration during which Louis stays up all night praying on his knees, he runs into the cleric and berates him, insisting that the whole hierarchy of the priesthood right up to archbishop should march with the Métis. It’s during this lecture that Louis utters one simple line, but one that carries great weight: “I have a task to accomplish by reason of a divine vocation.” A divine vocation? While on the surface these words appear simple enough, for a man already viewed as a rebel and maybe even a heretic by the priests, to actually admit aloud that he believes he is basically on a mission from God will certainly give them reason to pause. More importantly, Louis’s words will provide them with ammunition to use against him.
Also well documented is another, more explosive confrontation between Louis and the clergy just a few days later. This time Louis supposedly confronts a number of priests at once while they are on a retreat. Father André, the same tough old minister to the buffalo hunters and a man so easily angered by even the slightest sign of disrespect toward his rule, is ready with his response. André bellows that Louis is becoming an enemy of the priests and that they will speak against him to all the Métis. To dare question the Church’s authority as hotly as he does means Louis is one of three things: a non-believer (which he certainly isn’t), a sinner who can be saved (which he might hopefully be), or a heretic most probably under Satan’s control (which some priests believe is a real possibility). After the run-in at the retreat, the priests discuss whether Louis, for daring to question their authority and lack of support of the Métis, should face the worst punishment available to the Catholic Church: no more receiving of the sacraments and, as some of the priests present later claim, excommunication as a heretic.
What’s been fiercely debated about this whole scenario— and many others in which Louis is the focus—is that so many of the key moments were reported long after they are supposed to have happened, and by people who had plenty of reason to twist them to their liking. The story the priests tell is that when Louis was told he was making enemies of them, he fell to his knees, crying and begging for forgiveness. It was given to him only when he promised never to lead an uprising again. In hindsight, once the uprising actually did occur and everyone around Batoche, holy men included, was on the possible hook, of course it served the priests’ best interests to cover their own cassocks. But this might be too simple.
Louis Riel can in no way be understood if his deep faith isn’t taken into account. He never utters a negative word against the priests or the church in his diaries. Of course the priests who wrote about this event had grounds to distance themselves as far as possible from Louis when agitation quickly exploded into killing. But this is not the only reason they would paint Riel as an unstable man, a man who’s insane. To do so could save not just his soul but also his life during the trial that would decide his fate. When men like Father Fourmond and Father André came to the stand during Riel’s trial, his life hung in the balance, and they indeed argued that Riel was insane.
Regardless, when the new year of 1885, the last year of his life, arrives, Louis’s ties with the priests, the men who have so shaped and anchored his world, have been severed. And this surely affects everything in his world.
But with the hard times come good times, too. A huge party is thrown in Louis’s honour on the first of January, with as many as two hundred members of the Métis community coming together at the home of Baptiste Boyer to celebrate and to show their love and respect for Louis. He has come to make a stand for them, and this party is given in the hope that the rest of the year will be just as bountiful. This will be the year when the government finally pays attention and gives due where due is deserved.
No one at this point can fathom how quickly things will slide into anarchy.
Four weeks later to the day, Dewdney, the lieutenant governor and head of the territorial government of the North-West, receives a telegram from the Halfbreed Land Claims Commission, a commission set up just recently by the federal government. It’s a curt response to the Métis petition so painstakingly crafted and debated months before. Dewdney is so taken aback by the commission’s telegram that he is shocked into understanding that sharing it with the Métis of the North-West might very well cause open rebellion. Despite the millions upon millions of acres that make up the North-West, this three-man commission sitting in Ottawa has decided that only two hundred of the approximately thirteen hundred Métis who have legitimate claim will receive any entitlement. Anyone who’d received scrip in Manitoba in the past is no longer eligible, regardless of any past impropriety on the part of the government or questionable speculators, and regardless of the fact that the Métis of Manitoba were not given choice parcels of land, land that they themselves had broken with their backs. Virtually nothing that the Métis ask for is broached, including representation in local government, the delineation of all-important river lots, or acknowledgment of Métis rights as a distinct people.
Dewdney hems and haws as to what to do, finally deciding that he’d best gut this telegram to avoid trouble. When it circuitously reaches Louis a full eleven days later, Dewdney has so altered it that it now simply says, “Government has decided to investigate claims of Half Breeds and with that view has already taken preliminary steps.”
Word travels fast, and despite Dewdney’s fabricated version being far from the answer the Métis hope for, they at least recognize it as a response, finally, from John A. He has received their petition, and it will be difficult for him to not see its simple and inalienable requests.
The excitement of the Métis, their belief that their communal voice has finally been heard by Ottawa, peaks on the evening of February 24. The people have fallen into a nearreligious fervour. Prayer marathons for guidance and for leadership, for wisdom and for the future of their people, culminate in Louis speaking to the community at the Batoche church. Louis believes that if he stays any longer, his presence will become a hindrance. It’s no secret that John A. is not a fan. Rumours circulate that the police will arrest Louis on sight. The gathered crowd gasps when he announces that it is time for him to return to his simple life teaching in Montana, that the wheels have begun to turn, and it is now best that he step aside so that they may spin freely. The church erupts into cries of disbelief, becoming a single voice of desperation, of pleading that Louis stay and help finish what he has started. Louis sees that he has no choice but to do what they ask. He is moved by their desire, and he is here not only to lead but to serve them. But he warns the gathered crowd that consequences might very well follow. The people, he sees, are willing and able. Consequences be damned. The consequence will be that the
Métis will finally have a home. Louis finally has a home.
CHAPTER FIVE
Oath
For Gabriel, these last months through the winter are once again spent standing back in quiet support of Louis, but the brief happiness of February turns into the anger of March. The Métis don’t want to accept as normal the manic ups and downs that the government forces them to go through. It’s becoming a sickening pattern. If Gabriel didn’t know better, he’d swear the politicians were doing this on purpose, setting up the people’s hopes just to gut them. Four days into March, the actual words of the telegram to Dewdney and his rewriting of it become public knowledge, and with it, the brutal truth of the matter: only a tiny percentage of Métis will be offered possible title to their land and only after government land agents give their permission. Something in Gabriel hardens forever with this news. He was willing to go the peaceful route of petition, but it has gotten the people nowhere.
Had Gabriel been able to see the bigger picture unfolding—an impossibility for most anyone who didn’t have access to all the facts and all the government insider plans in 1885—it might not have been that big of a stretch for him to believe that John A. was actively attempting to incite the Métis to open rebellion by his long stretches of silence followed by short, devastating bursts of antagonistic decision-making that seem to unfairly punish them. Historians such as D.N. Sprague as well as the brilliant comic strip author Chester Brown make a fascinating argument for why it would perfectly serve John A. to incite the Métis to rebellion. John A.’s obsession, after all (an obsession, keep in mind, that forced him to resign because of his direct involvement in a railroad bribery scandal twelve years before), is a railroad that runs from sea to shining sea. But the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 is in desperate straits and close to bankruptcy. With the economy in the midst of a depression, Canadians worry that the project has become a fiscal black hole. But what if? What if a rebellion flares up in the west? The insurrection of 1870 is not only still fresh in the minds of English Canadians, it has grown to bogeyman proportions, and anger over the execution of the Orangeman Thomas Scott has never gone away. Riel is back in Canada, fomenting anger in the Métis, and now reports from government spies—including, of all people, Father André and the bureaucrat Lawrence Clarke—claim Riel wishes to pursue his revolutionary agenda even through violent means. And so why not just lead the Métis to water? Why not deny them what they ask for? Get them to act out violently, and what God-fearing Canadian is going to say no to loosening the purse strings in order to get the railroad finished so that troops and supplies can be sent quickly to quash the heathen uprising? Canadians will finally see the railroad’s positive use, and John A. will cement his place in the history books.
While this might verge on conspiracy theory, the simple fact of the matter remains that, regardless of whether John A. diabolically planned it or not, the outcome of his poor decisions remains the same. On March 5, the very next day after the federal government’s hurtful answer to Métis petitions comes to light, eleven men secretly meet with Gabriel, including Louis Riel. Louis has written a simple oath for the other men that has them agreeing to continue to live in as holy a manner as possible, but it also mentions the taking up of arms if necessary in order to save Métis country from a “wicked” government. The Métis have had enough of being trampled upon, of having their lives dictated to in this wild country by men thousands of miles away. Clearly the time for petitions has passed, and more direct action approaches. Still, Louis himself chooses not to sign this oath—a secret one, of sorts—because he believes his inclusion in any pact beyond the role of a “spiritual leader” will only lead to more troubles for the other men.
Despite Louis’s quiet call to take up arms if necessary, it isn’t bloodshed that the Métis desire, not at all. The next step, for some, becomes clearer by the day. But it is a dangerous step in that things can certainly escalate to violence if the Métis are not careful. And Gabriel knows violence, especially how quickly normally peaceful men can lose their stomach for it when it is actually upon them. Gabriel, Louis, and the others have to play this particular billiards game with all the skill and cunning they can muster. Talk emerges of a new provisional government, one that fairly represents the people of this land. But there’s one major problem, one major difference between March of 1885 and the days of 1869 and 1870: the North-West is now a geographical and political territory of Canada. To try to declare a provisional government when one already exists will be regarded as treason. And with the conviction for treason comes execution. This is a real and dangerous game indeed.
Gabriel knows that the Métis, though, will keep their wits about them. In Dumont’s Memoirs, years after the uprising, Gabriel notes of this time:
For there is not a more docile people, as disinterested in material goods as the Métis. And I am certain, that if one had given the more cool-headed Métis the alternative of renouncing their rights than winning them through bloodshed, there would not have been a single one of them who would have made the sacrifice; they would have been slightly vexed at first but then would have said cheekily: “Let them keep their rights then! Who needs them anyway!”
Regardless of the desire for most to not turn to violence even as a last resort, tensions run high, and the Métis are devastated to learn of the telegram message that Dewdney tried to hide. News travels fast, even in this lightly populated area. The Métis, yet again, have been forsaken by John A. Macdonald. His government cannot find it in its heart or in its conscience to offer them clear title to the land they’ve cleared, built homes upon, and settled. All these years of back-breaking work, and for what? For speculators to swarm in once again, selling Métis land literally out from under them to corporations or rich individuals, the government rubbing salt in the wound by offering free land to newly arrived immigrants. How did the Métis become invisible? Why are they being treated in this way? No one, not the priests or the bureaucrats or the chief factor of Fort Carlton, Lawrence Clarke, dares to answer. To the Canadian government, the rich land upon which the Métis have settled, land that soon will have a railroad running through it followed by the economic boom shortly thereafter, this land is far more valuable than the half-breeds who live on it.
Alas, the Métis are not ignorant, nor are they stupid. The priests and the bureaucrats don’t need to say aloud what the situation is. The half-breeds are adept at reading the weather, at knowing which way the wind blows. They are a people of and part of this land. They will not be pushed to act foolishly. This foolishness will be left to another.
The Métis gather at the Saint-Laurent church in large numbers on March 7, when the bad news has settled over the land like more snow. With the support of Gabriel, Louis announces that a provisional government should be created based on the abdication of federal government functions through neglect. Louis has re-worked the petition so recently shot down by Ottawa as a bill of rights for the people with ten straightforward points:
1) That the half-breeds of the North-West Territories be given grants similar to those accorded to the half-breeds of Manitoba by the Act of 1870.
2) That patents be issued to all half-breed and white settlers who have fairly earned the right of possession on their farms.
3) That the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan be forthwith organized with legislatures of their own, so that the people may no longer be subjected to the despotism of Mr. Dewdney.
4) That in these new provincial legislatures, while representation according to population shall be the supreme principle, the Métis shall have a fair and reasonable share of representation.
5) That the offices of trust throughout these provinces be given to the residents of the country, as far as practicable, and that we denounce the appointment of disreputable outsiders and repudiate their authority.
6) That this region be administered for the benefit of the actual settler, and not for the advantage of the alien speculator.
7) That better provision be
made for the Indians, the parliamentary grant to be increased and lands set apart as an endowment for the establishment of hospitals and schools for the use of whites, half-breeds, and Indians, at such places as the provincial legislatures may determine.
8)That all lawful customs and usages which obtain among the Métis be respected.
9)That the land department of the Dominion government be administered as far as practicable from Winnipeg, so that the settlers may not be compelled as heretofore to go to Ottawa for the settlement of questions in dispute between them and the land commissioner.
10)That the timber regulations be made more liberal,and that the settler be treated as having rights in this country.
Far from being the rebellious, antagonistic, dangerous, revolutionary, and blood-smeared doctrine that men like Lawrence Clarke warned the federal government about, this bill of rights is simple, direct, and incredibly enlightened. Nothing in it, or the similarly worded petition sent the autumn before, asks for anything unfair or beyond the bounds of respectability. When viewed in this light, it becomes quite easy to understand why the Métis became anxious and angry when John A. finally showed his hand.
Gabriel knows that Louis does not want violence, that he detests it. This is proven to all at the meeting when Louis makes it clear that as soon as the federal government addresses the gathered Métis by forming a commission to deal with these respectful demands properly, their newly cobbled provisional government will immediately disband. Gabriel views this as a wise play, and one that all can agree with. The provisional government is simply a tool to help ratchet the tension up enough so that Ottawa will come to the table rather than sending a demeaning telegram.
Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont Page 5