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2013 Review of Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State. By Jennifer Reid Kevin Bruyneel Babson College

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Bruyneel, Kevin, "Review of Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State. By Jennifer Reid" (2013). Great Plains Quarterly. 2503. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2503

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. 190 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SUMMER 2013 is that he seeks no simple answer to questions of and the opportunities it provided to people with why some women dressed as men, and some men nonnormative gender presentations. Meticulous- dressed as women. Most readers will be familiar ly documented and eminently readable, the book with the “progress narrative”—the story of wom- is an essential contribution to our understanding en who passed as men in order to seek gainful of gender in American history. employment, to serve their country in the mili- tary, or simply to travel unmolested—but Boag WILLIAM BENEMANN also includes women who continued to present School of Law themselves as men long after the need to cross- University of California, Berkeley dress would seem to have passed. As a parallel, he explores the gender implications of men who took the less understandable course of abandon- Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic ing masculine privilege in order to embrace the Discourse and the Postcolonial State. By Jennifer more difficult frontier life of a person perceived Reid. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, to be a woman. 2012. xi + 314 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, Boag is exceptionally skillful in his interweav- index. $27.95 paper. ing of issues of gender, race, and sexual identity. Particularly fine is his handling of the story of In the late nineteenth century, Métis leader Lou- Mrs. Nash, a Mexican hired in 1868 as a laun- is Riel led two rebellions against Canadian state dress for General Custer’s Seventh Cavalry in expansion on the North American prairies. The Leavenworth, Kansas. Mrs. Nash was also famed 1869 Red River Rebellion led to the creation of for her culinary talents at the army post, and the province of Manitoba. The 1885 North-West for her skill as a midwife. During the years she Rebellion, in present-day Saskatchewan, led to Ri- worked for the Seventh Cavalry, Nash married el’s state execution, by hanging. But Riel’s legend three times, always to soldiers in the unit. And goes beyond the facts of these nineteenth-century yet when she died in 1878, women preparing her conflicts toward the generation of the most omni- body for burial discovered she was biologically present and complicated mythology in Canadian male. The revelation sent shock waves through politics and culture. It is complicated because the regiment because of the uncomfortable Riel has been read in many, often contradictory, questions it raised. “In the wake of Mrs. Nash’s ways: as a Canadian founder, an Indigenous anti- death,” Boag writes, “when all attention shifted colonial rebel, a fighter for Western sovereignty, to her [latest] husband, John Noonan, reactions a messianic prophet, a lunatic, a statesman, and a to the cavalryman grew harsh. Likewise, the press founder of the new Métis nation. would soon report sharply of his suicide. ‘There Thus, Jennifer Reid has taken on a tough task, was a sigh of relief,’ one paper asserted, because for what is there new to say about Riel? Reid le- ‘Noonan by his own hand had relieved the regi- verages Riel’s mythological fluidity and hybridity ment of the odium which the man’s presence into her own claim that his legend speaks to a cast upon them.’ Corporal Noonan, the distant defining truth about the story of Canadian politi- New York Herald disparaged, ‘blew out what little cal and cultural development and the meaning of brains he had.’” Canadian identity. In this sense, the book is not Boag’s strongest contribution is his analysis of fundamentally about Riel himself, for even while stories such as Mrs. Nash’s, in which he expands Reid offers a meticulous, well-researched history our understanding of individual lives by moving of Riel and the rebellions he led, scholars on the beyond the documented fact of the cross-dressing subject are not likely to find anything new in an and looking at underlying assumptions about empirical sense. But that is not the book’s point: gender and sexuality and their larger implications Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada at for the entire community. He explores the role of base is about the role of collective memory in the the frontier—especially the myth of the frontier— production of Canadian national identity, with BOOK REVIEWS 191

Riel standing as the central figure in that mne- often ignored in standard accounts focusing on monic production. Saskatchewan and the Frog Lake area of Alberta. Reid’s take on the role of the myth of Riel is The first part of The Cowboy Cavalry places the that the modern Canadian state really begins in Rangers’ activities of 1885 in the larger context of 1885 with the end of the North-West Rebellion, Louis Riel and the Métis, and especially the Ab- and that Riel’s identity and politics both in his- original groups of southern Alberta: the Peigan, tory and in myth represent the history, develop- Blood, and Blackfoot peoples, who were then on ment, and potentiality of a métissage Canadian the verge of starvation. When trouble broke out identity, a hybrid identity, rather than a homog- in the spring of 1885 there was panic among the enous, singular national form. This hybridity, to settlers and ranchers of the area, but the restrain- Reid, was and continues to be produced through ing leadership of Crowfoot, and especially Red the political, cultural, and even violent inter- Crow, kept any large-scale violence at bay. Nev- play of English, French, Indigenous, and Métis ertheless, John Stewart, a well-connected former groups, and it is reproduced via the discourse of militia officer turned rancher, raised a unit of Canadian collective memory. three mounted companies of ranchers and for- Reid does not claim that hybridity or métissage mer North-West Mounted Police officers from means equality among these groups, and she ac- around the town of Macleod. knowledges that one key element Riel represents The book’s strongest section concerns the or- is the role of foundational violence in state and ganization and activities of the Rocky Mountain nation creation; that is, violence against racial Rangers during their brief existence and the per- Others such as Riel himself. At the same time, sonal histories of individual rangers. They were Reid’s book is also an effort to redeem the pos- dressed and armed like cowboys, and included in sibility for a globally unique status for Canadian their number such interesting characters as Billy identity as hybrid, not homogenous, and thus as Jackson, who had been with Major Marcus Reno a way to rethink the meaning of nationhood. I at the Little Big Horn; “Kootenai” Brown, a for- will admit my own skepticism about this redemp- mer English officer turned mountain man; and scout “Rattlesnake Jack” Robson. The Rangers tive vision, but I applaud and recommend Reid’s did not fight in any of the battles of the rebellion, serious and careful effort to generate a distinct and they failed in what was probably their most and stable position amid the turbulent and vast important single mission, preventing the escape sea of Riel scholarship and myths. of Gabriel Dumont into the United States, but from their headquarters at Medicine Hat they KEVIN BRUYNEEL patrolled the area from High River to the Cy- History and Society Division press Hills in the east, observing any Aboriginal Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts groups, including those across the border, that might be thinking of joining Riel, while U.S. pa- trols from Forts Assiniboine and Abraham Lin- The Cowboy Cavalry: The Story of the Rocky Moun- coln, operating south of the forty-ninth parallel, tain Rangers. By Gordon E. Tolton. Victoria, BC: did the same. Heritage House, 2011. 239 pp. Maps, photo- The book would have benefited from compari- graphs, notes, bibliography, index. $22.95 paper. sons of other similar units raised during 1885, including Boulton’s Mounted Infantry, French’s Gordon E. Tolton’s detailed description of the ac- Scouts, Steele’s Scouts, the Dominion Land tivities of the Rocky Mountain Rangers adds new Surveyors’ Intelligence Unit, the Moose Moun- research to an earlier book of his published in tain Scouts, “Stimson’s Scouts,” and the Alberta 1994. The Rangers existed for just three months Mounted Rifles, some of which are mentioned in and saw no real action, but through their histo- their connection to the Rocky Mountain Rang- ry one can learn much about southern Alberta ers. The most stark and interesting comparison during the North-West Rebellion of 1885 that is would have been with the Métis scouts of the