Book Reviews
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BOOK REVIEWS Flanagan, Thomas: Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1983, 177 pp., $12.95 paper, 13 maps and photos. Recently, the attention of scholars has shifted from the personal tragedy of Louis Riel to the larger issues of the development and dispersal of his people. Certain questions about Riel have been examined and re-examined so often, with substantially the same conclusions, that it has seemed appropriate to regard the old subject as closed. But hold on. Thomas Flanagan, co-ordinator of the Riel Papers project and previously sympathetic contributor to the Riel studies stream, now attempts to take the debate back to the point of departure that was abandoned in the mid-1930s. Flanagan's preface boldly proclaims that the "conventional account.., that the Metis had serious unresolved grievances; that Riel resorted to violence only after legal means of action had failed; that he received a trial of question- able validity before being executed by a vengeful government" is totally mis- guided: "the opposite was closer to the truth." As Flanagan also contends that his claim is supportable by evidence, readers will be anxious to know what new facts have been discovered to force such a complete rejection of the past half- century of scholarship. More particularly, we must inquire into the support for Flanagan's return to the official view, the interpretation that reduces to four propositions: 1. The Metis had no basis for demanding treatment from the Government of Canada that would differ from that accorded to any other Canadian settler population. 2. Their just demands as settlers were well looked after by the Department of the interior. 3. Riel manipulated their unreasonable expectations to further his own personal claims and weird political ambitions. 4. Riel's trial for the crime of treason was procedurally fair and the death sentence was in accord with Canadian precedent. Clearly, the first proposition is the most important because if it is plausible to regard the Metis as no more than an appendage of fur trade society (rather than a people in their own right), then Canada had no obligation to consider 398 any of their extraordinary demands - in 1870 or later. The official view is that the only legal obligation was to buy out the Hudson's Bay Company and the Indians. On this account, it is important for Flanagan to analyze the Metis claims to national status that were advanced on several occasions between 1815 and 1859. He does not. Instead of analyzing how an insider-outsider social dichotomy developed in Rupert's Land in the fifty years before 1870, how the inside structure created by the HBC was supplanted by the outside structure that was proclaimed as the "new nation" in 1869, and how the govern- ment of Canada was forced to negotiate a settlement with the provisional government, Flanagan only mentions the outcome of the process and then just to assert that "the Manitoba Act was a unilateral action of the Canadian Parlia- ment, not a treaty between independent partners . ." (p. 78). The provisions of the statute that took account of the uniqueness of the Metis by recognizing their aboriginal status as well as their pre-emptive settlement rights only confirm for Flanagan that the arrangement was "hastily contrived". To him - and opponents of the Manitoba Act in the parliamentary debate of 1870 - it was an error to think that a population could have settler and aboriginal status simultaneously. In fact, Macdonald agreed, but only because he had every intention of ignoring that which had been conceded in a hurry. From November of 1869 the Prime Minister had planned military action in response to the Metis demand for recognition as a people. The negotiations, the promise of amnesty, the Act of Parliament - all of it was part of a strategy to lull them into a false sense of security, to neutralize resistance before the troops arrived. Interestingly, Flanagan does not seem to have considered such double dealing even though he claims to have sifted all the evidence before concluding that there was no "calculated campaign to destroy the Metis or deprive them of their rights" (p. 146). The facts, however, show otherwise. Briefly, the "calculated campaign" was to deny the Metis their nationality, to treat them the same as any other settler population, and to do so in the full knowledge that most were not likely to pass such proceedings precisely because they were a non-literate trading and ranching population rather than literate farmers accustomed to bureaucracy and its paper mysteries. Once cleared from their homeland, the way would he open for "actual settlers". The Metis were merely "occupants". Flanagan observes that the Metis "did not typically have farms" (p. 14). He also sees that the point of the Dominion Lands Act and the amendments to the Manitoba Act was to promote field agriculture by awarding free grants of land to persons who "intended to settle on land and support themselves by farming" (p. 23). Inevitably, the Metis came into conflict with the Government. But instead of seeking to justify the government's dispossession of the Metis by appealing to some cosmic imperative such as progress (George Stanely's version of the Birth of Western Canada, an interpretation that still permits a certain sympathy for the Metis and their "fate"), Flanagan reaches for an apology that puts most sympathy with the personnel who manned the bureaucracy. The sections of the book that are intended to prove government good faith will be difficult for some readers to follow, however, because the argument 399 unfolds on two levels. On a level of factual narration Flanagan shows that the unqualified assurance of land in Section 32 of the Manitoba Act was trans- formed after 1875 into a less definite opportunity. The result was "those with few improvements on their lots ran into a good deal of trouble" (p. 24) that included an "extortion racket" operated by officials within the Department of the Interior. The impact of the amendments and the discretionary process for administering claims was that a huge portion of the original population received "nothing at all". Later, many found their way to the south fork of the Sas- katchewan River and emerged as the core of the new community of St. Laurent, upriver from the protestant village of Prince Albert. Naturally, they demanded confirmation of their new river lot estates in the pattern of survey of the old Red River Settlement, a pattern that was conceded for the whole of Prince Albert in 1878. But for reasons "unknown" to Flanagan the same pattern was witheld from St. Laurent. There the survey was completed in a grid pattern in 1879 and none of the land was legally open for settlement until the spring of 1884. As a result of the "mysterious" delay, the entire community was guilty of the crime of illegal trespass or "squatting" (in the quaint language of the bureaucracy). The people persistently claimed that their occupancy was owner- ship; and local officials dutifully forwarded their claims to Ottawa, where, just as persistently, John A. Macdonald (the Minister of the Interior) refused to entertain such demands. Once it became evident that another riot like the resistance of 1869-70 was likely, letters were sent to a "substantial portion" of the people informing them that their worries were over if they qualified as homesteaders. Others could buy their land at whatever government price was in effect when they came on the scene. Such is Flanagan's account of the critical facts in the river lot question. The confusion that arises is his insistence that the facts do not mean what they seem to indicate. To Flanagan, the evidence does not amount to a chain of causation provoking rebellion. He only admits that "the government made some serious mistakes" (p. 5). What is interesting about Flanagan's narrative is his refusal to connect any of the errors. He mentions the denial of rights and corrup- tion that led to the dispossession of "many" Metis in Manitoba, but glosses over such maladministration with the assurance that it made sense to withold land from "claimants, who previously had shown little interest in farming" (p. 24). On the same logic, Flanagan claims that the exodus from Manitoba had more to do with "social pressure" (advancing non-natives and retreating buffalo) than land loss. Not knowing the value of what they had lost, they cared but little, according to Flanagan: "the handling of river lots in Manitoba was connected with the North-West Rebellion only in the remote sense that it had engendered mistrust . .". Consequently, we are to believe that the Manitoba- born settlers of St. Laurent could be irritated but should have forgotten about past practices because the officials of the Department of the Interior in the vicinity of their new settlement were "competent and dedicated". To the extent that the Metis faced difficulties in the new setting, the "problems lay in Ottawa", says Flanagan. Here, however, he seems to have forgotten that John A. Macdonald was the Minister of the Interior throughout the period of "myster- 400 ious" delay. Given Macdonald's cabinet responsibility for land matters and his deep interest in the Canadian Pacific Railway, can we ignore the possibility that he played one issue against the other? Surely, we must at least pose the question to determine if neglect of St. Laurent led to one crisis that, in Macdonald's priorities, was intended to resolve another. No matter how painful, we must inquire if John A. Macdonald suspected that the "impulsive half breeds" of St.