Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State

Conclusion

241 Within the shared imagination of a people,only those aspects of the past that impinge upon concerns of the present have the possibility of being reanimated and sustained. Perhaps more than most facets of collective memory, mythic heroes speak to this property of collective memory and present valuation; and in this respect, Riel is an exemplary case in point. In spite of his execution at the hands of the Canadian government, the ostensible failure of the Rebellion of 1885, and his disparagement in dominant historical narratives for a good part of the century following his death, Riel has remained alive in the collective imagination; as such, he provides a resource for determining what is of concern to the Canadian people. As the poet Marilyn Dumont put it: “Riel is dead/but he just keeps coming back.”1 Daniel Francis suggested that Riel’s story has generally appealed to a society that has no agreed-upon historical narrative: “Riel is a model of what a uniquely Canadian hero has to be . . . someone whose story is complex enough to appeal to the kind of fragmented society Canada has become.”2 While this may be true, I believe that the mythic Riel in all his permutations may suggest a kind of basic ordering that lies beneath the surface of the cultural maze of Canadian society, and that, further, he may well provide a basis for a historical narrative that can coherently approximate the experience of Canada’s people. Canada is a society riddled with dichotomies that have given rise to cultural fragmentation, subnationalisms, ethnic oppression, separatist Conclusion 242 conclusion movements, and organized violent outbreaks ranging from the Conquest, the Rebellions of 1837, the Red River Uprising of 1869–70, and the NorthWest Rebellion of 1885 to the October Crisis of 1970 and the confrontation at Oka in 1990. It is also a society that has managed, thus far, to endure its intrinsic incompatibilities and remain a viable modern state. As Francis puts it, Canada is “decentralized, unstable, pluralistic, [and] truly democratic .”3 Amid the tumultuous—perhaps even chaotic—cultural and political history that has carried Canada into the twenty-first century, there has been a kind of order, epitomized perhaps by Riel. Looking back to our earlier reference to chaos theory, I would suggest at this point that insofar as Canada is a state system that has exhibited an internal tendency toward unusually complex forms of modern sociopolitical relations, Riel could be said to have become a “strange attractor” in relation to whom an ordered configuration might be discernable. This order revolves around what most Canadians would acknowledge as the central characteristic of their geopolitical union: its humanly and culturally radical character, the result of a process of hybridization that I have chosen to call métissage. One might argue that this is the most revolutionary aspect of the entire postcolonial world in which Canada finds itself, but few Western states have been so thoroughly enmeshed in it at a structural level. It has been a constant source of frustration to many Canadians that a collectively recognized historical narrative about the country has not emerged. Granatstein, in spite of his reactionary call for an imperialist narrative , has pointed this out in a particularly astute manner: “The nation is fragile indeed,” he writes, “and one reason for this lamentable state of affairs might well be a lack of a history that binds Canadians together. It is not that we do not have such a history. It is simply that we have chosen not to remember it.”4 Daniel Francis has gone a step further, suggesting that the lack of a historical narrative has been related to the country’s lack of a “myth of creation.”5 If we were to locate such a myth we would, presumably , find the repository of memories that Granatstein reminds us are out there somewhere, waiting to inform the shape of a collective historical narrative. It is no surprise, then, that at this point I should suggest that we look to the figure of Louis Riel, the man to whom, despite innumerable dissimilar portrayals, Canadians have quite consciously ascribed mythic and religious significance. Across the broad range of ostensibly contradictory Riels, we find a myth that bears a distinct resemblance to the man we have explored in the preceding chapters; and we may well discover that both the 243 conclusion man and the myth provide an...