The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture, and: Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography (review)

Googling 'Louis Riel Images' turns up pictures on the one hand monumental and heroic, and on the other, commonplace and 'realistic.' Snapshots of Riel in a Mackinaw coat and at times even beardless rest alongside the frock-coated statesman. These in turn abut upon shots of a comic-book hero and a larger-than-life man in bronze. Where is the real Riel hiding?

Where is Riel? He's hiding where Elvis lurks: in a limbo where every seeker finds what he seeks. Martyr? Statesman? Madman? Ayatollah? Patron saint of Confederation? Consider Riel a cultural Barbie doll, decked out in whatever raiment the outfitter picks. Albert Braz offers a guide to this wax museum, a comprehensive and engaging account of the imaginative uses to which Canadian culture has put Riel.

Braz's chapter headings tell the story: Red River Patriot, Traitor, Martyr, Go-Between, Mystic/Madman. Because Braz has dug up absolutely every imaginative account of Riel and thoroughly analysed it, his conclusions seem to me inarguable. The 'representations of Riel ... are important not so much because of what they tell us about Riel but because of what they reveal about Euro-Canada, the dominant sector of a society that for over a century has been able to create essentially the Riel it wishes - or needs - to see.'

My only cavil with the excellent job that Braz has performed comes out of my conviction that academic criticism often resembles the fabled guns of Second World War Singapore: fixed irrevocably in a single direction. That is, I would benefit from an evaluation of the various discursive treatments of Riel, which strike me as no less ideology-driven and contestable than the novels, plays, and poems which Braz surveys. Hints of the author's yearning to mount such a display of historiographical bias emerge fleetingly: his account of Donald Creighton's strenuous distaste for the the subject of Riel in general, the 'hagiography' of Maggie Siggins's recent Riel biography, and the rather remarkable assessments of Riel that he has garnered from Métis historians. As a casual reader of the historical literature on Riel, I find that it displays no less parti pris than the imaginative treatments of him. 'Which Riel are you writing about?' is a question I have wanted to ask of more than one historian. The many faces of the 'historical' Riel could be a most interesting successor volume to The False Traitor.

Certainly Braz's coverage of Riel as Canada's demon lover, who can be twisted into our very own anti-American, or Aboriginal or madman or sadman or sentimentalized victim, peforms a much-needed function. I can think of no better way, for example, of examining national (and nationalist) mythologies than that of following the path that Braz has set out. This is why False Traitor ought to wind up on a lot of reading lists.

The nature of such informed surveys requires that the writer move on to another work before exhausting every interesting aspect of the one before us. Tour guides never move us back into the bus at quite the right time. Yet without them, we would miss much. Braz's work performs that indispensable and timely function.

'Timely': Chester Brown's acclaimed Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography brings home just how entrenched and serviceable Riel remains in our national mythical pantheon. This big-haired Riel is a prophet and dreamer done to death by unscrupulous schemers and an indifferent god. Did anyone hear me say 'Jesus'? Yet the work is scrupulously referenced, to the point of Brown frequently admitting just where he is fudging the historical record.

Yet as a purported piece of historical writing, Brown's Louis Riel often cheats, in that it attributes a rationalized sequence of intentionality and control to Sir John A. Macdonald that the written record will not support...