Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State by Jennifer Reid (review)

The title of Jennifer Reid’s Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State captures the diverse foci of a text that can be read on two interconnected but different levels. On the first, cultural level, Reid explores the mythic status of Confederation-era Metis leader Louis Riel in Canadian historical memory. Using a mode of analysis similar to that of Sherrill Grace (On the Art of Being Canadian), Reid looks at how the image of Riel has been mobilized in Canadian culture to signify a broad range of political perspectives. Reid believes that this diversity is not a product of mystification but developed out of Riel’s subject position as a man who stood in between a variety of different Canadian political and cultural fault lines: centre and periphery, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, French and English. This series of disjunctures allows his ideas and actions to speak to different regional, ethnic, and linguistic constituencies.

On a second level, however, representation has over time disguised Riel’s project for Canada. Reid argues that looked at empirically – through his words and actions – Riel is important because he articulated a vision of a post-colonial Canadian state that was something other than a nation-state. In other words, Riel is important because he articulated a vision of Canada as a different type of geopolitical order that could encompass the fractures and divisions (ethnic, linguistic, regional) that have made Canada such a problematic nation-state. Canadians should, Reid clearly feels, embrace this alternative vision as the basis of a just project of Canada.

This is where my problems with this text begin. I have no particular problems with Riel’s vision of Canada, as Reid explains it. Indeed, I suspect that most readers will find it both appealing and aspirational. The question is this: has Canada actually reached this stage of development? On this point, Reid is not clear. To ask this question differently: Reid argues that Canada is a post-colonial state. But is this true? Is there not a very important disjuncture between what we might want Canada to be and what it actually is? The current federal government’s efforts to mould Canadian historical memory seem, in fact, more consistent with the homogenizing model of the nation-state that both Reid and Riel dismissed as an inappropriate (indeed, oppressive) political model for Canada. Even more problematic is Reid’s focus on religion – metaphysics – as necessary for Riel’s alternative vision. Reid is, rightly, one of a new series of scholars who take Riel’s religious views seriously, as opposed to dismissing them as a sign of his insanity. Again, I have no problems with this part of her argument, but it also begs an important question: if metaphysics is necessary to articulate an alternative vision of Canada, how effectively can that vision be realized when it runs against the hard realities of political economy and state power? Riel’s life and death suggest that it does not do well. In the battle between religion and state power, state power tends to win.

Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada is a good book, the full importance of which requires more time and space to discuss. For example, Reid’s assessment of the importance of the 1885 Northwest Rebellion for the crystallization of modern state political, communicative, technological, and military power is more than insightful. It brings a new approach to the old subject of confederation and the consolidation of the modern state in Canada. What it means is that the project of building a post-colonial state in Canada is contested and far from complete. Reid charts an appealing alternative vision for Canada. The problem with Canada, however, is that it rarely lives up to such visions. Riel’s death illustrates this.