Louis Riel was a political reformer who was driven by religious visions. In this sense he was not unique in the modern period. The story of the Americas is rife with figures like him, leaders who materialized out of oppressed nations and cultures, carrying visions of other kinds of modernities that were grounded in their profound experiences of the sacred. Here we might think, for instance, of Wovoka, whose visionary experiences were the catalyst for the Ghost Dance, a movement of reform that began first among the Paiute in 1889. Wovoka had been instructed by God to introduce a dance among his people that would recreate the colonial world into which they had been thrust by the westward expansion of the United States. Or again, we might think of the Brazilian reformer Antônio Conselheiro, who spent twenty years preaching against slavery and the newly formed republic in peasant communities in northeastern Brazil. He and thousands of disenfranchised followers created a community in the 1890s where together they waited for a millennium that would bring prosperity. Like the Métis resisters in the Canadian North-West, they were crushed by military forces.
In one sense, Riel, Wovoka, Conselheiro, and countless others experienced nineteenth-century colonialism as a religious problem that required a religious resolution. Pre-existing frameworks of the sacred – mainstream Catholicism, for instance, or traditional tribal knowledge – were challenged significantly as these figures struggled to account for a changed and chaotic world; and in each instance visionary religious experiences re-established a kind of order in which the lives of their communities, albeit briefly, promised to acquire new kinds of broad cultural significance. What has come to interest me in recent years is the political content of these visions and the social movements they brought into being. More specifically, with respect to Riel, I find myself with an abiding interest in the way that Riel’s experience was undeniably linked to state creation. I explored this issue from the perspective of the creation of the Canadian state in a book I published a few years ago, tracing Riel’s impact on both the geopolitical development of Confederation-era Canada and the more ontological development of Canadian mythologies of place and collective identity.1 Since that time, I have found it difficult to turn my attention away from Riel, who continues to fascinate me. Although it is obvious that colonialism was experienced as a local and religious problem for those who were forced to undergo it, in Riel’s discourses we can also hear an analysis of the rise of modern nation-states more broadly – a critique of modernity with profoundly religious implications.
Of course, contemporary scholars have linked the emergence of modern states with an Enlightenment secularism that rejected earlier constructions of geopolitical identity grounded in religious frameworks. Benedict Anderson’s now famous argument concerning “imagined” political identities is a case in point. The European idea of the nation-state, he has argued, became viable only when medieval assumptions about language, time, and political authority – and their relationships with the transcendent authority of God – were rejected.2 In Riel’s discourses, however – and especially in the two speeches he delivered in the Regina courtroom as his trial for high treason was coming to a close – we can discern the outlines of a very different understanding of the rise of the nation-state, an understanding of modernity that is decidedly ontological.
A few years ago, a writer for Maclean’s Magazine described the 1885 rebellion in the Saskatchewan Valley in the following way: “[It] began as a western protest movement, it grew into an act of political defiance and soon became a matter of cultural survival. And as Riel grew increasingly delusional, it took on the characteristics of a religious movement. Riel was going to create a New Jerusalem on the plains: the Métis were the chosen people and he would be their ‘infallible pontiff.’ With God on their side, how could they lose?”3 The cynicism we hear in this passage is not unique. Although most Canadians have generally come to regard Riel sympathetically, it remains that his religious life and visions still seem enigmatic to most of us. As Joseph Boyden has put it, Riel’s mind was situated “somewhere between” sanity and insanity.4 Generally, Riel’s political actions have been viewed as expressions of the former, whereas his religious life has been regarded to varying degrees as a byproduct of the latter. This is not to say that his religious life has been thoroughly stigmatized. Among scholars, for instance, there has been some notable work that has treated it with sensitivity, interpreting Riel’s religious life within the context of modern nativistic movements. They have thus delivered Riel’s religious inspiration from the denigrating constraints of psychosis and repositioned it as part of a broader movement among oppressed peoples to maintain a sense of cultural integrity in the face of colonial domination. Notable in this respect has been the work of Thomas Flanagan.5 This has resulted in recent years in a less derogatory interpretation of Riel’s religious life and has created an opening, I think, for new considerations of his visions and experiences. That is where my interest primarily lies, particularly as regards the religious significance of Riel’s understanding of the limits and possibilities of the modern nation-state as he presented it in his final speeches to the jury and the court in Regina.
The colonial period initiated an unprecedented global shift in the nature of human community in our world. That change was experienced in the first instance by non-Europeans as a problem of sheer survival. The slave trade and westward and southern expansion resulted in large-scale displacements of peoples, destruction of cultures, and marginalization of communities from centres of political and economic power – a chronicle of injustice that haunts the West to this day. The story of obvious resistance in this context is well known: slave revolts and Aboriginal resistance movements marked the period from its outset and have reverberated into the present in various forms. At one level, these movements have been about land, wealth, and cultural self-determination. When we think of the Métis resistances of 1869– 70 and 1885, these were obviously central issues. As the boundary line between Canada and the Métis moved westward, land and economic survival became crucial concerns. In this respect, we see a community that was forced to retreat as much as possible from a protracting physical boundary. This is a phenomenon that we have witnessed repeatedly throughout the history of the Americas.
But this is only one perspective on the problem of boundary lines. Although marginalization was an unmistakable result – and the equally inescapable legacy – of colonial expansion, the theoretical frameworks on which it was enacted have not been as inviolable as dominant geopolitical forces have perceived them to be. In the midst of tangible pressure from expanding states, oppressed societies have also consistently engaged in critical analyses of the historical, cultural, and ethical foundations of those states. The ostensibly stable assumptions that underlie dominant visions of modernity have constituted another kind of boundary that voices like Riel’s have called into question. They are, from the perspective of those who have found themselves on the underbelly of Western modernity, contested sites of legitimate cultural meaning.
Critiques fostered by this vantage point have rarely, if ever, posed a serious threat to reigning ideologies. As Frederick Cooper has noted in Colonialism in Question, the ability to constructively advance interpretations “and to alter definitions of what is a debatable issue and what is not” is always imbalanced in this context.6 Consequently, there has generally been no necessity for dominant sectors of society to pay attention to these definitions. Yet as we confront an emerging twenty-first-century world that is at once increasingly global and increasingly fragmented, it may well be a good time to stop and begin to listen more closely to some of these alternate perceptions of modernity. We have the colonial period to thank for many of the global economies and ethnic nationalisms that are coming to define our world. They point to what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the “fragmentary histories of human belonging that never constitute a one or a whole”;7 they point to the way that the history of the modern West has been “heterotemporal.” I have borrowed the concept of “heterotemporality” from David Schoenbrun because I think it is a particularly apt way of speaking about the simultaneous and divergent understandings of time and space that emerged from European and non-European cultures during the colonial and postcolonial periods.8 In some sense, we have not all been living in precisely the same temporal and spatial frame. Moreover, voices emerging from other times and spaces of modernity may speak to us more profoundly than we have imagined. I believe that Riel’s speeches at the end of his trial present us with a heterotemporal Canada within which certain prevailing assumptions about the modern period are challenged in significant ways.
So what are the particular “debatable issues” that came to the fore in Riel’s trial? At a basic level, of course, they revolved around questions related to the trial itself. The question of Riel’s innocence or guilt was primary among these as the foundation for the trial. But also at stake was the question of Riel’s sanity, something on which the jury and Riel himself would ultimately agree. And then there was the question of an appropriate sentence for a man found guilty of high treason in a case presided over by a magistrate committed to meting out the maximum penalty despite the jury’s recommendation for leniency. These are issues that are, to varying degrees, adjudicated in any criminal trial: culpability, fitness to stand trial, and the parameters for handing down a sentence. There was, however, a second order of debatable issues related directly to the trial that were also more specific to the situation involving Riel. Was it appropriate for the Canadian government, for instance, to move the location of the trial from Winnipeg (where a jury could well have included persons who were French Catholics) to Regina (where the jury was comprised solely of English Protestants)? Could these persons have been construed in any way to constitute a jury of Riel’s peers? Or again, given the magnitude of the trial and the events that led to it, was it appropriate for that jury to have been comprised of six, rather than twelve, jurors? Should a part-time magistrate who was an Orangeman have been permitted to preside over the proceedings that transpired in a makeshift courtroom? Should a naturalized United States citizen even have been convicted by a Canadian court of a crime established in a 500-year-old obsolete statute of British law? These are questions related directly to the authority of the court, and they point to a third order of debatable issues that Riel confronted in his two speeches and that ideologically underlay the authority of the expanding Canadian state: issues that related to the legitimacy of the state and to its political and legal apparatus. I believe that because of a general unease with their religious character, his reflections in these discourses on the broad issue of geopolitical legitimacy in the modern period have not been fully appreciated. This chapter is an attempt, in a preliminary way, to do that.
“Who starts the nations?”9 To my mind this is the religious question that undergirds the two speeches on which this volume is focused. Religion is an integral part of these speeches, mapping out both personal and public spaces that rest at the heart of Riel’s understanding of himself, his later life’s work, and the evolving Canadian state. The personal aspects of Riel’s religious life are conspicuous in these two discourses, and I want to talk a little about these. But my principal interest in this chapter revolves around the way that his very individual experience of the sacred spurred him on to a more collective vision that was a constructive – and religious – critique of nineteenth-century modes of state creation as they were playing themselves out in the Canadian context.
Riel’s religious life was rich. When we read these speeches, we find a portrait of a man with an intense visionary life, a profound sense of the reality and power of God, and a belief in his own divinely ordained mission. During the last years of his life, he regularly found himself visited by the Holy Spirit, who provided him with direction and encouragement. His diaries from his period of incarceration, for instance, are riddled with references to these kinds of visionary experiences.10 On 31 July 1885, he also described one of these encounters to the jury, an experience he had the night before in his jail cell. “The spirit who guides and assists me and consoles me,” he said, had indicated that someone would come to his assistance in the courtroom the following day.11 In his subsequent address to the court on 1 August, he spoke of the spirit having provided him with a kind of precognition of events that had transpired during the final confrontation of the Métis with Canadian forces.12 These visionary experiences reinforced his distinct sense of having been blessed by God13 and set apart as “the prophet of the new world,” in the image of King David.14
Although this comparatively self-referential mode of religious life is significant in itself, I find it all the more intriguing when it is placed in the context of the more public facets of Riel’s vision. Here we find religion functioning as the foundation for a critique of the colonial enterprise as it was being played out in the context of Canadian expansion. We should make no mistake: Riel had no problem with the basic idea of a Canadian state. He had hoped, he reminded the court, that the “agitation in the North-West Territories would have been constitutional,” and he felt certain that it would have been so if he and his compatriots had not been attacked by military forces. Even as he faced conviction for high treason, he spoke well of Canada, saying that he still hoped that he would one day “have an opportunity of being acknowledged as a leader of good in this great country.”15 Canada per se was not the problem. What he had a distinct issue with, however, was the formation of a state that systematized a disequilibrium of power, privileging one ethnic group within an obviously multi-ethnic New World territory. In other words, he did not believe that the geopolitical space that was to be the Canadian state should be politically and culturally dominated by an Anglo-Canadian elite.
This was not simply a Métis problem but also one that affected everyone living in the North-West, and Riel had spent much of his public life advocating for the rights of a variety of communities whom he believed were being variously marginalized by central Canadian expansionist forces. He told the court,
When I came into the North-West in July, the first of July, 1884, I found the Indians suffering. I found the half-breeds eating the rotten pork of the Hudson Bay Company and getting sick and weak every day. Although a half-breed, and having no pretension to help the whites, I also paid attention to them. I saw they were deprived of responsible government, I saw that they were deprived of their public liberties … I have directed my attention to help the Indians, to help the half-breeds and to help the whites to the best of my ability.16
Although Riel was unmistakably moved to action by a consciousness of these inequalities, it was the idea of ethnic dominance that most troubled him. He saw the New World as a metamorphic ethnic space in which the concept of discreet nationalities typical of the Old World was no longer operative or appropriate. He regarded himself as a prime example of this process of transformation, and he explained in court, “My ancestors were among those that came from Scandinavia and the British Isles, 1,000 years ago. Some of them went to Limerick and were called Reilson, and then they crossed into Canada and they were called Riel; so in me there is Scandinavian, and well rooted; there is the Irish, and there is the French, and there is some Indian blood.”17
Riel believed that in a world defined by this kind of ethnic transformation, a single ethnic group could not claim ascendance. Ontario, he told the court in Regina, had no special status: it was merely “our sister colony in the east.”18 His vision of the emerging Canadian state was one of a confederation of new nations based on transformed ethnicities. The number of such communities varied, but what Riel ultimately foresaw were new nationalities that would all in some fashion be indigenized and become part of a new hyphenated (i.e., “German-Indian”) world – whether Italians, Irish, Bavarians, and Poles; Belgians, Scandinavians, Germans, and Jews; or First Nations, Métis, English, and French.19 Aboriginality figured prominently in these new configurations as an underlying structure of identity, the only authentically North American foundation, perhaps, on which Riel could imagine a legitimate modern society in Canada. Regarding himself as a “co-proprietor of the soil with the Indians,” he envisioned a geopolitical community that was to be a “whole Cree world”20 divided evenly among its constitutive ethnic parts. The question of fairness was at the forefront of his thinking. Reflecting back on the agreement that was reached with the Canadian government in the wake of the 1869–70 resistance at Red River, for instance, he emphasized during his trial this necessity for an equitable division of territory: “when the English population has had a full and reasonable share of this land, other nationalities, with whom we are in sympathy, should have also their share of it. When we gave the lands in Manitoba for one-seventh, we did not explain, we gave it to the Canadian Government, but in giving it to the Canadian Government … we did not give it only for the Anglo-Saxon race.”21
The question of how the incipient Canadian state was to be structured was not simply a political and ethnic issue for Riel. It was also fundamentally religious. As he told the court a number of times, he had a mission.22 In the first instance, that mission undoubtedly involved a reformation of the Catholic Church, and he held fast to the words of a spiritual director who told him that God had singled him out for special work: “Father Jean Baptiste [Primeau], the priest of Worcester, who was my director of conscience, said to me: ‘Riel, God has put an object into your hands, the cause of the triumph of religion in the world, take care, you will succeed when most believe you have lost.’” Riel added, “I have got those words in my heart.”23 What this meant was that he bore the responsibility for creating a New World Catholic Church, the nature of which he described in detail elsewhere in his writing,24 a responsibility that he believed to be based on the fact that God had revealed more “to the New World than He had judged appropriate to reveal to the Old.”25 This new reformed church was also enmeshed in his understanding of the radical difference of the New World, which in this case required diffusing Old World antipathies between Catholicism and Protestantism: “If I have any influence in the new world it is to help in that way … then my children’s children will shake hands with the protestants of the new world in a friendly manner. I do not wish these evils which exist in Europe to be continued.”26 It is worth noting here that during his trial he freely employed the concept of Protestantism in a very new way, pointing again to a break with the Old World as well as a politicization of the idea in the Canadian context. Reflecting on a witness’s statement that Riel had called a Catholic priest a Protestant, he explained “that we were protesting against the Canadian Government, and that he was protesting against us, and that we were two protestants in our different ways.”27 This statement provides as good an entrée as any into the geopolitical significance of Riel’s religious mission. It was not simply about the church. The cause of religion in the world involved a broader mandate for reforming the developing Canadian polity, and it was to this mandate that he referred when he said in court that his mission was aimed at “practical results.”28 He was called “to do something which, at least in the North-West, nobody has done yet.”29 His understanding of himself as the prophet of the New World involved a mission to unseat central Canada’s expansionist plans.
Although Riel’s mission was undoubtedly religious, I suggest that he understood Canadian expansion to be an issue that was also fundamentally religious. His mission was obviously based on his own sense of a divine call to struggle for change. But equally, the nature of the issues that he believed were at stake in the conflict marked out another kind of religious meaning. Implicit in his struggle was a critique of the universalizing structure of authority undergirding Anglo-Canadian colonialism. The ideology of modern state creation, which Canadian expansionist interests shared, sprang from the new political communities that emerged from the European Enlightenment. These states rejected earlier modes of claiming territory and imagining geopolitical identity on religious grounds. In place of the universal authority of religion, modern states relied on the notion of the sovereignty of the state itself for legitimacy. Nineteenth-century imperialist interests were well served by the ideology of state sovereignty. Indigenous and creolized societies, however, were not. Colonial expansion based on the universalizing principle of state sovereignty entailed the marginalization of nations and cultures occupying territories earmarked for absorption by the new colonial states. Riel recognized that these states had simply replaced one universalizing structure (God) with another (state sovereignty), and he regarded the new ideology as inherently flawed. The state’s assumption that it could extend itself with impunity was having devastating consequences for other communities like the Métis.30
Riel’s concern was with a state apparatus that appeared to be answerable only to itself with respect to its formation. As a good Catholic, Riel knew that an entity cannot create itself. For him, that would have been a power reserved for God. His mission was consequently to ground the emerging Canadian state in a structure of authority that was not subject to the comparatively transitory whims of an elite and powerful class of nineteenth-century colonials. In this respect, he approached the problem from two different angles that were apparent in his trial speeches. The first was an appeal to the authority of the international community, particularly Great Britain. With respect to the international community, he appealed three times in his second speech to the Law of Nations (to which he referred as “the right of nations”).31 The Law of Nations refers to a tradition of international law involving rights and obligations presumed to exist among distinct nations or nation-states. Riel clearly regarded this as a mode of authority that exceeded that of an individual state. When speaking of the treatment in Ottawa of Red River emissaries in 1870, for instance, he claimed that it was counter to the Law of Nations: “Our delegates had been invited three times, how were they received in Canada? They were arrested – to show exactly what is the right of nations.”32 More incisively perhaps, later on in this address he made it clear that he regarded the Red River community as a distinct nation deserving of rights articulated by international law:
there were two societies who treated together; one was small, but in its smallness it had its rights. The other was great, but by its greatness it had no greater rights than the rights of the small, because the rights is the same for everyone, and when they began by treating the leaders of the small community as bandits, as outlaws, leaving them without protection, they disorganized that community. The right of nations wanted that the treaty of Manitoba should be fulfilled towards the little community of Red River in the same condition that they were when they were treated. That is the right of nations.33
Turning to the authority of Britain, Riel focused specifically on the British concepts of liberty and impartial justice, the British Constitution, and Britain’s role in world history. Speaking to the presiding magistrate, Hugh Richardson, Riel called the trial to account for its failure to uphold the tradition of British justice: “you have acted according to your duty, and while it is, in our view, against the guarantees of liberty, I trust the Providence of God will bring out good of what you have done conscientiously.” He similarly told the court, “When I see British people sitting in the court to try me, remembering that the English people are proud of that word ‘fair-play,’ I am confident that I will be blessed by God and by man also.” He spoke also of the British Constitution and the idea of civilization, suggesting that on the basis of these, the existing government in the North-West was unacceptable: “British civilization … rules to-day the world, and the British constitution has defined such government as this is which rules the North-West Territories as irresponsible government.”34 For Riel, both the Constitution and British civilization were destined for broader historical purpose than merely the benefit of England. The Constitution was “an institution which has been perfected for the nations of the world,” and although it had failed to do so, civilization had the capacity to improve the lives of Aboriginal peoples (including the Métis). On this point, Riel chastised the “gentlemen” seated in the courtroom: “If I give offence, I do not speak to insult. Yes, you are the pioneers of civilization, the whites are the pioneers of civilization, but they bring among the Indians demoralization.”35
The second perspective on the problem of the origin of nations that Riel expressed in the court was noticeably more transcendent in character and provided a context within which perhaps to situate conventions of international law and to definitely locate the tradition of British justice, the British Constitution, and the concept of British civilization. This framework was the foundation of both his vision and his critique, and it revolved around the reality of God as a defining and world-creating power. With respect to the Law of Nations (jus gentium), we might recall that its European foundations stem back to the Roman Empire and were picked up by later Christian theologians and jurists. The first European treatises on the subject were written by Francisco de Vitoria (who held a chair in theology at the University of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century). Vitoria, greatly influenced by Aquinas, argued that issues in international law had to be adjudicated in terms of natural law based on Christian anthropology.36 Having attended seminary, Riel may well have been acquainted with this tradition, and his appeal to the Law of Nations could have been a means of calling for not only a universal, but also a transcendent, mode of ordering human relationships in modern states, particularly the Canadian state.
Although I am admittedly speculating with respect to the Law of Nations, we can be more certain of Riel’s belief in the transcendent nature of the British legal and political traditions. Regardless of what the British Empire had achieved, Riel believed that it was ultimately subject to God and a part of God’s plan for humanity. He told the court,
As among the nations of Europe 2,000 years ago, the Roman people were the leading race, and were teaching the other nations good government; that is my opinion of the Anglo-Saxon race. I am not insane enough to [regret] the great glory of the Anglo-Saxon race God has given to that race, and when God gives something to somebody it is for a good purpose, and because God gave glory to England, it is because He wanted the Anglo-Saxon race to work for His own glory, and I suppose it is not finished yet.37
Riel had no doubt that God was also at work in the Canadian situation. He had a God-given mission, after all, to resist colonial expansion and to work for the creation of a different kind of state defined by an alliance of a group of transformed ethnic communities. He had no doubt that God was deeply implicated in his struggle. He told the jury that God had been present in the struggle for the recognition of rights in the North-West: “there was a Providence in the battles of the Saskatchewan.” Likewise, God was present with him in the courtroom where he was working to assure his acquittal: God, he said, was “in this box with me, and He is on the side of my lawyers, even with the honorable court, the Crown and the jury, to help me, and to prove by the extraordinary help that there is a Providence today in my trial.” Furthermore, he believed that God would reward the members of the jury who were determining his fate if they returned a verdict of not guilty, and that their reward would be given to them not only in this life but also in the next: “What you will do in justice to me, in justice to my family, in justice to my friends, in justice to the North-West, will be rendered a hundred times to you in this world, and to use a sacred expression, life everlasting in the other.”38
Riel took the idea of a Canadian confederation very seriously. In some ways, perhaps he took it more seriously than did the political apparatus in Ottawa against which he struggled. A confederation is a configuration in which independent states, or nations, are united for limited purposes (e.g., defence and foreign relations) and in which the federal government does not hold the balance of power. Settlers in the North-West were not part of such an arrangement. Lacking responsible government, their territory was, as the Regina Leader’s editor, Nicholas Flood Davin, put it early in 1885, “disestablished and disendowed, and outside the pall of the Constitution.”39 The Métis were not part of such a configuration as they were forced progressively westward after 1870 in search of land, rapidly disappearing buffalo, and employment to sustain themselves. And the region’s First Nations were certainly not part of such an arrangement, as they found themselves coerced into treaties, removed from their lands, and sinking into destitution and starvation. Riel’s advocacy for the rights of all these communities betrayed a belief not only in the need for responsible government but also in the legitimacy of the Métis and First Nations as nations. His appeal to the Law of Nations during his remarks to the court underscored this belief and, together with his support for an expanding Canadian state, indicated that his conception of a confederation may well have been closer to the spirit of such a geopolitical arrangement than that of its architects and promoters in the Canadian context.
What was lacking in the expansion of the Canadian state was, first, a sense of regard for the integrity of the nations that Canada intended to incorporate into itself. “When they have crowded their country,” he told the court after he had been found guilty of treason, “because they had no room to stay any more at home, it does not give them the right to come and take the share of all tribes besides them … We are not birds. We have to walk on the ground.”40 Riel’s belief in the need for a basic level of regard for the rights of other peoples was perhaps the reason why he stressed again and again at his trial his own respect for those who opposed him: the police, the “honorable” court and jury, the presiding magistrate, and the Crown attorneys.41 But also absent from Canada’s expansionist aspirations was a mitigating presence of another authority aside from the state itself. He acknowledged the value of a Canadian state, but he wanted it to be founded on something other than the vagaries of elite ambitions:
In England, in France, the French and the English have lands, the first was in England, they were the owners of the soil and they transmitted to generations. Now, by the soil they have had their start as a nation. Who starts the nations? The very one who creates them, God. God is the master of the universe, our planet is his land, and the nation and the tribes are members of His family, and as a good father, he gives a portion of his lands to that nation, to that tribe, to everyone, that is his heritage, that is his share of the inheritance, of the people, or nation or tribe. Now, here is a nation strong as it may be, it has its inheritance from God.42
Riel’s confrontation with Canada was not simply a political issue. His religiously inspired vision of the state confronted an opposing force that had assumed for itself the power to create its world – an undertaking that in any place or time outside the modern West would be reserved for the gods.
Riel did not reside in the same modernity as those who opposed him. In the time and space he inhabited, nation-states owed their existence to the will of something other than themselves, and their unilateral assumption of god-like powers of world creation was illogical and humanly destructive. By the time he delivered his two trial speeches in July 1885, he had, to quote Marshal Sahlins, integrated his “experience of the world system in[to] something that is logically and ontologically more inclusive: [his] own system of the world.”43 Inherent in Riel’s religious mission was a vision of the modern state that was fundamentally critical of the notion of state sovereignty as the source of political legitimacy. He knew first hand that a state that regarded itself as its own ultimate authority was a potentially destructive geopolitical entity.
This chapter began with the suggestion that the notion of heterotemporality opens a space in which to reconsider fundamental assumptions about the word we inhabit. Riel’s trial speeches provide us with one such temporal frame. Emerging out of this frame was a critique of the sacrosanct ideology of state sovereignty. Fundamental to the notion of sovereignty is the principle of autonomy from external authority; another state’s intervention in the affairs of one’s own state, for instance, is unacceptable. Yet we know that this principle has been largely rhetorical in our time, not only with respect to the rights of Indigenous and other ethnic nations but also at the level of the state: it has too often been claimed by states with the power to deny it to those with less political or military leverage. And again and again we have seen it subverted – for example, by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and by the United States in Nicaragua and Granada, as well as more recently in Iraq.44 Riel knew that the ideology of state sovereignty was a precarious foundation for geopolitical identity in a global community. Ultimate authority borne of an entity itself is no authority at all.
1 Jennifer Reid, Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State (2008; reprint, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011).
2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 36. See also Brian C.J. Singer, Society, Theory, and the French Revolution: Studies in the Revolutionary Imaginary (London: Macmillan, 1986), 103–4.
3 Will Ferguson, “Ghosts of a Nation: The Louis Riel Rebellion Still Haunts us Today,” Maclean’s, 17 November 2003, 128, 133.
4 Boyden is cited in “Was Louis Riel Insane?” Maclean’s, 4 October 2010, 76.
5 See, for instance, Thomas Flanagan, Louis ‘David’ Riel: ‘Prophet of the New World,’ 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).
6 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 149.
7 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 255.
8 David L. Schoenbrun, “Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing between the Great Lakes of East Africa,” American Historical Review 111 (December 2006), 1403–39, at 1410.
9 Louis Riel, “Address to the Court,” 1 August 1885 (hereafter “Court”), in The Collected Writings of Louis Riel/Les ecrits complets de Louis Riel, vol. 3, 1884–1885, ed. Thomas Flanagan (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1985), 547.
10 Thomas Flanagan, ed., The Diaries of Louis Riel (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1976).
11 Louis Riel, “Address to the Jury,” 31 July 1885 (hereafter “Jury”), in The Collected Writings of Louis Riel/Les ecrits complets de Louis Riel, vol. 3, 1884–1885, ed. Thomas Flanagan (Edmonton: University of Albert Press, 1985), 532.
12 Riel, “Court,” 559.
13 “Bishop Bourget wrote again and said: ‘Be ye blessed by God and man and take patience in your evils.’ Am I not taking patience? Will I be blessed by man as I have been by God?” See Riel, “Jury,” 527.
14 “I say humbly, through the grace of God, I believe I am the prophet of the new world.” See Riel, “Jury,” 534; see also Riel, “Court,” 541, 559.
15 Riel, “Jury,” 529, 533.
16 Ibid., 524–5.
17 Riel, “Court,” 557.
18 Ibid., 548.
19 Ibid., 545, 555–7.
20 Ibid., 547, 556.
21 Ibid., 555.
22 See for instance, Riel, “Jury,” 526, 531.
23 Ibid., 527.
24 See Flanagan, Louis ‘David’ Riel; and Flanagan, ed., Diaries, 80.
25 Flanagan Louis ‘David’ Riel, 27.
26 Riel, “Jury,” 531.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Riel, “Court,” 541.
30 Elsewhere, Riel spoke of his view of new revolutionary states as undermining the authority of the Catholic Church: “Revolutionary ideas are trying to make Rome into a city of tradesmen and merchants. A majority of governments has contributed to despoiling the Papacy of its possessions. Their machinations have gone to the extreme of daring to rob the successor of St. Peter of his royal patrimony and give it to Umberto, who purposely remains in Rome to mock Catholicism by making the scepter he has stolen from us shine before our eyes.” Cited in Thomas Flanagan, “Louis Riel’s Religious Beliefs: A Letter to Bishop Taché,” Saskatchewan History 27, no. 1 (1974): 21.
31 See Riel, “Court,” 543, 550.
32 Ibid., 543.
33 Ibid., 549–50. On the treatment of the delegation from Red River, see 543.
34 Riel, “Jury,” 534–5, 527.
35 Riel, “Court,” 555, 548; Riel, “Jury,” 530, 539n27.
36 See Thomas D. Williams, “Francisco de Vitoria and the Pre-Hobbesian Roots of Natural Rights Theory,” Alpha Omega 7, no. 1 (2004): 47–59.
37 Riel, “Court,” 555.
38 Riel, “Jury,” 526, 536.
39 Cited in J.M. Bumsted, Louis Riel v. Canada: The Making of a Rebel (Winnipeg: Great Plains, 2001), 246–7.
40 Riel, “Court,” 547.
41 Riel, “Jury,” 529, 524, 526, 534–5.
42 Riel, “Court,” 547.
43 Marshal Sahlins, Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 417.
44 Norihisa Yamashita, “Empire or Post-Empire: The Concept of ‘Long Century’ and the Consequences of Globalization,” in Emerging Meso-Areas in the Former Socialist Countries: Histories Revived or Improvised?, ed. Kimitaka Matsuzato, 335–48 (Sapporo, Japan: Hokkaido University, 2005), 343.