The focus of this collection of essays is two speeches given by the Métis leader Louis Riel at his trial for high treason. Nearly all Canadians have heard about Riel, and most people with an interest in Canadian history know about the speeches, but few have paused to consider them in detail. They are the last public statements of defence by a man who has an ineradicable place in Canadian history, who combined his personal vision with a national vision, and who left it with us under extraordinary circumstances.
Riel’s speeches interest us partly because of their autobiographical character: they give us a self-portrait of an intelligent, ambitious, charismatic, and conflicted man, the leader of the Métis in the years when they began to assert their identity as a people and make their land claims in the North-West Territories. They also provide a first-person account of events by one of the principal actors who influenced the course of history as it unfolded in the 1870s and 1880s. In these addresses by Riel – meant both for those present in the court and those beyond – we find insights about his constitutional thought, arguments about the basis of the Métis land claims, a record of grievances against the federal government, an outline of a plan for immigration in the North-West, and a personal plea for justice, all themes that are with us still. The tragedy of Riel’s life, and the drama of the speeches, is heightened by his courage in standing very much alone against the power of the Crown – and his own lawyers – both before sentence was passed and after, and in movingly arguing his own case and that of the Métis.
Riel’s trial was and continues to be a source of legal controversy, and he mentioned some of the reasons why in his first speech. However, the focus of this collection of essays is not the trial per se, although it does comprise the narrow and immediate context of the speeches. Riel believed that the troubles that led to the North-West Rebellion in 1885, and subsequently to his trial, could be traced back to the Red River Uprising in 1869–70 (II: 11).1 Accordingly, the first part of this introduction outlines the background of issues and events that weighed heavily with Riel and that found their way into the speeches. The second part of the introduction gives a brief overview of the essays written especially for this volume, essays that aim to interpret, analyze, and explore the themes of Riel’s two addresses, the first to the jury and the second to the court.
After Confederation in 1867, Canada set about arranging to acquire the huge land area known as Rupert’s Land, granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company by the British Crown in 1670. Especially of interest was the area that lay north of the 49th parallel and west of the Great Lakes, known as the North-West Territories. Several reasons motivated the Canadian government to acquire the region, including (1) a need for more agricultural land, (2) the desire to connect with British Columbia on the West Coast, and (3) the pre-emption of any move by the United States to take possession of the land. The possibility of Canada admitting the North-West Territories was mentioned in the British North American Act of 1867.2 Canada bought the land from the Hudson’s Bay Company for £300,000, and Britain transferred administration of the region to Canada on 1 December 1869. In preparation for taking possession of the region, and in anticipation of the arrival of settlers from Ontario, Ottawa sent an advance party to the Red River region to survey the land.
At the time, there were about 11,000 people living in the Red River region, most of them Métis.3 The term “Métis” has been used to designate descendants of French and First Nations people as well as of English and First Nations people. For the most part, however, it is used to refer to those with French and Native parentage.4 This is the community into which Louis Riel had been born in 1844 and the group that he has been thought to primarily represent. These Métis, who had adopted the Roman Catholic religion, spoke Native languages as well as French. They lived by hunting buffalo, transporting goods across the Prairies, and making pemmican for the fur-trading companies. The biggest concentration of Métis was along the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, where they occupied river lots. Although in most cases they had no legal deeds to the land on which they lived, they nevertheless believed they had a right to it.5
The Métis were uneasy about the transfer of the North-West Territories from the Hudson’s Bay Company to Canada. They feared they might lose their landholdings, and they were also wary that they would be swamped by the influx of Protestant settlers who would come to dominate the region politically and culturally. When the surveyors arrived, the Métis resisted (II: 11). This led to a series of events beginning in November 1869 now known as the Red River Uprising – led by the young Louis Riel – and culminating in the entry of a small part of present-day Manitoba into Confederation as a province in the following year (II: 15).
Although the Manitoba Act of 1870 gave control over natural resources to Ottawa, it nevertheless appeared to give the Métis much of what they had wanted, including land, language, education, and religious rights.6 Nevertheless, there was a significant emigration from the Red River area to settlements along the South Saskatchewan River throughout the 1870s. One reason for this was that some Métis desired to continue the traditional way of life of following the buffalo, another was that it took a long time to settle the land claims in Manitoba, and a third was that the Métis were being swamped by the influx of English-speaking Protestant settlers from the east and, as anticipated, found their community was being marginalized.7 Riel maintained that since the Métis no longer felt secure in Manitoba, they had subsequently sold their land for much less than it was worth and had then moved west (II: 26).
There were already Métis living along the Saskatchewan River when their numbers were augmented by the arrival of the Métis immigrants from Red River. Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, many petitions and requests had been sent to Ottawa by different groups in the North-West Territories, but they mostly went unanswered or received the reply that the government would deal with the requests “in due course.” Because communication between the Métis and the Dominion government was poor, many people were left uncertain of their land rights, and accordingly the Métis – both French-speaking and English-speaking, as well as the white settlers8 – were frustrated and grew anxious. This led them to seek out Riel, who was then a school teacher in Montana, and invite him to come to the North-West in order to help with their political cause (I: 13). Consequently, Riel returned to Canada in July 1884 and took up residence among the Métis along the South Saskatchewan River. In December of that year, a petition written by Riel and others was sent to Ottawa asking for, among other things, additional sustenance for the First Nations, land grants for the Métis, and patents for those of them who already occupied land. Whatever steps the federal government may have been taking to address these grievances, it was perceived as being indifferent to the demands of the petitioners,9 and Riel and the Métis formed a provisional government in February 1885, hoping to compel Ottawa to negotiate with the residents of the Saskatchewan region as they had done in Manitoba fifteen years before.10 This time, however, the federal government was better prepared to resist the Métis’s demands. Using the newly constructed Canadian Pacific Railroad, it sent a military force into the West to put down the rebellion. The Métis’s military efforts, guided by the skilled buffalo-hunt leader Gabriel Dumont, were able to hold off the Canadian forces in a number of smaller skirmishes at Duck Lake and Fish Creek in March and April, but without the military support of the English Métis and the First Nations, they were eventually defeated at the Battle of Batoche in May 1885. Riel was soon arrested and taken to Regina, where later that summer he was put on trial for high treason.11
Against his wishes, Riel’s team of lawyers pursued the defence that he was insane at the time of the North-West Rebellion and therefore not criminally responsible for his actions. Riel disowned this defence, realizing that it undermined the legitimacy of his cause (I: 16, 25; II: 4–7). Although he admitted that between the Red River Uprising in 1869–70 and the North-West Rebellion in 1885 he had spent time in asylums in Quebec, he maintained he had been put there without reason (I: 15).
Questions of Riel’s sanity are connected to his avowal that he was a prophet and was given a mission from God. He refers to this explicitly in the first speech (I: 10–14, 34; see also II: 43). In support of the claim that he had a mission, Riel made the further claim that he had prophetic powers (I: 26–8). Based on testimony by others, expert witnesses inferred that Riel must have been insane at the time of the rebellion. Some of the symptoms of Riel’s mental illness (identified as megalomania) were his alleged egotism and strong reaction to being contradicted. Hence there are several references in the speeches accounting for his egotism (I: 6, 18; II: 26) and giving context to the way he behaved when people disagreed with him (I: 16; II: 7, 33, 35).
Although the Red River Uprising was not, on the whole, violent, it did lead to the execution of one of the Orangemen from Ontario (II: 42), an act that incensed Ontarians at the time and continued to plague Riel for the rest of his life. During the negotiations that led to Manitoba’s entry into Confederation, the delegates from Red River believed, as did local clergy and the lieutenant governor of Manitoba, that Riel and his comrades who had taken control of the Red River settlement in the winter of 1869–70 would be pardoned for their actions. But the pardon for Riel never came. In fact, the Ontario government offered a $5,000 reward for the arrest of Riel (II: 31). This meant that he could be prosecuted if he was captured, and it kept him from taking his seat in the House of Commons, a seat to which Manitobans had twice elected him. In lieu of a pardon, the federal government decided it was better to remove Riel from political influence in the North-West and eventually struck a deal whereby he would voluntarily go into exile for at least five years in return for $5,000 (I: 11; II: 23, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 36).12
In addition to having to endure exile, Riel had other grievances against the federal government. He believed that he should have been paid for his contribution in marshalling the Métis to resist the Fenian invasion of Manitoba in 1871 (II: 30), as well as for the two months he spent as leader of the Manitoba government in the period right after the province entered Confederation (II: 28, 34). Furthermore, he believed he was entitled to be reimbursed for being excluded from the Métis land grant (II: 28). In the months leading up to the North-West Rebellion in 1885, there was an attempt by the federal government, through intermediaries, to reach an agreement with Riel that would give him financial compensation on the condition that he abandon his political activity in Saskatchewan. Testimony at the trial13 indicated that a sum of $35,000 was discussed (II: 29, 42), giving the Crown cause to depict Riel as being motivated solely by self-interest in leading the North-West Rebellion.14 Riel did not hide from the accusation that part of his motivation for his actions in the North-West Rebellion was personal and financial, but he insisted that his own interest was always secondary to his pursuit of the welfare of the Métis and others settled in the North-West (I: 6).15
A large part of Riel’s second speech focuses on what he considered the principle for allocating land to the Métis during Canada’s western expansion. The Manitoba Act had set aside 1.4 million acres for the Métis, and since the area of Manitoba at the time it entered Confederation was 9.5 million acres, this was about one-seventh of the land. Riel believed that this ratio was a precedent that should be followed in dividing up the rest of the land in the North-West Territories so that the Métis would have one-seventh of that land too (II: 16, 20). He went further and proposed a plan for how the West could be populated by giving sevenths to other cultural or national groups, coming either from the United States or Europe. Among the groups he mentioned that would join the Métis and First Nations were the Poles, Germans, Italians, Scandinavians, Irish, Belgians, and Jews (II: 17). Riel also intimated that if Canada did not deal with him fairly, several of these nationalities would enter the North-West and, by force, help him with his political program in return for their seventh of the land (II: 17–19).
Riel’s trial was and remains controversial. The 1885 North-West Rebellion took place in a part of Canada that is now the province of Saskatchewan but was then a part of the North-West Territories. The legal system in the territories was not as fully developed as it was in the provinces, being a mixture of surviving Hudson’s Bay Company regulations, British laws valid in Canada, and statutes and laws newly passed by the Dominion government in Ottawa.16 This uncertainty was then and continues to be a source of debate about what Riel should have been charged with and about where his trial should have taken place. It also makes possible the view that the federal government chose legal avenues that would favour its case against Riel.17
The Crown decided to prosecute Riel under the Statute of Treasons passed in the reign of Edward III in 1352 – long before there was a Canada and long before there were Métis. If found guilty under this law, the death penalty was inevitable. Riel was the only one of the insurgents from the North-West Rebellion of 1885 to be charged under this law; other Métis were charged with the lesser crime of felony treason and received relatively short prison sentences. Eight First Nations men were executed for their part in the killing of white settlers at Frog Lake in March 1885, but they had been charged with murder, not treason.18
The question of venue for the trial is a central point of controversy because of its several consequences. Riel had wanted to be tried before the Supreme Court of Canada sitting in Quebec, a legal as well as a political impossibility. The more pressing issue is whether he should have been tried in the province of Manitoba instead of the North-West Territories. A trial in the territories was a disadvantage to Riel since there the law required only a jury of six men (as it turned out, six non-Métis men) and a stipendiary judge (a government-appointed judge who was potentially vulnerable to political interference). If the trial had been held in Manitoba, as seems to have been the original intent, Riel’s chances of acquittal would have been better since there would then have been a twelve-man jury, some of whom would have been French-speaking Métis, and a politically independent judge. After some initial indecision on the government’s part, it was determined that the trial should be held in the North-West Territories, where the alleged offence had occurred. Toward the conclusion of his first speech, Riel reminded the jury of the contentious nature of the trial, remarking both on the judge’s status and on the questionable size of the jury (I: 38).
These are the foremost issues and themes in the two speeches. Most of the first address is given over to reacting to the charges made and testimony given during the trial, whereas the second speech reviews the history of events, both those personal to Riel and those affecting the inhabitants of the North-West Territories. Despite his extraordinary oratorical efforts, Riel was found guilty of high treason and hanged in November 1885.
The authors of the essays in this collection come from a variety of academic backgrounds: philosophy, law, history, political science, argumentation studies, religion, and communication. Accordingly, they approach the study of Riel’s speeches from different perspectives and find different aspects of the speeches to be of interest. Still, each of the essays may be seen as belonging to one of three groups. The first two essays, by Desmond Morton and Nicole O’Byrne respectively, give us valuable historical background for appreciation of the issues in Riel’s speeches. The next four essays, by Thomas Flanagan, Christopher Tindale, myself, and Kerry Sloan, are specifically concerned with the matter, the analysis, and the evaluation of the speeches. The last five essays, by Paul Groarke, Benjamin Authers, Jennifer Reid, Maurice Charland, and Louis Groarke, consider aspects of the speeches from particular vantage points as they take up legal, literary, political, philosophical, and comparative aspects of the texts.
It is largely to George F.G. Stanley and Desmond Morton that we owe the renewed interest in Riel and his career that arose in the second half of the twentieth century. Whereas Stanley’s books The Birth of Western Canada and Louis Riel19 allow us to see Riel-the-rebel in a sympathetic light, Morton’s edition of the trial transcript, The Queen v Louis Riel, makes Riel’s two remarkable speeches, as well as the troubling details of the trial, widely available. In his essay in this volume, Morton revisits his earlier interest in Riel and the military campaign in the North-West, commenting on the question of Riel’s citizenship, his mental state, the fairness of his trial, Ottawa’s strategy, contemporary judgments of Riel, and the impact of his speech. Morton’s perceptive essay provides a broad background for the various themes explored in the subsequent chapters.
O’Byrne’s essay gives us insights into the extent of Riel’s knowledge of British constitutional law. “Responsible government” is referred to at least a half-dozen times in the first speech and twice more in the second one, and the concept of “rights,” or “public liberties,” is invoked about two-dozen times in the second speech. Riel was well aware of the difference between a province and a territory and of the significance of having control over resources. Whereas the original four provinces – Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario – entered Confederation with full control of their natural resources, Manitoba, without similar jurisdiction, was a constitutional anomaly. Not only was this a legal difference, but it also had consequences that encumbered the social and practical growth of Manitoba – a situation Riel wanted to amend and thus prevent in the development of the North-West Territories. O’Byrne’s chapter is especially significant for a reading of Riel’s second speech, his address to the court, wherein he recounts the history of the Red River Uprising and maintains that the troubles in the North-West, fifteen years later, had their genesis in the faults of the “Manitoba treaty.”
In his essay, Flanagan considers why Riel’s speeches were unsuccessful in both their short- and long-term effects. This is curious because, as Flanagan shows, Riel’s background and natural abilities suggest that he could have made much better, more persuasive speeches. One factor that weakened the first speech, thinks Flanagan, is that Riel crowded too many different themes into it. This made it lack coherence and diminished the effect of his best arguments.
Flanagan examines Riel’s speeches in light of the three Aristotelian artistic means of persuasion – ethos, pathos, and logos – and observes a significant quantitative difference in their presence in the two speeches. In the first speech, it is ethos that is the predominant means of persuasion, whereas in the second speech, it is logos. Riel’s attempt to establish his ethos in the first speech is compromised by his tying it too closely to his religious mission, namely his belief that he was the prophet of the New World; and his arguments, or logos, in the second speech, which trace the political failings of the Canadian government and its mistreatment of Riel, are offset by the speaker’s two lengthy explanations of his highly unorthodox immigration plan for the North-West.
In the following chapter, Tindale classifies Riel’s speech to the jury as falling within the genre of defence speeches and, accordingly, as exhibiting some of the characteristics of that genre. He also identifies some of the familiar rhetorical tropes employed by Riel, such as drawing attention to something by saying it will not be mentioned, as well as “turning the tables.” But the rhetorical strategy that interests Tindale the most is that of allusion, in which audience members are influenced by making them aware of something by means of imitation. Riel’s speech, it is proposed, alludes to the speech that Socrates gave in his defence. As documented in Louis Groarke’s chapter, the similarities in the rhetorical situations of Riel and Socrates are indeed extraordinary. Tindale adds to this that the rhetorical strategies pursued by the two speakers have much in common as well.
As mentioned, commentators have observed that Riel’s speeches are poorly organized, which has put in doubt their value as objects of study. However, Tindale finds that Riel responded remarkably well to the exigency of the courtroom in which he found himself. Not only did he give arguments in his own defence, but he also dealt extemporaneously with his lawyers and with testimony given by witnesses. In conclusion, Tindale finds that Riel did “a masterful job of using the materials available to him” and that his speech is one of the best in the genre of defence speeches.
In the next essay, which also expresses a concern about the order of Riel’s first speech, I set out to distinguish the narrative order from the logical order of the argumentation. To describe the narrative order, I divide the speech into nine parts (in addition to the opening and conclusion), each devoted to an issue Riel wanted to address. I suggest an alternative narrative ordering of the same parts that might have made for a more effective speech. The logical order is quite different. It organizes in an evidentiary way the arguments Riel gave, such that it can be seen which arguments are in support of other arguments in relation to the main conclusion Riel was urging, namely that he be acquitted. Three main lines of argument are discerned: one is that Riel’s actions were justified, another is that he was not insane, and a third is that there was something amiss about the legal proceedings. In identifying the components in each of these lines of argumentation, and their relation to each other, a picture of the speech’s overall logical order emerges.
In her essay, Sloan explores the complexities of Riel’s second speech – the speech he gave after the jury had found him guilty of treason. She considers it to be a fugue that interweaves different thematic strands: it integrates the statement of Métis rights with a unique immigration policy; it depicts the troubles and misfortunes of Riel’s life as a micro version of the trials and grievances of the Métis; and, very subtly, it harmonizes Indigenous religious thought with Riel’s political views.
Sloan resists the idea that Riel’s religious and political thought was wholly Western, as some have maintained. She finds antecedents to Riel’s unique views in the Iroquois League of Nations, as well as in the Anishinabek prophecies, which spoke of different cultures having shared responsibility for the land. We are then led to see Riel’s vision for the West as one that combines elements of European and Native ideas. Riel believed that the Métis society should be the model for immigration to the North-West. European nationalities would be invited to come there, and through intermarriage a new and greater nation would arise, organized under Métis principles that allowed for the existence of multiple distinct cultures in one confederation. In this way, the region would eventually become wholly Métis, and the lands lost to the onset of Canadian western expansion would be regained. Sloan sees this as significant in that the Métis, like Riel, had become exiles in their own land, and it was through immigration, organized in accordance with Métis principles, that they could return home since the land from which they had become estranged would now be peopled by them.
In his essay, Paul Groarke takes up the question of identifying the legal grounds of the defence in Riel’s first speech. He observes that the jury’s being all white and all Protestant meant that it would be sympathetic to the government’s case, which, he thinks, led Riel’s lawyers to opt for a defence strategy based on insanity. But Riel wanted to be tried on the substantive issues in the case, and Groarke is of the opinion that Riel’s lawyers failed in their duty to their client in not following his wishes. The lawyers went further: they refused to let Riel speak during the examination of witnesses, thus in effect making his “legal representation contingent on the fact that he did not defend himself.”
When Riel did finally get to speak, his first goal was to persuade the jurors of his sanity, and the second was to defend himself on the merits of the case. Groarke takes Riel’s own legal defence to rest on two arguments. The first was that the North-West was not legally part of Canada because the region had been annexed without the consent of the inhabitants; consequently, there could be no “rebellion,” only a military opposition. The Canadian government’s record of negligence with regard to the region, both materially and politically, reinforces this view. The second part of Riel’s defence was that he and the Métis were acting in self-defence, something they had a right and a duty to do under natural law, or the doctrine of lawful rebellion, a basic principle upon which Riel’s legal defence ultimately should have rested. Groarke concludes that since Riel’s case went to the jury as an insanity defence, his substantive legal arguments have never received due consideration.
In the next essay, Authers focuses on the questions of responsibility and insanity that are so central to Riel’s trial and his speeches. The legal background is the M’Naghten case of 1843, which brought together four concepts: punishment, responsibility, sanity, and the capacity to tell right from wrong. The parties to Riel’s trial were well acquainted with the M’Naghten Rules. The prosecution argued that Riel was sane and therefore responsible, making him eligible for punishment; his defence lawyers tried to show that Riel was insane and therefore not responsible, meaning that he could not be punished for his actions. Authers steps outside the confines of the legal discourse of Riel’s time and considers how the question of responsibility was treated in the popular literature of the day. He looks especially at John Mackie’s The Rising of the Red Man (1902), which depicts Riel not only as a madman but also as an imposter. Based on either characterization, Riel and his cause are depicted as having no legitimacy.
Riel rejected his own lawyers’ insanity defence, according to Authers, because it was inconsistent with the validity of his political actions. To be found insane is to be put outside the community of moral agents; it is humiliating, and puts one’s status as a person in doubt. Accordingly, throughout his speech, Riel tried to gain control of how his mental state was depicted by insisting that he was a responsible agent. He argued that whereas the federal government had been irresponsible in not dealing with the inhabitants of the North-West in a timely and fair manner, Riel had taken on the responsibility of speaking for those people and identifying their rights. In this way, Riel presented himself as a responsible agent, politically and mentally, and depicted the Dominion government as being neither.
In her essay, Reid distinguishes between three levels of debatable issues in Riel’s trial. There were the issues of whether Riel was sane and of whether he should be found guilty of treason; at a higher level, there was the question of whether, within the Canadian legal system at the time, the court at Regina had the authority to try Riel; and at a still higher level, there were philosophical questions concerning the ultimate legitimacy of states. It is this last issue that intrigues Reid and that she explores in Riel’s two speeches to uncover his critique of Canada and his thoughts on the legitimacy of the concept of state sovereignty.
Riel would not accept that the expansion westward should be an extension of only Anglo-Saxon Canada; he made it clear in his second speech that his thinking was that the North-West should be settled by a variety of nationalities that would share the land equitably with the First Nations and the Métis. Furthermore, in his insistence that the dealings with the westerners must accord with the rights of nations, Riel showed that he thought of the people of the North-West as constituting a series of nations, albeit smaller than Canada; nevertheless, the rights of small nations are as valid as those of bigger, more powerful nations. Not only the rights of nations, but also, in Riel’s view, the British Constitution and laws, prescribed a standard of justice by which Canada had to abide in dealing with the North-West. Thus Riel held that there were restrictions, over and above Canadian law, that could regulate the disagreements between Canada and the inhabitants of the North-West, restrictions that Canada had failed to heed. Finally, Riel did not think that a state could be self-legitimizing, as Canada purports to be, but that its legitimacy must come from without. It was at this point that Riel’s religious thought came into play since, as he argued, only God could start a nation. By bringing these aspects of Riel’s thought into focus, Reid gives us a view of Riel’s unique geopolitical thought and provides us with a compelling hypothesis to explain his second speech, his address to the court.
Charland’s essay explores Riel’s trial and speeches using two sets of concepts from Jean-François Lyotard. The first set is that of litige and différend. A litige is a kind of disagreement where both parties share a common idiom and where there is a recognized adjudicator for resolving differences; in a différend, in contrast, the regulation of the conflict is in the language of the accuser, so the other party is divested of the means to argue and thus becomes a victim. The second set of concepts is the polis and the pagus. The polis is the city or the state where law and the canons of reason are recognized; the pagus is the region outside the polis, where there is no determinable audience and where law is yet to be made.
Charland’s analysis sees Riel’s situation in 1885 vis-à-vis Canada as being that of a différend: the court in Regina could not recognize his arguments inside the framework of a trial for high treason. Since Riel’s position was that he was neither insane nor a traitor, to overcome the impossible différend situation, he had to construct a larger framework in which he could be heard, one in which the competing interests of Canada and the people of the North-West could both have standing. Thus Charland interprets Riel as taking a rhetorical stance that had him speaking to the jury from the pagus. He had to persuade the jury to see things his way, to take his perspective, and, so to speak, to join him in the region where the law of the polis itself could be judged. For him to do this, his character had to be sufficiently credible, and it is to this factor that the ultimate evaluation of Riel’s speech can be traced. Charland’s analysis of the address to the jury reveals the near impossibility of Riel’s rhetorical situation and gives us a vivid analysis of the factors that circumscribed it.
The final essay in this collection, by Louis Groarke, undertakes to make a comparison of the trials, character, and speeches of Socrates and Louis Riel, using this as yet another way to gain a fresh perspective on Riel. Among many of the similarities between the two men is that both were on trial for crimes against the state, that both made long speeches, and that both were martyrs for their cause. Both had the same strong and unshakeable conviction that they were right, both justified their activities by claiming to be on missions, and both followed signs that they took to come from gods or God. There are many other points of similarity between Socrates and Riel that Groarke draws to our attention, but there are also important differences between them. One difference is that Socrates was primarily a philosopher, engaged in a contemplative life, whereas Riel was more of a man of action, being a political organizer and leader. Moreover, Socrates was an insider, a man whose Athenian citizenship was never in doubt and who preferred death to exile; in contrast, Riel was an outsider who had suffered exile and who struggled to find a place for his people and himself inside Canada. Groarke’s comparison of Socrates and Riel is both a way of paying homage to Riel and, by drawing out similarities and differences, a way of showing us the extraordinary difficulty of his situation.
In subjecting Riel’s two trial addresses to analysis, comparison, and criticism, it is our intent to pay tribute to their enduring relevance and importance. The different disciplinary perspectives that are brought to bear bring into focus different aspects of the speeches and the issues that surround them. In this way, the essays complement each other, and when combined, they provide us with a broader and deeper understanding and appreciation of Riel’s speeches, which in turn allows us to realize more fully his abilities, his character, and his vision.
1 References to Riel’s speeches are to paragraphs as they are numbered in the version of the texts printed in this volume. For example, “(II: 11)” indicates the second speech, paragraph 11. Inserted in the text of the speeches are the page numbers of the trial transcript as reprinted in Desmond Morton, ed., The Queen v Louis Riel: Canada’s Greatest State Trial (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974).
2 Article 146.
3 There were about 6,000 French-speaking Métis, 4,000 English Métis (or “Native English”), and 1,000 Canadians in Red River in 1869. See D.N. Sprague, Canada and the Métis, 1869–1985 (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988), 45.
4 On the origin of the Métis, see J.M. Bumsted, Louis Riel v. Canada: The Making of a Rebel (Winnipeg: Great Plains, 2001), ch. 1; and Bob Beal and Rod Macleod, Prairie Fire: The North-West Rebellion (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1984), ch. 1. Interestingly, Riel himself does not use the term “Métis” in either of the speeches studied in this volume. Instead, he refers to his people as “half-breeds,” thereby distinguishing them from Aboriginal people and European settlers. The term “Métis” does not occur in either of the Bills of Rights associated with the Red River Uprising (December 1869 and February 1970) or in the St Laurent petition of December 1884, but it is used in the Revolutionary Bill of Rights issued from Batoche in March 1885.
5 See Sprague, Canada and the Métis, chs 2–4; and Thomas Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), ch. 2.
6 See the Manitoba Act of 1870, articles 22 (ss. 1, 2), 23, 31, and 32.
7 See Bumsted, Louis Riel v. Canada, ch. 11; George F.G. Stanley, The Birth of Western Canada: A History of the Riel Rebellions (1936; reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960), ch. 12; and Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion, ch. 1.
8 Stanley, Birth of Western Canada, ch. 12.
9 Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion, 108.
10 Ibid., ch. 4.
11 See Beal and Macleod, Prairie Fire, ch. 14; and Maggie Siggins, Riel: A Life of Revolution (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994), ch. 18.
12 On the amnesty question, see Bumsted, Louis Riel v. Canada, chs 8–10.
13 Morton, ed., Queen v Louis Riel, 194–5.
14 Ibid., 74–5.
15 For a discussion of the indemnity issue, see Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion, ch. 5; and Siggins, Riel, 360–2.
16 See, for example, the Temporary Government of Rupert’s Land Act of 1869, article 5.
17 For contrasting views of the fairness of the trial, see Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion, ch. 6; and J.M. Bumsted, “Another Look at the Riel Trial for Treason,” in Canadian State Trials III: Political Trials and Security Measures, 1840–1914, ed. Barry Wright and Susan Binnie, 411–50 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
18 See Blair Stonechild and Bill Waiser, Loyal till Death: Indians and the North-West Rebellion (Markham, on: Fifth House, 1997), 221.
19 Stanley, Birth of Western Canada; and George F.G. Stanley, Louis Riel (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1963).