Signs of the times

Afew years ago, I found myself walking along the north bank of the Thames River in London, England. As the afternoon waned, I skirted along the edge of St. James’s Park before ducking down a side street to rest my aching feet. Leaning against a white stone building, I noticed a round blue plaque attached to its facade. It read, “Sir Isaac Newton 1642–1727 Lived Here.”

I was momentarily floored; I was standing at the site of the former home of the man who had discovered gravity! Somehow, amid touristically gawking at the London Eye and the other attractions, I had forgotten about the rich history that was literally engraved into the walls and streets around me. It was a great reminder that the paths we tread today were blazed by countless people who came before us — and that someday we, too, may be only distant memories to future generations.

I returned to Winnipeg determined not to step blindly through the history of my adopted city. Soon, I began noticing historic sites everywhere, such as at Portage Avenue, where a plaque honoured railway baron Donald Smith, and on Main Street, where all that remained of Upper Fort Garry — a former nexus of the Hudson’s Bay Company fur trade — was a lone limestone gate, the rest of the fort having been torn down in 1882.

In recent years, a provincial park has been established at the Upper Fort Garry site. It is a fitting tribute to a

location that played a central role in the Métis resistance that erupted in the Red River Settlement 150 years ago.

In the fall of 1869, an “uprising” led by Métis leader Louis Riel refused to allow the Canadian government simply to annex the colony following the transfer of Rupert’s Land from the HBC to Canada. It was at Upper Fort Garry that Riel’s forces declared their provisional government, where a Métis firing squad executed anti-resistance agitator Thomas Scott, and where the Red River resisters voted to join Canada as the province of Manitoba.

The Red River Resistance sent shockwaves far beyond the Forks, where the Red and Assiniboine rivers meet. Branded a rebellion by the Canadian government, the conflict threw the young country into turmoil, straining the tenuous bonds that held together French and English societies in the late-nineteenth century. It also marked another moment of dispute between Indigenous peoples and the settlers who sought to supplant them.

In this issue, historian Philippe Mailhot examines the Red River resistance through the eyes of a francophone clergyman who played a key role in helping to achieve provincehood for Manitoba. Today, Father Noël-Joseph Ritchot lacks Riel’s celebrity, but it’s fair to say the resistance might have failed without his timely and crucial assistance.

Elsewhere in this issue, we remember the legacy of the legal case that confirmed that women were indeed “persons” under British law; we recall a time when pacifists in Ontario invited conflict into their community as a way of testing their tenets of nonviolence; and we remember a political leadership convention in 1919 that forever changed the way politics is practised in Canada.