Sesquicentennial
Changes sought in how schools teach history
Rethinking how Canadian history is taught.
High school students across the country could be forgiven for thinking Louis Riel’s main role in Canadian history is as the subject of dry essay questions.
A narrow interpretation of the Métis leader’s legacy is that he was either a hero or a villain for defending indigenous rights through armed rebellion in 1869. The conclusion in many Grade 10 history classes seems to be that he was simultaneously right and wrong for resisting government annexation of his people’s homeland.
But what if students were taught that Riel and the Métis were among the founders of independent Canada? That’s what Métis National Council president Clement Chartier would like to see happen in school curricula for the 150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017.
“You can’t just take a snapshot and say ‘1867 and nothing more.’ There were events leading up to that moment and events that took place after it,” Chartier told Postmedia News. “You have to take into account the fact that the Métis nation was instrumental in negotiating Manitoba’s entry into Canada (in 1870).”
Chartier says the Métis are at the very core of what it means to be Canadian. The Métis language, Michif, is a blend of French, Cree, Ojibwa and Assiniboine. Their ancestral lands stretch from Manitoba to Alberta and the Northwest Territories. And the Métis people, who are of mixed European and aboriginal descent, were among the most prolific fur traders of colonial North America, establishing settlements and trade posts deep within Canada’s wilderness.
Most importantly, Chartier said, the Métis-led Red River Resistance of 1869 resulted in the creation of Canada’s first prairie province. Because the Métis resisted having their land annexed — and, in so doing, formed a provisional government that negotiated Manitoba’s entry into Canada — the government was able to secure the completion of its most crucial nation-building project: the Intercontinental Railroad.
“(Manitoba) was basically a Michif speaking population, so, really, (Canada has) three founding languages if you want to go that narrowly,” Chartier said. “English, French and Michif. Of course there were aboriginal languages, but the Métis Nation played a peculiar and particular role (in Confederation).”
Despite the Métis’ historic importance within Canada, the federal government almost immediately embarked on a campaign to assimilate and suppress them following the rebellion and subsequent creation of Manitoba.
The 1879 Manitoba Act guaranteed a land grant of 1.4 million acres to the Métis but less than half of the territory was ceded.
For more than a century, the Métis were marginalized from white society while living without the treaty rights guaranteed to most of Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples. Among the most controversial rights withheld from them was hunting and fishing, a staple of the Métis economy for centuries.
“(In 1961) when I was 16, I remember going to the movie theatre and Aboriginal People could only sit in one section,” Chartier said.
“Indian people were being beaten up and it was really, I had never seen anything like that … Whether you were Métis or Indian it didn’t matter, you weren’t white. So, I think because of that, a lot of the Aboriginal People kept to themselves. In that sense it was to the benefit of the Métis.”
The experience of growing up isolated led Chartier to an interest in politics, and, in 1973, he became the executive director of the Native Youth Association of Canada.
As a constitutional lawyer, Chartier helped successfully argue for Métis hunting rights before the Supreme Court in the 1980s and 1990s.
Chartier says the courtroom victories provided his people with much-needed momentum.
The federal government recognized the 400,000 Métis as one of Canada’s three Aboriginal Peoples in 1989. In December 2011, the Supreme Court began deliberating on whether the government reneged on the land allotments outlined in the Manitoba Act.
For Canada’s 150th birthday, some politicians and activists have demanded that the Conservatives pardon Louis Riel, who was convicted of high treason and hanged in 1885. However, that doesn’t interest Chartier.
“A pardon implies that Riel did something wrong and he’s being forgiven,” he said. “We believe that he did no wrong. We want to get the things that Riel fought and died for: land base and self-government … Our preference is, as one of our Métis professors says, ‘let the stain remain.’ It’s not a stain on us, it’s a stain on Canada and how they treated us.”