A history of resistance
“We were to recognize Quebec as a distinct society, whereas we as Aboriginal people were completely left out.” ELIJAH HARPER
When first elected to the Manitoba legislature in 1981, Elijah Harper represented the province’s northern riding of Rupertsland — a significant name in Canadian history, in a part of the country central to ideas of Indigenous resistance.
In the 17th century, Rupert’s Land was the name given a sprawling tract in the Hudson Bay Lowlands by King Charles II, in honour of his cousin Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
In 1869, just after Confederation, the Hudson’s Bay Co. (HBC) agreed to sell Rupert’s Land — which included all of modern Manitoba, parts of Saskatchewan, Alberta, Nunavut and northern Ontario and Quebec — to the new Dominion of Canada.
When federal agents were dispatched to the new territory, Louis Riel organized the Métis National Committee to protect his people’s interests.
The committee halted Canadian land surveys and mounted roadblocks to pre- vent the newly appointed lieutenantgovernor from entering the Red River Settlement. It seized Upper Fort Garry from the HBC and established itself under Riel’s leadership as government of the settlement.
That December, the committee issued its “Declaration of the People of Rupert’s Land and the North West,” rejecting Canadian authority to govern it.
The declaration opened 15 years of turbulence and violence, during which anxious Métis and Indigenous plains tribes — impoverished as bison herds dwindled, lands were ceded and treaties were dishonoured — became victims of Canada’s push west.
The hostility culminated in the NorthWest Rebellion of 1885, after which Louis Riel (now honoured in downtown Winnipeg with a statue as a founder of the province) and other Indigenous leaders were executed.
Author John Ralston Saul has identified that event as one of the most significant in Canadian history, with ramifications that rippled through ensuing generations and continue, remaining unresolved, in contemporary times.
“We’d be wrong to think of 1885 as a rebellion by a small group of Métis,” Ralston Saul wrote in his 2014 book A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada.
“It was a major crisis in how Canadians would think of themselves and, therefore, how they would act,” he wrote.
“The stronger party acted as if physical strength were moral virtue and therefore justified any sort of action.
“The reason Canadian debates keep coming back to the tragedies of 1885 is that they represent the clearest warning shot we have of how not to act.”
His handling of that crisis was, Ralston Saul concluded, the single greatest failure of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister.
“To this day, our national weaknesses are exposed along the fault lines Macdonald allowed to open by acting without precaution, without generosity and without attempting to imagine the other.”