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Reprinted from Prairie Books Now, Winter 1994, p. 3

Knowing Riel: Discovering the man inside the historical icon
By Kelly Jo Burke

Maggie Siggins is free, finally, after having been locked in her office with Louis Riel for two and a half years. The book is finally out, and the poetry, the journal entries, the events everyone thinks they know, and the daily bits of life no one thought worth examining have been read, meticulously noted, compared, contrasted and shaped into a 451-page biography.

You’d think they would have had enough of each other. But Maggie wants to be wih Louis Riel. And she thinks he might come to her yet. She is headed for a book launch at St. Boniface Cathedral in Winnipeg, where Riel’s body lies. “I fully expect he’s going to arrive there. I’ll finally see him.”

Siggins did not expect to become so close to this man who died November 15, 1885, hanging by a rope placed firmly around his neck by Sir John A. Macdonald’s hangman. She was asked to write the biography by HarperCollins. They wanted a woman to examine Riel, a western woman who knew about and understood the Metis of the region. Based on Siggins’s work in Revenge of the Land, for which she won the Governor-General’s award for non-fiction, she was the one to do it. But Siggins was not so sure.

“I wasn’t sure I’d be able to connect with him. I thought he’d be too much of an enigma.” Instead she found herself becoming more and more impressed with the spiritual leader of the Metis rebellion. “I never once found anything that was duplicitous or mean in him. He was an extremely honourable man, I tell you, among men who were not so honourable.”

As her research progressed she found herself working more and more with Riel’s diaries as her her primary source. Of all the accounts and analyses, both primary and scholarly, she found Riel’s own impressions the most reliable “because I never found a lie in him.” His poetry in particular, largely ignored by academics, became her road into the mind of this complex man.

Her relationship with her subject became more and more personal, and she believes this will set her biography apart from other work on Riel. “You have to get in – be empathetic – to do this kind of personal biography. And I think it’s what people really want to read.”

Siggins talks about Riels’ first love, the extremely available daughter of a white Montreal labourer. The father forbade her to marry the handsome young man – headed for a career in law after a decade of education in the seminary – out of bigotry. One of Riel’s great-grandmothers was Indian. That was all it took.

“I think that’s terribly important – I think that shaped his whole view – he could have stayed in Montreal and gotten married, and become a successful politician, and everything would have been different.” But, Siggins says, no other biographer has been even mildly interested in how such personal events led to Riel’s evolution as a revolutionary.

That Riel was overwhelmingly influenced by his mother, that both she and his sister had the same ecstatic religious visions that formed the basis of the hybrid Christian/Aboriginal spiritual faith Riel tried to found, that he was an adoring and involved father, a somewhat passionless husband, a sudden and profoundly caring friend, that his sole occasion of documented mental collapse was preceded by years of pursuit and assassination attempts – all these things barely merit footnotes in academic studies of Riel’s political impact. Yet they are what Siggins believes is critical to understanding the man.

Siggins also paid close attention to Riel’s social history. The Metis people Riel came to lead were not oppressed and downtrodden masses. They were proud, successful people who were not just socially acceptable, but critical to the economies of the communities. They were astonished as well as outraged by Ottawa’s determination to give vast tracts of their land over to speculators. Riel, having grown up privileged, extremely well educated, anticipating a bourgeois life, personified that astonishment and outrage.

The emphasis on the personal in the historical is common in the kind of revisionist historical writing that has come from women in the last few decades. Siggins says she has no doubt that the book is entirely different because she is a woman. She has chosen to treat Riel subjectively, in a fair, journalistic sense. She has focused on cause, not effect, and on a holistic view of the geography and the time, rather than specific, linear events. The book reads like clean, dramatic letters from one of Riel’s friends, observing his influences and decisions with a critical but loving eye. This kind of approach, she agrees, is womanly.

“I even have references to the man’s body all through the book,” she laughs. “His manly chest, his piercing brown eyes, it’s almost sexual. . . . Well he was very handsome, if a bit of a prude.” She says that if you’re a woman writing about a man intimately, you’re bound to be affected by him in all says, including sexually, “which is just as it should be.”

Having formed such a close relationship with her subject, Siggins draws the conclusion, with some anger and pain, that he was ultimately a political prisoner murdered by the Canadian state, particularly by Sir John A. Macdonald. Macdonald ordered Riel hung after Riel’s jury urged clemency, and over an international protest and campaign to save Riel from the rope.

“I’ll tell you, I think it was because Riel outsmarted him during the Manitoba rebellion, and Riel was a vigorous, strong and very honourable man, more so than Sir John A., certainly. . . . I think [Macdonald] did him in because he was tired of this vigorous young man bugging him.” And because the land speculators who had been inconvenienced by the rebellious Metis in general and Riel in particular, many of them in Macdonald’s cabinet, were howling for his neck.

“It’s funny. I didn’t know this book would become the third in a trilogy, but it is, because Riel, Revenge of the Land and A Canadian Tragedy (which became the television mini-series Love and Hate) are all about the same things – land rights, murder and the changing perception of the west.”

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