Final Thoughts

  Louis Riel was a real man, of course. He was Métis, a political leader, an exile, a self-proclaimed prophet, likely mad, and ultimately, a body at the end of the rope of the Canadian state.

  The past seven installments (Whose Riel? — 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7) have been drawn from my own research into the words and deeds of Riel and his cohorts, as well as those of the political and public actors of English and French Canada. A key premise of my reading of Louis Riel is that he was at the time of his life and death and is still today, the subject of multiple and parallel interpretations, none of which excludes any other as they all intertwine to weave the complicated web of Canadian political culture. To some he was fighting for the cause of French culture in Canada, to others he was a traitor and threat to the foundation and future of Canada, and to many important people he was a powerful voice for the cause of those who first occupied the land that would become Canada. To this day this debate goes on: Freedom fighter or traitor? In whose name and against whom?

  The lessons of the story of Louis Riel are many, some specific to Canada and others to our more general effort to understand the relationship between the past and present as we seek to define and move towards a better future. As we witness the debate about Riel lean more towards seeing him as a hero - a Canadian hero interestingly enough - rather than a traitor Riel's story is a lesson in the myth-making of any nation's history. A man who fought against and was pursued by the Canadian government - and ultimately executed by that government - is now deemed by many Canadians a positive representative of their history. This is about the myth of the Canadian nation's history, but it is just as much if not more about the myth of the Canadian present.

  Who we are is not predetermined by the past. To paraphrase William Faulkner, the past is not really in the past, rather it is very much part of the present. It may well be said that the past does not shape the present but rather the reverse: the present shapes the past. So, the larger lesson is about our relationship to the past, and how we - however this we is defined - seek to re-shape the past to fit a present that we want validated, given historical ground so to speak; which will thus authorize the effort to mold and move towards some envisioned future. Louis Riel's story is one such story.

  In Canadian history and history generally, one can find many more of these stories. It is our task in the present not only to do the work necessary to tell these stories as best we can, but also to read these stories with an eye to both what they say about the past but just as importantly - if not more - what they say about the present: who we are, where we want to go, and how we plan to get there.

  Those are three fundamental questions that any political community poses to itself. We fail as a political community not when we come up with the wrong answers to these questions, but rather when we stop recognizing that we must keep asking them.