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Here is Louis Riel at the Manitoba Legislature facing away towards the Assiniboine River. What is the message? Does he look to the river and the ebb and flow of flow of fortunes of his people of Manitoba? Does the river represent the past or the future or the present? Is symbolic Riel looking to the past. It is certainly magnificent to skate by this statue, but it is a shame so few people get to see from the river.
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Book Review published in Aboriginal Policy Studies
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| Riel a little closer Feb 23 2013 |
Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada-Mythic Discourse in the Post-Colonial State
Robert-Falcon Ouellette’s interview with the author, Jennifer Reid
142-148
aboriginal policy studies, Vol. 2, no. 2, 2013
www.ualberta.ca/nativestudies/aps/
ISSN: 1923-3299
Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada—
Mythic Discourse in the Post-Colonial State
Robert-Falcon Ouellette’s interview with the author, Jennifer Reid
The following is a conversation that took place on the radio show
At the Edge of Canada: Indigenous Research between the host, Dr. Robert-Falcon Ouellette, and Dr. Jennifer Reid. First broadcast on April 17, 2012, the two talk about Reid’s new book Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada—Mythic Discourse in the Post-Colonial State (published by University of Manitoba Press). This interview was broadcast by the UMFM radio station and the podcast is hosted at www.attheedgeofcanada.blogspot.com. The interview was transcribed by Bryan Tordon.
Robert: Welcome to At the Edge of Canada. I’m your host, Dr. Robert-Falcon Ouellette, and today I have with me Dr. Jennifer Reid from the University of Maine. Dr Reid received her PhD in religious studies from the University of Ottawa; she is the author of Myth, Symbol, and Colonial Encounter; Worse than Beasts: An Anatomy of Melancholy; and The Literature of Travel in 17th and 18th Century England, as well as numerous articles in the history of religions. She has edited the volume Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion, and she has just published her new book, called Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada—Mythic Discourse in the Post-Colonial State, published by the University of Manitoba Press: so welcome, Jennifer. Tansai.
Jennifer : Well, thank you Robert.
Robert : I was reading your new book—well, it’s not a new book, in fact it’s an "old" book republished here in Canada for the first time. It’s called Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada—Mythic Discourse in the Post-Colonial State. So why would you reissue a book in 2011 that was published in 2008?
Jennifer : Well, it was published in 2008 by University of New Mexico Press, so I think it probably targeted an American audience. I actually didn’t know it was going to be published again in Canada until I heard from University of Manitoba Press last fall saying that the press had negotiated the Canadian rights and were going to reissue it in Canada which was great. I was really happy.
Robert: Wow, that’s very exciting,
Jennifer: Yes, it’s what I wanted in the first place but I couldn’t get a bite in terms of Canadian publishers, so that’s why I went with the US publisher.
Robert: This book looks at the mythic significance that surrounds Louis Riel and explores the search for Canadian national identity. I was wondering if you could just talk a bit about the premise of the book.
Jennifer: There are a few things going on simultaneously in the book. One of the basic things that I’m interested in is how, in a broader sense, the notion of the nation state doesn’t work very well with post-colonial states. It’s a European construction, and with a nation state you need to have broad geopolitical notions of identity that rest on traditional things like religion, language, or ethnicity. This is what makes a nation, but in post-colonial states we lack those traditional markers for community. We don’t have a single nation in any post-colonial state. That’s the nature of colonialism: it mishmashes everybody together. So I started thinking about how, maybe, identity in this context has to reflect disjunctures and tensions rather than commonalities. Immediately, my long-term interest in Riel just kind of congealed around that. I thought about the constructions of Riel by so many different communities, and the so many different Riels that are out there, and it occurred to me that perhaps he could be one of those linchpins for thinking about identity in terms of disjuncture and tension. So that’s what it came out of.
Robert: Because you also write about the métissage and the creolization of the Canadian state.
Jennifer: Yes, I think that the fundamental thing we have to come to terms with in the modern period is that post-colonial states, the Atlantic world - essentially Africa, North America, South America - these states are incredibly variegated in terms of culture and we already know that we have different ways of talking about that. The US has its melting pot, and we want a mosaic, but we’re all trying to find a way to—of talking about the fact that we don’t have that unity. I like the idea of métissage partly because we get the term from an actual group of people who have lived through these tensions and have created something absolutely new in the New World. And Métis peoples hearken to a process, not of struggling to maintain discreet Old World nationalities, but of creating something very new. I think that’s what we have; we just haven’t created a language to talk about that.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission held a national gathering in British Columbia from the 16 to 22 September 2013. I thought it would be of interest to hear again the full speech and apology given by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on June 11, 2008. There is a feeling that the words of Harper were just that words. Some have started to say these words are without feeling or the actions that are required to minimally or substantially change the situation of First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples in Canada in their relations to other Canadians.
