And as a legacy --has a bar in downtown Ottawa that's a few steps away from where he was assassinated named after him.
Some might argue that's quite the POSITIVE legacy.
Professor Zyzzyva's Canadian History 101
- Thread starter Zyzzyva
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Some might argue that's quite the POSITIVE legacy.
*I mention this here because I don't think he'll ever be mentioned in lecture; the other almost assuredly will be. Bonus points for nonCanadians who can name the who, where, when and why of the second assassination.
[Lecture mode off]
I recognised the name upon looking it up but as I had to prompt my memory I don't think I ought to name the name.
Passepartout are you from quebec by any chance? if not I excuse myself as you are likely not to get the reference that make your username hillarious name to me
Some might argue that's quite the POSITIVE legacy.
Well--considering the reputation he had among his peers, HE certainly would have been honoured
1. No
2. There is a character in Around the World in 80 Days named Passepartout, who was the reason I chose this name.
3. There is a children's show in Quebec with this name or something like it, and it is not the reason I chose the name. It took me a second to think of this instead of trying to connect it with the assassinated guy I didn't name.
heh I was thinking of the children show
, but yea I thought about around the world in 80 daysWait, what about Belize, or the Virgin Islands...or do you exclude Central America and the Caribbean from your definition of North America? And please Continue! I'm sure I'll need to know this for the Citizenship Exam!
Me too. Then I took a full year Canadian history course in my third year of university. That's when I finally understood how all the themes that I had learned in high school fit together and that's when it became interesting, because I finally learned the story of Canada.
I would also say that if you want to learn more about Canadian history, The Penguin History of Canada is worth a read, as it starts with the First Nations circa 10,000 years ago and goes all the way up to the turn of the millenium. If you want to explore Canadian history in more depth after that, then I can't recomment Pierre Berton strongly enough. A good place to start is with The National Dream, The Last Spike and Vimy. These events occupy the same kind of places in Canadian history that the Panama Canal, the Moon Landings and Omaha Beach occupy in American history.
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If anyone wants an interesting read on Canadian Confederation (as boring as it sounds), they should read 1867: How the Fathers Made a Dealby Christopher Moore. It details the entire process quite well.
IV
Native Policy and the Red River Rebellion
Native Policy and the Red River Rebellion
Despite MacDonald’s best efforts, however, Canadian nationalism was still pretty limited at best. Most Canadian sentiment was pro-British. Canadians might –and generally did – want a larger part in the Empire, but they wanted to stay a part of the Empire. British culture was generally seen as one of the pinnacles of human progress, and Canadians were for the most part happy to stay with it. The exceptions to this tended to be rather minor: first, there was pro-North American sentiment, which tended to blend pretty quickly pro-Americanism and then straight-up annexationism. The other was an as yet very nascent Canadian nationalism, which tended (logically, if somewhat ironically) to spring from Quebec. The prototypical example of this was Henri Bourassa, a French-Canadian newspaper editor, fervently opposed to imperialism of all stripes, British and American, and supported what he saw as a bicultural Canada.
Most of these various nationalisms, it almost goes without saying, were quite racist. The British imperialists tended to believe the superiority of the British Empire sprang from the superiority of British blood, and the Americans and Canadians differed only in how they widened this (to “Anglos and Germanics” for the former, and “Anglos and French” for the latter). The hierarchy of races, if vaguely defined and rarely stated outright, was nevertheless widely held. It ran from the Anglo-Saxons, Germans and Latins (depending on who you were talking to) at the top, through the other two top groups, Slavs, Asians, Blacks, and then Native Americans. As the west opened up, this was the order of priority for the Canadian government: the land was granted first to native-born English Canadians, then to British and (Anglo) Americans. It would take almost until the end of the century before the net started seriously being cast wider. At the bottom of the ladder were the Native Americans. They fell sufficiently far down that the government not only saw them as ineligible to be settlers, but as actual obstacles to the settlement of the west. With an attitude like this, the first clash could not be long in coming.
In fact it came immediately. With the purchase of the NWT, Canada had acquired a couple of million square kilometers of “uninhabited” wilderness, plus one genuine settlement: the Red River Colony. Red River had initially been founded as a settlement for the largely Scottish employees of the HBC, but by 1869 had more or less lost that character and also became the centre of Métis society. The Métis, biracial descendants of the French and Natives, had their own society and culture, a mix of Quebecois and Plains Indian, and by 1869 outnumbered the much more insular Anglophones of Red River by about 9,000 to 3,000. But, when Red River became part of Canada, it did not take long for the government’s disdain for the Métis to become clear.
The first arm of the Canadian government to arrive were the surveyors, in mid-1869, plotting out Sections for the farmers soon to follow into the northwest. The surveyors laid out the new plots along square grid lines, a pattern common to the American and Canadian prairies. The Métis, by contrast, farm in long, narrow plots perpendicular to the rivers, similar to the Quebecois. Unlike in Quebec, however, the surveyors showed little sign of respect for the Métis settlement patterns – or, indeed, even their rights to the land they had settled – and the Métis quickly realized they had to take matters into their own hands. They set up a Métis National Committee to try and convince the government of the soundness of their claims; for their secretary, they elected Louis Riel, an intelligent, articulate young Métis who had just returned from seminary education in Quebec. It would prove a fateful choice, for him, the Métis, and the Northwest.
The Canadian government took no notice of this; they were busy getting their territorial government out there. This consisted of the new Lieutenant Governor of the new NWT, William McDougall. Because of the utter impassability of the terrain between southern Ontario and the Red River, McDougall was forced to take a train through the United States around the southern side of the Great Lakes. As he tried to cross the border back into Canada, however, he was met by a party of Métis to turn him back. Things in Red River were spiraling out of control; the more hot-headed and anti-Métis Anglos in the colony had formed a “Canadian Party”, made a brief attempt to defeat the National Committee by force of arms, and had been put down and arrested. The Métis, in an attempt to put some order back into the situation, declared a Provisional Government in December to replace McDougall’s non-government, and directly negotiate with Ottawa.
The terms the Métis wanted were reasonable but the Canadian Party – even imprisoned in Fort Garry at the centre of Red River –were not. A mass escape in January 1870 was followed by a second attempt to overthrow the Provisional government, again put down. Riel, now in charge of the Provisional Government, felt that an example needed to be made. The most virulent anti-Métis agitator, an Orangeman (protestant Irish) named Thomas Scott, was tried for disobedience to the government of the NWT, found guilty, and shot. What sympathy the Métis had had in Anglophone Canada suddenly evaporated.
But the situation was rapidly slipping out of the Canadian government’s hands, too. Popular sentiment in Quebec was firmly pro-Métis, in the rest of Canada firmly anti-, and the Americans (who since McDougall’s failed trip to Red River the preceding fall had become acutely aware that Fort Garry was a lot closer to Chicago than it was to Ottawa) were licking their chops. The last was a faintly absurd idea – Riel’s government, such as it was, was firmly pro-British, just also pro-Métis – but the more things deteriorated the more likely American intervention, of the kind Canada couldn’t even hope to stop, became. So in the spring of 1870, MacDonald negotiated with Riel. This took place through the only remotely reliable Anglophone they had left in the colony: the former HBC administrator, a man named Donald Smith, about whom more will also be heard later. The Canadian government agreed to most of Riel’s demands, most importantly recognizing the Métis land claims and creating a new province, Manitoba, around Red River, in which the Métis, for the time being, would have a dominant voice through their numbers.
But the MacDonald government was also going to make sure this never happened again, and to that end Colonel Garnet Wolesley was now moving west with 1000 men to make sure things stayed orderly. A second purpose was to show Canada’s strength in the area and keep the Americans out; for that reason, the expedition portaged the whole way from Thunder Bay to Fort Garry instead of crossing into the US and back. A third reason, perhaps, was to make some examples a la Thomas Scott; if this wasn’t actually in Wolesley’s orders, he had enough Orangemen with him that something was sure to happen. In the event, Riel escaped into the US just ahead of Wolesley’s men.
The “Red River Rebellion”, as this oddly bloodless revolution was called, was now over. Over the next decade, immigrants, mostly Anglophone, would flood Manitoba, taking over the Provincial government and marginalizing the Métis. Eventually most of the Métis ended up leaving, a bit at a time, for points further north and west, where the prairies were still free and filled with buffalo. Their story was not quite over yet, however; nor, however trapped in exile in Montana he might be, was Louis Riel’s.
As the government slowly brought Manitoba back to relative normal, it was also negotiating with the aboriginals further out in the northwest. The Red River Rebellion hadn’t exactly improved their opinion of the natives, but it had made them more aware of the trouble they could cause, as did the Indian Wars now burning brightly across the border. Between 1871 and 1877 a series of seven treaties – the unimaginatively named treaties 1-7 – were signed by the government and various native groups, and in 1876 the Indian Act was passed by parliament. Between them, they set out Indian policy for the remainder of the century and indeed a good chunk of the next. Native land was transferred to the government, to do with as it saw fit (ie, give to settlers). The natives were put on reservations on which the government will give them some agricultural and cash assistance, to get them settled in on a new agricultural existence. The unspoken but wildly-assumed goal of this was assimilation; to this end, residential schools were set up and native culture – already severely uprooted –was left to wither. Finally, all aboriginals were to become wards of the state – in essence, severely limited noncitizens. They pay no taxes, but have few to no legal rights: they cannot vote, or, for that matter, buy alcohol.
Given all this, why did the native peoples of the NWT sign the treaties so quickly? The answer, as often happens in Canada, lies to the south. By the 1870s, the US government and the US Army were well into a campaign of Indian relocation that often amounted to ethnic cleansing and occasionally flirted with genocide. If the Indian Wars worried the Canadian government they absolutely terrified the natives of the Canadian northwest. Better to take the bad terms being offered now than the terrible ones that would be enforced at the end of an Indian War – and, however small the Canadian Army might be, compared to that of the US, the outcome of a war between the Natives and Canada could have only one outcome.
So, on that grim note, the Aboriginals signed on the line, and the northwest was opened to settlement. And the peace was kept, for the next decade or so. But the Canadian government had not seen the last of Riel – and, despite the Pacific Scandal of 1873-4, Riel had not seen the last of John A MacDonald.
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I agree.
Like Zed--I've been getting increasingly more and more annoyed with all the 'Canada joins the US during the ARW' threads that were so poorly researched that they might as well be ASB stuff.
Exactly. My ideal goal (I didn't think about actually doing the experiment until late last night, when it was a bit too late for a control thread) is to post a thread that starts
and get back, eg,
rather than the three "What?"s, two "Huh?"s, a "
" and an entropic thread death that I would have gotten two days ago.Very interesting.
I would dispute, though, the idea that Canada (i.e. Quebec) becoming part of the USA during the American Revolution is totally ASB. It's not likely, but I was under the impression that ASB means "essentially impossible", which it most definitely is not.
I would dispute, though, the idea that Canada (i.e. Quebec) becoming part of the USA during the American Revolution is totally ASB. It's not likely, but I was under the impression that ASB means "essentially impossible", which it most definitely is not.
Thande
Donor
By conquest, perhaps; Zed is disputing the misconception that the rebels would be welcomed with flowers (or whatever that Iraq stereotype thing was).
That and the whole 'accepting it without making lots of noise/annoyance' either before or afterwards. A lot of the threads in question seem to be '...and they accept the idea with open arms in 1776...' and then that's it.