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Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes 51 Volume 54 • Number

Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes 51 Volume 54 • Number 1 • Winter 2020 | Volume 54 • numéro 1 • hiver 2020 Consecrating Canada’s Icon: The Riel Project, Usable Heroes, and Competing Nationalisms ALBERT BRAZ Abstract: The publication of The Collected Writings of Louis Riel / Les écrits complets de Louis Riel in 1985 was a remarkable event for several reasons. To begin with, it is the first collected works devoted not only to any figure in Canadian history but to someone who had been hanged for treason. In addition, Riel is not generally considered a major writer. So given the controversy still associated with the nineteenth-century Métis politician, poet, and mystic, the editors decided to eschew contextual anal ysis and limit their commentary to bibliographical matters. This is a strategy they justified by arguing that it would enable the collection to incorporate only the views of Riel as he articulated them in his considerable body of poetry and prose. Paradoxically, though, most contemporary reclamations of Riel rely little on his words as gathered in The Collected Writings. Perhaps because his texts often conflict with the dominant images of him in popular discourse, the collection appears to have become can onized. Like the monument that it is, it is largely unread—or, at the least, unacknowledged. Keywords: Louis Riel, the Riel Project, the Western Canadiana Publications Project, George F.G. Stanley, Thomas Flanagan, nationalism, grantship Résumé : La publication de The Collected Writings of Louis Riel / Les écrits complets de Louis Riel en 1985 a été un événement remarquable, et ce, pour de nombreuses raisons. Premièrement, il s’agit de la première col lection d’écrits consacrée non seulement à une personne faisant partie de l’histoire du Canada, mais aussi une personne qui a été pendue pour trahison. De plus, Riel n’est pas généralement considéré comme étant un écrivain important. Ainsi, compte tenu de la controverse toujours liée au politicien, poète et mystique métis du XIXe siècle, les directeurs du livre ont décidé de laisser tomber une analyse contextuelle et de limiter leurs commentaires aux sujets bibliographiques. Ils ont justifié cette stratégie en soutenant que ça permettrait à la collection d’incorporer seulement les perspectives de Riel, telles qu’il les a articulées dans son corpus considérable de poésie et de prose. Paradoxalement, la plupart des réhabilitations contempo raines de Riel se basent peu sur ses paroles trouvées dans Les écrits complets. Peut-être parce que ses textes sont souvent en conflit avec les images dominantes de lui dans les discours publics, la collection semble avoir été canonisée. Comme le monument qu’elle est, elle est très peu lue, ou, à tout le moins, reconnue. Mots clés : Louis Riel, le projet Riel, le projet Western Canadiana Publications, George F.G. Stanley, Thomas Flanagan, nationalisme, l’octroi de subventions “We [Canadians] are a métis civilization.” —John Ralston Saul (2009, 3) A country’s nationalization of a former enemy is an inherently paradoxical act. Since there is bound to be historical evidence of the particular country being defended by people who 52 Albert Br az battled the individual now deemed a patriot, as well as of that individual opposing the country, the process of consecration usually entails much forgetting, willful or otherwise. However, in 1985, Canada chose a radically different strategy to mark the centenary of the death of Louis Riel, whom it had hanged for treason. Instead of attempting to mask some of the more problematic statements made by the Métis politician, poet, and mystic, it de cided to gather and disseminate all of his extant writings. The result was the publication of a five-volume critical edition called The Collected Writings of Louis Riel / Les écrits complets de Louis Riel,1 under the general editorship of the prominent historian and Riel biographer George F.G. Stanley. The singularity of the event is reflected in the fact that, at the time, no such honour had been bestowed on any (other) Canadian public figure, including Riel’s nemesis, Canada’s founding prime minister, John A. Macdonald. Given that Riel is not generally considered a major writer, there was always suspicion that the project was a political enterprise. Still, there was hope that the assembling of the whole of his textual production might finally unravel the enigma that is Riel. Neither issue, though, has been conclusively resolved. By tracing and analyzing the evolution of the publication of Riel’s poetry and prose, including its reception, this article attempts to answer why someone so prodigiously self-documented remains so elusive. The release of The Collected Writings / Les écrits complets in 1985 was the culmination of the Projet Riel Project, whose trajectory seems surprisingly haphazard—laying to rest some of the conspiracy theories about its political nature. Centred at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, the Riel Project lasted between 1977 and 1984 (Stanley 1985b, 3, 6). Besides Stanley, who was a professor emeritus at Mount Allison University and soon would be appointed Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, the other editors were the University of Calgary political scientist Thomas Flanagan, who served as the Deputy Editor and edited volume 3; the University of Lethbridge historian Raymond Huel,2 who edited volume 1; the Université de Sherbrooke sociologist Gilles Martel, who edited vol ume 2; the University of Calgary French professor Glen Campbell, who edited volume 4; and the political scientist and Administrative Officer Claude Rocan, who, along with Stanley and Flanagan, edited volume 5.3 Interestingly, none of those individuals initiated the project, which at first was not supposed to focus specifically on Riel. Rather, the cat alysts were two University of Alberta English professors, Noël Parker-Jervis and David Jackel, and their central goal was to acquire funds “to publish significant works to do with Western Canada in reliable editions so as to preserve, bring forward, and enliven the traditions of the region” (Parker-Jervis 1978, 49). As Parker-Jervis relates, as early as 1970, he “organized a petition … to the National Library urging it to produce under its auspices a Canadiana reprint programme” (49). The National Library declined to support the initiative, but the idea continued to germinate and eventually developed into what be came the Western Canadiana Publications Project, still aimed at publishing both original texts and reprints dealing with Western Canada. To determine what the most germane 53 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes projects were, Parker-Jervis and his colleagues conducted a comprehensive survey of Canadianists around the world, receiving some “143 replies, [with] 204 reprint titles and 62 original titles suggested, and 64 offers to edit” the volumes (49; see also “Complete Edition” 1978, 1; Stanley 1985b, 3–4). Based on the enthusiastic response, they elected to proceed with an application for funding. First of all, the Western Canadiana promoters assembled an advisory board composed of eminent scholars working at universities across Western Canada, “weighty names” that they “could drop on funding agencies,” such as the librarian Bruce Peel, the novelist and literary scholar Henry Kreisel, and George Woodcock, the much-published anarchist thinker and founder of the journal Canadian Literature (Parker-Jervis 1978, 50).4 By May 1976, after receiving approval as a President’s Committee at the University of Alberta, they informed the Canada Council (later the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Can ada) of their intention to apply for a major editorial grant. The notification in turn elicited “a most useful letter of support” (50) from the head of the Committee on Bibliographical Services for Canada, Margaret Williams, and, subsequently, an equally profitable visit by one of the council’s negotiating officers. This officer, whom they suspected of being sent “to test the firmness of [their] purpose,” apprised them that “an application for a major editorial grant, in order to succeed, had to have ‘a narrow and homogeneous corpus’ and had to exercise one particular kind of scholarship” (Parker-Jervis 1978, 50). It was only at this stage that the Western Canadiana committee members shifted their attention to Riel the writer. Their survey of Canadianists had identified three “focal areas” of interest: “Riel and attendant circumstances, the roots of prairie fiction, and the documents and propaganda of settlement” (50). In light of the inside knowledge shared with them by the Ottawa bureaucrat, they decided to concentrate solely on a critical edition of Riel’s writings.5 This turned out to be a wise choice. Working in conjunction with most of the collection’s eventual editors, they prepared a 115-page application titled “The Collected Pa pers of Louis Riel” (Western Canadiana Publications Projects Committee et al. 1977). They submitted it to Ottawa in June 1977 and, by the following April, learned that they were the recipients of “the first major editorial grant to be awarded a western [Canadian] university, one of the few on a Canadian subject, and the first to publish the complete papers of a noted figure in Canadian history” (“Complete Edition” 1978, 1). While often called the “million-dollar grant” (Owram 1986, 207; Friesen 1988, 92), the award perhaps would be more accurately labelled “the half-million dollar” grant (Morton 1992, 53)—which more closely approximates the contribution made by uploads/Litterature/ louis-riel-article-1.pdf