Strange Empire
Louis Riel and the Métis People
by Joseph Howard
Strange Empire is both a biography of Louis Riel and the story of the Metis people in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Joseph Howard skilfully weaves together the events of Riel's life with the brief emergence of the Metis nation.
Strange Empire is both a biography of Louis Riel and the story of the Metis people in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Joseph Howard skilfully weaves together the events of Riel's life with the brief emergence of the Metis nation.
Howard's sympathies lie with the Metis as he describes the clumsy but single-minded and devious crushing of the provisional government in Manitoba in 1870 by John A. Macdonald and his cabinet. Howard shows how the political outcome of that struggle literally drove Riel crazy as he drifted from place to place in exile in the U.S. Then there is Riel's final effort in 1885, when he agreed to help the Saskatchewan Metis and white settlers resist the exploitation and dispossession threatened by the speculators, politicians and developers who followed the CPR as it pushed out across the continent.