Chester Brown reinvents the comic book medium to create the critically acclaimed historical biography Louis Riel. Brown won the Harvey Awards for best writing and best graphic novel for his compelling, meticulous, and dispassionate retelling of the charismatic, and perhaps insane, nineteenth-century Metis leader's life. Brown coolly documents with dramatic subtlety the violent rebellion on the Canadian prairie led by Riel, an embattled figure in Canadian history, regarded by some as a martyr who died in the name of freedom, while others consider him a treacherous murderer.

Shining a spotlight on the life, vision, and cultivation of one of Canada's most influential historical figures.

Biography, focussing on Riel's prophetic mission.

This book takes a look at Louis Riel from a historical perspective, examining the political and cultural ramifications of Riel's life for the citizens of Western Canada. As a revolutionary, as a religious prophet, and as a spokesman for the Metis people, Louis Riel changed the course of Canadian history.

Compulsively readable, this first social history of the opening up of the Canadian West is a triumph of historical detective work and gives us Siggins at the top of her game. While researching the biography of Louis Riel, Maggie Siggins became aware of a figure lurking in the background who had had a profound influence on the great Canadian reformer. This was his grand-mother Marie-Anne Lagimodière, née Gaboury. As Siggins’ research progressed, she came to regard Marie-Anne as the most exceptional Canadian woman of the nineteenth century. The perils of Laura Secord and Susanna Moodie paled in comparison, yet she remains largely unknown. Beautiful and rebellious, Marie-Anne was still unmarried at twenty-five—unheard of in 1800s Quebec habitant society. Furthermore, once she did marry Jean-Baptiste Lagimodière, she insisted on accompanying her fur trapper husband to the uncharted wilderness of western Canada. The year was 1807, and no European woman had yet ventured west of the Great Lakes region. For the next thirty years, she would live among the native people or at fur-trading forts from Pembina to Edmonton House, leading an undoubtedly difficult life but one with freedoms unknown to women in western societies of her time. Drawing from primary sources, Siggins paints a vivid portrait of life in the West, from survival on the plains and bison hunts to the tribal warfare triggered by the fur-trade economy. Through it all, Marie-Anne survived and thrived, living to ninety-six, the matriarch of a large and diverse family whose descendants still live in Manitoba.

In 1885, Louis Riel was charged with high treason, found guilty, and consequently executed for his role in Saskatchewan's North-West Rebellion. During his trial, the Métis leader gave two speeches, passionately defending the interests of the Métis in western Canada as well as his own life. Riel's Defence studies these speeches, demonstrating the range of Riel's political and personal concerns. The first and better known of the two speeches addresses the jury, while Riel's second speech - rarely reprinted - addresses the court following his guilty verdict. Both orations have been edited, annotated, and reprinted, and are followed by essays from diverse perspectives including philosophy, law, history, political science, religion, and communication studies. Through the course of their inquiry, contributors come to understand more about Riel's personal character and political thought, as well as his arguments supporting Métis land claims, grievances against the federal government, and his immigration plan for the North-West. Evaluating the rhetorical quality, legal merit, and cultural stakes of his speeches, Riel's Defence reveals the significance of the last public statements made by a man who indelibly shaped Canada’s history by combining his personal vision with a national vision.

Louis Riel devoted his life to the Metis cause. A fiery activist, he struggled against injustice as he saw it. He was a pioneer in the field of Aboriginal rights and land claims but was branded an outlaw in his own time. In 1885, he was executed for treason. In 1992, the House of Commons declared Riel a founder of Manitoba. November 16 is now designated Louis Riel Day in Canada.

There is a missing chapter in the narrative of Canada’s Indigenous peoples—the story of the Métis Nation, a new Indigenous people descended from both First Nations and Europeans Their story begins in the last decade of the eighteenth century in the Canadian North-West. Within twenty years the Métis proclaimed themselves a nation and won their first battle. Within forty years they were famous throughout North America for their military skills, their nomadic life and their buffalo hunts. The Métis Nation didn’t just drift slowly into the Canadian consciousness in the early 1800s; it burst onto the scene fully formed. The Métis were flamboyant, defiant, loud and definitely not noble savages. They were nomads with a very different way of being in the world—always on the move, very much in the moment, passionate and fierce. They were romantics and visionaries with big dreams. They battled continuously—for recognition, for their lands and for their rights and freedoms. In 1870 and 1885, led by the iconic Louis Riel, they fought back when Canada took their lands. These acts of resistance became defining moments in Canadian history, with implications that reverberate to this day: Western alienation, Indigenous rights and the French/English divide. After being defeated at the Battle of Batoche in 1885, the Métis lived in hiding for twenty years. But early in the twentieth century, they determined to hide no more and began a long, successful fight back into the Canadian consciousness. The Métis people are now recognized in Canada as a distinct Indigenous nation. Written by the great-grandniece of Louis Riel, this popular and engaging history of “forgotten people” tells the story up to the present era of national reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. 2019 marks the 175th anniversary of Louis Riel’s birthday (October 22, 1844)

Published to widespread critical acclaim, Riel: A Life of Revolution proved that an intimate and revealing portrait of one of our most enduring—and most isunderstood—legends could be an almost instant national bestseller. ‘Who is Louis Riel?’ Maggie Siggins asks, and comes up with some fascinating answers. Seen by many as an unrepentant traitor, a messianic prophet and a pathetic tyrant, Siggins uncovers the real Louis Riel—a complex man full of contradiction and angst, a charismatic visionary and poet, a humanitarian who gave up prestige and wealth to fight for the Métis people. Infused with atmosphere and detail, this fascinating portrait is illuminating in its accounts of the people and events that moulded the enigmatic rebel. Revealing a man passionate about forging an equitable and just relationship between native and white people, Riel: A Life of Revolution is more relevant today than ever before.

The nineteenth-century Métis politician and mystic Louis Riel has emerged as one of the most popular - and elusive - figures in Canadian culture. Since his hanging for treason in 1885, the self-declared David of the New World has been depicted variously as a traitor to Confederation; a French-Canadian and Catholic martyr; a bloodthirsty rebel; a pan-American liberator; a pawn of shadowy white forces; a Prairie political maverick; a First Nations hero; an alienated intellectual; a victim of Western industrial progress; and even a Father of Confederation. Albert Braz synthesizes the available material by and about Riel, including film, sculpture, and cartoons, as well as literature in French and English, and analyzes how an historical figure could be portrayed in such contradictory ways. In light of the fact that most aesthetic representations of Riel bear little resemblance not only to one another but also to their purported model, Braz suggests that they reveal less about Riel than they do about their authors and the society to which they belong. The most comprehensive treatment of the representations of Louis Riel in Canadian literature, The False Traitor will be a seminal work in the study of this popular Canadian figure.