Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont are two names well known to Canadians due to their role in the 1885 conflict between prairie Metis and the Canadian government, but what about the Metis who opposed them?
On Tuesday, a Prince Albert historian will be giving a talk examining that angle, with a focus on John Norquay and other English speaking Metis who opposed Riel and sided with the Canadian government.
Gerald Friesen is a retired University of Manitoba professor, an Order of Canada recipient, and a former resident of Prince Albert. On Tuesday, he’ll be at the Prince Albert Public Library’s John M. Cuelenaere branch discussing John Norquay, an English Metis leader who became the first Indigenous Premier of Manitoba, and his connection to English Metis in the Prince Albert area who opposed Riel.
“Louis Riel is an extremely important figure in Canadian history, and Norquay is, in many ways, like Riel, but in this case he actually opposed Riel” Friesen said. “His children, two of his boys, were in the troops that came to fight Riel.”
Friesen will base his talk off of research he conducted while writing ‘The Honourable John Norquay: Indigenous Premier, Canadian Statesman’. That research includes thousands of letters written by or to Norquay, including some written to residents in the Prince Albert area like his step-brother, Andrew Spence.
In his talk, Friesen plans to focus on how the Metis conflict with the federal government began, and the impact it had on the people of Prince Albert. He also plans to focus on how those events from 1885 still impact Metis people and Western Canada today.
“I think it’s an extremely important topic in Canadian history,” Friesen said. “Lots of people know about it so I don’t mean to suggest it’s not known, but the story I tell in this book is a slightly different angle on the events.
Friesen described Norquay as an exceptional and extremely intelligent leader who punched above his weight in national events. Even though he opposed Riel, that didn’t mean Norquay gave unconditional support to federal policies.
“Western Canada, prairie Canada, was organized by John A. MacDonald to have a very limited kind of power in the country,” Friesen said. “It was basically organized as a colony of Ottawa and Central Canada. Norquay worked against that constantly for a decade, and was remarkably successful in defending prairie Canada against control by Ottawa.”
Friesen wrote the book following his retirement from the University of Manitoba. He became inspired after a trunk arrived in the Manitoba archives containing decades worth of Norquay’s correspondence.
Some of those letters contained unexpected pieces of information about his hometown.
“I was surprised by the things I’ve written about in the book in relation to PA,” he said.
In addition to the 1885 conflict, Friesen will also talk about life in the Red River settlement in Manitoba, and the factors that pushed many Metis further west.
Gerald Friesen will be speaking at the Prince Albert Public Library on Tuesday, Sept. 24 at 7 p.m. Copies of his book will be available for $40.
@kerr_jas • jason.kerr@paherald.sk.ca
