| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Albert Braz. The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 245. Cloth $55.00, paper $24.95.
Louis Riel was the Metis leader whose resistance to Canada's annexation of Rupert's Land (the Hudson's Bay Company territory) led to the founding of Manitoba in 1870, and whose 1885 Metis uprising led to his execution later that year. He is the only Native historical personage whom most Canadians can name when asked. Albert Braz's book surveys novels, poetry, drama, and other literary genres, in English and French, from 1885 onward to analyze their representations of this controversial figure. Braz's study is comprehensive; his twenty-three-page bibliography is itself a valuable compendium of works, some famous, many obscure, on his subject. Although the book is short on historical context, it is a nuanced examination of the literature on a man who continues to evoke strong feelings in Canada, and whose contested character and actions reveal some enduring fault lines in Canada's confederation and polity.	1
The title derives from Riel's indictment for treason in July 1885: "Louis Riel ... not regarding the duty of his allegiance, nor having the fear of God in his heart, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil as a false traitor against our said Lady the Queen." Here, "false" intensified the term "traitor." But Braz plays on a double entendre—false as the opposite of true—and on the fact that Riel, born in Red River (Rupert's Land) before it was Canada, and being a U.S. citizen in the 1880s, did not see himself as Canadian or as a traitor to Queen Victoria, since he was not her subject. Canada, he wrote, was a foreign power, and the Canadian Confederation was "une fraude immense, une tyrannie colossale" (p. 41).	. . .

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