Review of Loyal till Death: Indians and the North-West Rebellion By Blair Stonechild and Bill Waiser

Authors

Christopher Hannibal-Paci, University of Manitoba

Date of this Version

Winter 1999

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 1999, pp. 58-59.

Comments

Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

In Loyal till Death, Blair Stonechild and Bill Waiser retell the North-West Rebellion from the Indian perspective, an ambitious task not without precedent. Earlier revisions of the events of 1885, such as Rudy Weibe's novel The Temptations of Big Bear (1976) and Walter Hildebrandt's book of poetry Sightings (1991), deconstruct the historical narrative, so that "from the unitary, closed, evolutionary narratives of historiography as we have traditionally known it," as Linda Hutcheon notes in The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), "we now get the histories (in the plural) of the losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and colonial) as well as the centrist, of the unsung many as well as the much sung few." Loyal till Death, however, is not historiographic metafiction; as a work of history it must be critiqued as such.

Stonechild and Waiser stress the important influence of oral history for an Indian account; "over fifty interviews were collected" and are discretely interspersed throughout the text. As well as relying heavily on the papers of Reed, Dewdney and Macdonald, the authors most often cite historians Sarah Carter, Hugh Dempsey, ]. L. Tobias, D. Morton, and R. Roy. Arranged in thirteen chapters, the overall writing by the book's two authors appears seamless, though perhaps repetitive. The volume is rich with illustrations, not so much of the unsung many (there is indeed a preoccupation with the aboriginal political elite), archival photos, maps, sketches, and paintings. There is a wealth of archival material here, and from an academic perspective an index of illustrations would have been a useful research tool.

Loyal till Death's thesis is simply that the First Nations of western Canada remained loyal to the Crown in 1885 and were deliberately saddled with rebellion in an attempt by Indian Affairs officials to subjugate them and speed up acculturation. Without much doubt the book highlights Canadian assimilationist policies and their influence on the North-West Rebellion. Ultimately, it presents a constructed history, the result of its authors' researching accumulated archival collections for evidence that First Nations in western Canada openly "rebelled" with the Metis-evidence which, in the absence of a Metis archive, one is hard pressed to find. This is not to dispute the thesis, which in its telling is quite convincing; rather it is to call into question the book's overall aim. The authors leave little doubt that some First Nations oppose arguments that they willingly participated in a Metis vision for the west, a stance which other First Nations would disagree with.