Adventures in the Mouse House

39. Legacy of Stone: Saskatchewan's Stone Buildings by Margaret Hryniuk and Frank Korvemaker, photos by Larry Easton

My parents sent me this because my dad's a friend of the photographer. It's mostly a very pretty coffee table book, but I thought I'd have a read of the text.

The architectural bits are as dull as I'd expected, but it's full of interesting stories about various people who settled Saskatchewan, which was interesting, and I learned a few things.

16. Loyal Till Death: Indians and the North-West Rebellion by Blake Stonechild and Bill Waiser

Arguably, the only interesting thing that ever happened in Saskatchewan is the Riel rebellion (although if you nerd for labour history there's the Bienfait miners' strike).[1][2] In school we were taught that the rebellion was an uprising of the Metis[4] and First Nations (only I'm old, our teachers still called them Indians) against the Canadian government.

This is the real story of the First Nations' involvement in the rebellion. Which, for the most part, was non-existent. Where it did happen, it was either due to disgruntlement with the local "Indian agent" and about very specific grievances, or they were coerced by Riel's forces. For the most part, the tribes (who had only come into treaties over the last 10-15 years after the collapse of the buffalo herds) took their treaties with the Queen very seriously. The Canadian government was already looking for an excuse to not uphold these, though, so were quick to cast them as rebels and broadcast lies and half-truths about events.

Like every history of the Canadian west, it's about how the white people screwed over the First Nations. There was lots in this book that I didn't know, because I went to school at the very tail end of the "white people are great!" era of education.

While of course the book is angry-making about the events, what made me angry is that they were still teaching something that was so patently wrong when I was in school 100 years later. The evidence has always been there, but nobody cared to set the story straight.

This was the easy one. While at home I also picked up another book about Riel that has "postcolonial" in the subtitle.

[1] Google them.
[2] Because while bootlegging was A Thing in Moose Jaw[3], the Al Capone connection is actually about his underlings and pretty dull.
[3] Yes, there's a town called Moose Jaw. My dad's from there, so don't start.
[4] Google that too.