LOUIS RIEL: A COMIC-STRIP BIOGRAPHY

 Chester Brown. LOUIS RIEL: A COMIC-STRIP BIOGRAPHY. Drawn & Quarterly, 2003.

I've owned this book for more than 20 years and only dared to begin reading it this month. I feared an Ontario Orangeman tirade about a mad catholic and blood-thirsty natives standing in the way of conservatives-who-know-best politicians' ambitions in the far west. And I have the same hesitation I have about watching so-called "historical" movies, like those about the war that only Americans won and about presidential assassinations. Writers, producers, directors take stances and attempt to make their interpretations look real and believable. This is one of the ways the public has been dumbed down, and no one even knows that there is a difference between fact and opinion. So I chose not to look, even though, like many Manitobans, I celebrate Louis Riel as our Father of Confederation. Were it not for his resistance, there would have been no Bill of Rights that morphed into The Manitoba Act and Manitoba would not have been the first "in" province.

So, because of my biases, I found the footnotes more useful than the text. Although, I have recommended the text to high school students who had a first positive experience of Canadian history by reading it.

Of course, it didn't help when Page 3 begins with a major error of fact. Charles II never granted Rupert's Land to the Hudson's Bay Company. And the references to Big Bear and Poundmaker in Stony Mountain and their fates was also less than complete.