Author Description

In 1879, Louis Riel was elected chief of a band of Métis buffalo hunters who wintered at Flat Willow Creek in northwestern Montana Territory. At the time, he was in exile from his beloved province of Manitoba, which Riel had helped to create through the Manitoba Act of 1870. His exile had begun in August 1870 with the arrival of armed forces to the Red River colony, when he had fled to the United States fearing for his life. Riel was wanted for the murder of an Irish Protestant named Thomas Scott who had threatened to kill Riel, who a Métis government thus tried and executed, and who consequently was martyred in Upper Canada. Riel, fearing for his life - there was a five-thousand-collar price on his head - could not take his duly elected seat in Parliament. He was formally banished from Canada in January 1875 for a period of five years. Riel's exile was not only political but also social: single, far from home - his family and his people - he was unable to find employment, although talented and highly educated, because of his race. He left the eastern United States in early 1878 and headed for the final frontier in Montana. The one thing Riel did, from the age of fourteen when he started school in Montreal until shortly before his execution, was write poetry. Unfortunately, historians have dismissed most of his poems as "little more than doggerel," insisting on a comparison of his work with that of Keats, an unreasonable comparison for a poet trained in the formal French style. This cultural difference may have turned many poets away from Riel's work. While working on another project, translator and editor Michael Barnholden came across a previously unknown text by Riel: a poem written in the Regina jail just before his execution. As both a poet and historian, Barnholden saw something more. A careful reading of Riel's poetic work revealed to him not only the 481-line masterpiece "To Sir John A." but a sequence of poems written between 1878 and 1