Red River Rebellion Research Paper

The Red River Rebellion, lasting from 1869-1870, was a sequence of retaliations among the Metis and the Ontario settlers that led to the establishment of the provisional government by the Metis leader Louis Riel and his followers of the Red River Colony, in the modern day province of Manitoba. Many independent First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples populated Rupert’s Land and the North-West Territory, but immediately impacted by the impending acquisition of Rupert’s Land was the settlement along the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. Pride and ignorance, the rebellion begins, mixed with physical and political battles with the goal of succession of the National Policy and the Metis long desired independent province.

The Red River Rebellion was a drastic result of Ontario incompetence, Metis pride and both groups attempting to utilize the land in cohabitation. The Metis, inhabitants of the Red River, were continually in conflict with the Hudson’s Bay Company, particularly over trading privileges. By the 1850s, the company's rule was under attack from Britain, Canada and the United States, and a decade later, had agreed to surrender monopoly over Rupert's Land and the North West.

Louis Riel fought on behalf of Metis for the preservation of Metis rights and culture in their homelands as the North-West was brought under the Canadian Eurocentric sphere of influence. Louis Riel’s reputation varies among historians and regions of Canada as he is seen as either a dangerous, religious lunatic, rebelling against the Canadian government, or as a heroic rebel, who fought to protect the Francophone Metis against assimilation by the Canadian government. He has been celebrated for over a hundred years as a proponent of the multiculturalism, but that is without recognition of his commitment to Metis nationalism and political