Open this photo in gallery We should remember that the original voice of Western alienation was Louis Riel. We should also remember that Canada hanged him for being that voice. Library and Archives Canada

Jean Teillet is the great-grandniece of Louis Riel and an Indigenous rights lawyer. She is the author of Métis Law in Canada and The North-West is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation.

Western alienation is a belief that Eastern Canada takes too much out of the West. That it plunders Western wealth and gives nothing back. That it acts in its own best interests and rarely acts to protect, promote or invest in the West. This sense of injustice may be at a rolling boil right now, but it isn’t new.

Alienation began when the West joined Canada in 1870, when Great Britain transferred Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to Canada. It was the largest peaceful land transfer in the world and included what would later become the Prairie provinces. The Canada First movement started it. The movement was initiated by a group of men in Ontario who firmly believed that immigration should be limited to the British, with their superior Anglo-Saxon Protestant values and institutions. When some of their leaders moved from Ontario to Red River in the late 1860s, they formed the Canadian Party. Both the movement and the party were anti-French, anti-Catholic and dismissive of Indigenous peoples. The goal of these men was to ensure that their race and religion would control and profit from the lands and resources in what would soon become Western Canada. The Métis called them lii Canadas (the Canadas) – and it wasn’t a compliment.

Story continues below advertisement

It is in this context that Louis Riel arose as the leading voice of those who rejected this supremacist vision and land grab. In July, 1869, the Métis set up patrols, forcibly ejecting men who were staking claims on Métis lands – men Canada had sent as road workers. Events began to move quickly after Riel and the Métis stood on the surveyors’ chain on Oct. 11, 1869.

Then-prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald’s proposed Lieutenant-Governor, a prominent member of the Canada First movement, arrived in the West with a shipment of one hundred Spencer carbines and 250 Peabody rifles all equipped with bayonets and accompanied by 8,000 to 10,000 rounds of ammunition. It was in response to this display of force that the Métis took up arms to defend their lands and their rights.

Riel gathered together the leading men of Red River, including Ojibwa Chief Prince, the Métis, the Catholics and Protestants, the French and the English, into the Red River Resistance. His articulation of the complaint was simple. The people living in the land Canada sought to annex wanted a say in their lives. They wanted to protect their languages, religions and cultures. They objected to joining Canada if that meant losing control over their lands and resources. They did not want to become a colony of a colony. It was the first articulation of what we now call Western alienation.

Riel insisted on the right to negotiate the terms on which the West would enter Confederation. He wanted the West to enter as a province, not a territory, because he appreciated the crucial distinction between the two: A territory had no control over its land and resources, and a province did.

Riel succeeded in forcing Macdonald to negotiate, but the goal of local control was undermined when Macdonald made Manitoba a province in name only. He kept control of the lands and resources and established an inequality that lasted until 1930. According to the newspaper The New Nation, Macdonald kept control so that he had a “field in which to feed and fatten Canadian Government pets and robbers.” In 1874, Macdonald established colonization companies. The idea was that the companies would purchase land on the Prairies from the government and resell it at a profit. The idea failed at that time, but in 1882, when 10 million acres were given freely to these companies, men fought to take part in a land speculator’s dream. The boards of directors of these companies provide insight into what was going on. They usually included one or more sitting Conservative members of Parliament, their sons and in-laws. Most were Easterners. It was, at least in part, in response to the land grabs by these colonization companies that Riel’s North-West Resistance began in Saskatchewan in 1885. The Canadian Party had simply shifted its focus further west.

For daring to resist Canada with arms, Riel was targeted by the Canadian Party and the Grand Orange Lodge, which demanded his head. They wanted the Métis exterminated and driven out of the country. On Nov. 16, 1885, Macdonald gladly obliged. He hanged Riel – and with that one brutal act suppressed the opposition to Eastern Canada’s efforts to control its Western colony.

So it is not without irony that the Métis observe the latest rendition of Western alienation. Today’s version is largely the cry of the descendants of the very men who came from Eastern Canada to make their fortunes by scooping the lands and resources of the West from Indigenous peoples. For decades, their schemes of land speculation and resource extraction paid them huge dividends, and all of Canada’s legal resources supported this appropriation. The treaty and scrip systems were designed to give the force of law to efforts to move the land out of the hands of Indigenous peoples and into the market, which enabled the new Westerners to benefit. And benefit they did: For 150 years, they have taken the riches of the land.

Story continues below advertisement

Western alienation has never been far from the surface in Canada. It boils up from time to time as successive generations of Westerners object when they think Eastern Canada is interfering with their resources. But we should remember that the original voice of Western alienation was Louis Riel. We should also remember that Canada hanged him for being that voice.

Keep your Opinions sharp and informed. Get the Opinion newsletter. Sign up today.