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Thursday, March 4, 1976, THE MEDICINE HAT NEWS—9Gabriel Dumont—A prairie heroBy GRAHAM THOTTEIt The Canadian Press In the first book of his memoirs, former prime minister John Diefenbaker says Gabriel Dumont was “a legitimate hero and deserves a better place in history than he has received.”George Woodcock, a leading Canadian author and historian,' has helped fill that void with his powerful book, Gabriel Dumont, The Metis Chief and His Lost World. It is the first full-scale biography of the great plainsman, buffalo hunter and guerrilla genius.. Dumont, whose spirit and physical presence personified the Metis people, commanded the outnumbered forces of Louis Riel in the Northwest Rebellion of 1885 on the South Saskatchewan River.Woodcock, among those who have written plays on Riel, notes that over the last 90 years Riel has remained one of the most fascinating figures in Canadian history while Dumont has gone almost uncelebrated.WAS LEGEND Yet Dumont, he says, had all the qualities of a folk or frontier hero and would have acquired a legendary status in the United States. He concludes that Canadians tend to distrust heroes and identify more easily with martyrs.Dumont, whose paternal grandfather was a Montreal French voyageur who took a pure-blooded woman of the Sarcee Indian tribe as his wife, grew up on the prairieswhen they resounded with the hoofbeats of millions of buffalo.The Metis—people of mixed blood—were “lords of the western prairies” for almost 70 years to 1885, when they numbered about 10,000. Their buffalo hunts were thoroughly organized affairs. Eventually, Dumont rose to be chief of the buffalo hunts. When the buffalo was virtually exterminated and the Metis turned to the land for a living, Dumont became the natural leader in the community of St. Laurent, on the trail between Saskatoon and Prince Albert.The Metis, who still outnumbered whites in the Northwest Territory (later Saskatchewan and Alberta), helped settlement of the west by being guides and freighters. They also acted as go-betweens for the Indian treaties only to find that their own demands for land and scrip were ignored by Ottawa. In frustration, they‘brought Riel out of exile in Montana to lead them and formed a provisional government of Saskatchewan based at St. Laurent. The Northwest Rebellion was born.SPOKE MANY TONGUESDumont, who spoke six Indian languages as well asFrench, did much visiting among the various tribes and nurtured a vision of a great alliance of the native peoples to preserve their ancestral rights against inroads of the white settlers.But it was not to be. Most of the Indians, and many otherMetis, stayed out of the conflict. After early successes in the rebellion, Riel’s restraint and vacillation led to the decisive battle of Batoche where Dumont’s band of fewer than 300 Metis was overwhelmed by an 850-man militia contingent headed by General Middleton.Dumont organized his small army along the traditionallines of the old buffalo hunt. Few Indians knew more than he did of the lore of the wilderness and he was a clever guerrilla fighter—“the greatest ... of them all,” says Mr. Diefenbaker who as a boy on the family homestead met this “imposing figure.”Author Woodcock writes that one could sketch “a very plausible scenario of what might have happened” if Dumont had followed through on his plans for guerrilla warfare and Riel had been ignored. Middleton’s army would have been inadequate to contain such a movement.PM CRITICIZEDPrime Minister John A. Macdonald — severely criticized by Woodcock for “fatal indifference and incomprehensible inertia” on Metis land claims — would have been forced to negotiate seriously or face years of guerrilla warfare. Completion of the Canadian PacificFORGOT TO SMILEEmmett Kelly, one of America’s best-known and most popular circus clowns, has never smiled professionally in more than 30 years.Railway would have been delayed indefinitely and there would have been a growing danger of intervention by the “strongly imperialist Americans of the 1880s.”Woodcock writes movingly of the Metis cause.“Gabriel Dumont and the Metis whom he led for a while and whom he so dramatically personified formed one of the Canadian minorities who asked only to be able to make their own adaptions, in their own way, to the changing patterns of history.“That opportunity was not allowed them. ...“So the Metis ... were challenged to fight in defence ofProtectingGRANDE PRAIRIE, Alta. (CP) — A former employee of the Alberta human rights commission says the commission lacks the power to enforce laws that protect the rights of Albertans.Roger Cardinal, who resigned after six months as an education officer, said the commission has difficulty in thoroughly investigating a complaint or penalizing a company or individual found guilty of discrimination.“It’s a very, very frustrating place to work.” Persons being investigated by the commission for alleged discrimination are not legally bound to produce pertinent documents and records, Mr. Cardinal said. If a companytheir distinctive culture, and in defeat they were to be submerged.”And later:“... they did not even have the negative dignity of recognition as a separate people that the treaties had granted to the Indians. They had become a people without standing in the new world of the future, and without rights in the old world of the past, and the best they could hope to retain was the individual dignity that Gabriel Dumont never lost.”Gabriel Dumont, The Metis Chief and His Lost World, George Woodcock; 280 pages; $8.95; llurtig Publishers.Albertans?was found to have discriminated against a person, reconciliation usually followed and the guilty party could close the case simply by giving the complainant a letter of apology.Only when there has been discrimination in employment will financial compensation be considered, Mr. Cardinal said.“If you break the law, there should be a set penalty. The way it works now, for example, an apartment owner can admit he doesn’t like Hindus and that’s the reason he won’t allow one to rent from him.“All he has to do is keep a stack of letters of apology handy and give one to each Hindu he rejects.”
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Medicine Hat News
Medicine Hat, Alberta, CA
Thu, Mar 04, 1976
Page 9
Full Page
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CA 07 May 2020
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