Women and the West

Louis Riel had a sister. Her name was Sara and her claim to martyrdom on behalf of her Métis brethren is equal to his.

Until I read Lesley Erickson’s article in Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women’s History, I did not know about Sara Riel, although as an undergraduate at the University of Alberta I spent several months in Rudy Wiebe’s class studying her older brother’s rebellions, and his final religious outpouring. The woman who, like him, was educated as part of the “Métis elite” of Red River, Manitoba, became the first Métis Grey Nun and served out most of her short life as a “missionary in exile” among Cree and Dene in the far north, but is almost completely unknown. She spoke English, French, Cree and Michif. Her sketch of the Catholic Mission at Île-à-la-Crosse, preserved in the St. Boniface Historical Society Archives, is copied into the pages of this weighty paperback, edited by Erickson along with Sarah Carter, Patricia Roome and...