Louis Riel Day celebrates history of Manitoba, Métis

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This article was published 20/02/2023 (977 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Meghan McLeod does beadwork to connect with an ancestry she did not always know about.

“I found out I could bead before I found out I was Métis, that’s the funny part,” said McLeod, while sitting in a beading circle at the Le Musée de Saint-Boniface Museum on Monday.

She was there along with three other beaders as part of the museum’s Louis Riel Day festivities, held in conjunction with the Manitoba Métis Federation.

As fiddle music came from the museum’s chapel, parents, children and others came on the statutory holiday to the museum, which celebrated the interwoven history of Manitoba and the Métis.

Riel helped found the province, establishing a government which he and others negotiated into Confederation, and was the leader of the Métis in two resistance movements against the federal government.

Convicted of treason, he was executed in Regina on Nov. 16, 1885, and his body returned to Winnipeg for burial.

McLeod said she only recently discovered her ancestry while studying genealogy in 2020, as she wasn’t raised by her mother’s Métis side of the family.

“For me, it’s my first year coming into being Métis, because I wasn’t really raised with the culture. Reading about it in a book and then seeing it in real is two different things,” said McLeod, 37.

“It’s part of being Métis — the art, the culture. Louis Riel said that in 100 years, we would come back, that it would be the artists that brought us back.”

Museum director Cindy Desrocher, who is also Métis, said the open house at the museum on Tache, near Riel’s grave site, was a chance for the public to come and learn.

“It’s a day… of recognition of how our province came to be. It’s a good way for people to explore their history and learn a bit more about how the province started,” she said.

“We have the Riel exhibit, but obviously the museum covers more than just Riel. We’re hoping that people will learn about the museum, but we’re also exposing them to Métis culture, through the foods, through bannock, sound, they get to hear the fiddle music — it always gets people tapping their feet.”

Desrocher said it’s also a moment of pride for Métis people.

The museum hosted music, as well as historians and presentations from the MMF.

Kyra De La Ronde, 23, was outside on the museum’s lawn, tending to a fire, before she gave a presentation on the history of the Red River Métis Monday afternoon.

“It’s not necessarily a historic event within our nation, but in 2008, the province put forward for a new holiday,” said De La Ronde, a policy analyst for the MMF.

“Today is really important, I think it’s a day to celebrate, to come together, to reflect on who Louis Riel was and what he did for all Manitobans, as well as for all Canadians, to honour and pay respect for him.”

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @erik_pindera