Louis Riel: A Summary of Man

Riel A Summary of Man

Author: J. A. W.

The Canadian hero Louis Riel shows mankind that life is fraught with controversies and battle with establishment. Moreover, establishment is the very ruin of Mankind. Riel's live was in more ways parallel to the human life cycle than one would guess. From the birth to the death of the notorious Riel, we can see how little control an individual really has over life.

Louis Riel started out life living in the sticks far from 'civilization,' caring parents, who taught him the basics of life, raised him. His early home was simple, uncomplicated, his family farmed and hunted on the side to make a living. Like the hunter/gatherer people in prehistoric times, as these people lived mainly of the Wooly Mammoth1, so lived Riel's people of the giant buffalo herds, both people depending with their very life on these beasts. Just as the sudden extinction of the Wooly Mammoth complicated things for early mans' hunting habits, politics complicated Riel's outlook on life. Life got swiftly more complicated as Riel grew up. As the country came into the hands of "civilized people", it's people were forced into a lifestyle which was more complicated than the hunting and gathering lifestyle the Riels and other Metis families were used to. Establishment is the biggest complication in life, Riel fought this all his life, in the end it won. What advances did civilization make in this killing? It benefited them little other than the satisfaction of routing their enemy. Are people satisfied; was that the end? That remains to be proven; people are still fighting to gain amnesty for Riel.

Life did not stay simple for people, problems started. As people established customs and started to stray from the hunter-gatherer society things got more complicated. Slave labor was one of the prominent drawbacks of people establishing new cultures. People needed slaves to build the huge monuments that they used to show their power and their allegiance to their Gods. The huge prehistoric stone calendar called Stonehenge2 may be the first example of slave work ever built. Canadians built up the West using methods that were essentially the same; they actualized it at the cost of the Metis' and Natives' lives and their livelihood. Riel's people, because they learned to depend the staples they could get in trade for hides and pemmican, were slaves of buffalo hunt and fur trade, thus slaves of the whites.