Louis 'David' Riel prophet of the new world - Flanagan, Thomas 1944- (University of Toronto Press, 1996)
Includes bibliographical references and index
Louis Riel believed that on 8 December 1875 he received a divine commission authorizing him to save the metis and reform the Catholic Church. He was a prophet, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and the metis were the new chosen people. A new branch of the Catholic Church would be founded in North America, with its first Holy See in Montreal and its second in Riel's birthplace of St Vital. When Riel expressed these views in 1876, he was committed to a lunatic asylum. After his release, he suppressed his ideas for several years, only to reveal them again to his metis followers during the North-West Rebellion. The Rebellion thus became as much a religious as a political movement; to the end of his life Riel believed himself a prophet, and he went to his death thinking that he, like Christ, would be resurrected on the third day
Earlier writers about Louis Riel noted his religious beliefs but did not take them seriously. They usually dismissed Riel's attempt to found a new religion as a symptom of a deranged mind. Thomas Flanagan takes Riel's religion seriously and analyses it using categories developed in the literature about millenarian movements. He shows that Riel's religion, far from being simply individual madness, is typical of the nativistic and millenarian movements described by one author as the 'religions of the oppressed.'. This is also a biography, tracing Riel's thinking on religious subjects from his childhood to the end of his life and paying particular attention to events that influenced his thinking. This developmental approach is necessary because Riel's ideas changed frequently; he never arrived at a fixed 'system.'