[R-G] Riel's secretary and the Afghan mission

[Anthony Fenton]

Friday, February 15
3:55 AM

Riel's secretary and the Afghan mission
Rick Salutin
 From Friday's Globe and Mail

Monday is Ontario's first Family Day. In Manitoba, they're calling  
the day off Louis Riel Day, which I think is a better idea. The Métis  
leader led an 1870 uprising that resulted in Manitoba being a  
province instead of a fiefdom of the Hudson Bay Co. In 1885 he rose  
again, which led on to Saskatchewan and Alberta. He was hanged for  
his contribution to nation-building. A day in his honour is a nice  
gesture. A single day for family seems chintzy. It's like setting one  
day aside for love and affection. Oh, right, that was yesterday.

I thought about it this week while reading historian Donald Smith's  
book on Honoré Jaxon, Louis Riel's "secretary." He was born William  
Henry Jackson, a Methodist, in 1861 in Toronto. He went to school in  
Southwestern Ontario and University College at the University of  
Toronto. Then he joined his family out West and soon identified with  
the Riel vision: a society uniting the strengths of aboriginals,  
settlers and Métis, both French and English. When fighting broke out  
in 1885, he was arrested, like Riel, tried, found insane and jailed.  
He escaped, went south and wound up in Chicago, a booming, seething  
city. He segued easily into the anarchist, labour politics of the  
age. He changed his background to Métis and his name to Honoré Jaxon  
(Henry + Jackson). He became a late-19th-century type: the left-wing  
agitator, lecturer, gadfly, public figure. He travelled to Europe on  
that ticket and moved in the 1920s to New York, where he became a  
local character and failed businessman. In 1951, he was evicted from  
a basement apartment where he'd been, aged 88, the janitor. Photos in  
the New York press showed him on a sidewalk before a mountain of  
books and papers he'd accumulated on the Métis cause. They were sold  
for scrap. He died in Bellevue hospital soon after.

I imagine he could get tedious, like anyone with a colourful shtick,  
after hours or years of peddling it. He was probably a bit crazy and  
deluded, although I'm not sure that faking an identity was part of  
that. It was an era of less documentation and more tolerance for  
personal reinvention, that's what migration was often about - think  
of Grey Owl, about whom Donald Smith also wrote a book. And on one  
point I think Jaxon/Jackson was superb: relations between Canada's  
original inhabitants and its newcomers. He felt no group's rights  
negated any other's. He thought all could contribute to a bright,  
new, inclusive Canada. He didn't believe in the superiority of "our"  
civilization over that of the "savages." What could have been more  
savage than 19th-century capitalism? Yet official policy then was "to  
continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not  
been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question  
and no department."

I know the policy is long gone - or has it just transmigrated into  
the Afghan mission? We are there on a "noble undertaking" (Derek  
Burney in The Globe, citing the Manley report). We come from afar:  
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. We will save them from being  
a "failed state" - as if every state, including Canada, with all our  
advantages, isn't a seriously failed project. There is no real sign  
of mutuality or respect for their achievements, like their history of  
resisting foreign occupation, from which we could learn a tad. And  
consider the context: a renewed "clash of civilizations." Honoré  
Jaxon might have had some thoughts, as he hauled out his well-worn  
spiel.

Or maybe it's more personal. I once lost a stash of books myself, in  
New York, as a student. The super tossed cartons of my treasured  
volumes when he cleaned up after a sublet. They took the garbage scow  
to Staten Island and joined acres of trash there. At the time, I'd  
gladly have given my right arm to get them back. I can identify with  
that forlorn figure, slumped on a Manhattan sidewalk, lamenting the  
fate of his beloved library.