Abstract

‘‘Zones of Intelligibility’: The Trial of Louis Riel and Nineteenth-Century Canadian Media” is a critical discourse analysis of Louis Riel’s 1886 trial transcript. Using a post colonial, interdisciplinary, and critical race approach, I examine various Canadian media upon which the event was predicated. My research project enters Canadian history in the mid-nineteenth-century setting of Riel’s 1885 high treason trial and uniquely draws together three distinct areas: Canadian media history, illustrative print culture, and the intertextual use of Shakespearean works in a selection of media. The 1886 trial transcript is my point of departure from which I address how the tripartite discourses of sovereignty, civility, and memory, each with inherent paradoxes, operate through the media to cultivate a specific national pathos that shaped the zones of intelligibility and naturalized the (mis) representation of Louis Riel, the Métis peoples, and Aboriginal Nations in Canada. My analysis of Louis Riel’s trial transcript is concerned with critically addressing the historic and inherently dichotomous verdict, guilty or innocent, to uncover what it elides. Here, I argue, Riel’s trial was not about his guilt or innocence, nor his insanity or sanity; Riel’s trial and his execution were about Métis people’s sovereignty.