Big Bear: The Man and His People

Big Bear was a noble man who yearned for peace between the Red man and the White, but was caught up in the vortex of his time - a time when the whites pushed into the Cree lands along the Blue Canadian Rockies, when the white government in Ottawa was diffident to the fate of the Natives, when Canada's vast buffalo herds were slaughtered to near extinction, and when unscrupulous traders poisoned the Crees with Whiskey and Illness, and Cree women were forced into prostitution to survive. Big Bear? For Americans and even Canadians who are unfamiliar with the Riel Rebellion of 1884-1885, think Sitting Bull meets Chief Joseph. Big Bear was more a medicine man than a fighting chief, and like the Nez Perce Chief Joseph, preferred co-existence with the Whites. But events, including the chaotic aftermath of the Little Big Horn, the expansion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, the arrival in Canada of American whiskey traders - and finally the savage decimation of Canada's Buffalo herds by the beginning of the 1880s pushed Big Bear over the edge. Urging co-existence and compromise, only to see his efforts largely ignored by the national government in Ottawa, and watching his people slowly starve to death when the Canadian promise of food never materialized, Big Bear, against his better judgment, rallied his people to the side of the equally persecuted Metis, the half-French, half-Indian people led by the fiery Louis Riel. When Riel promised the Indians that they would have a sovereign entity if the rebellion succeeded, Big Bear joined Riel in his desperate rebellion against the Canadian authorities. Despite some initial victories, the rebellion was quickly crushed by the superior firepower of the RCMP and the (British) Canadian militia. Whereas Big Bear sought only peace and reconciliation, the victorious Canadians, fearing that a successful rebellion would have seen a Metis state in alliance with the United States, as well as a sovereign Cree-Blackfoot entity as promised by Riel, sought only vengeful and reprisal. Riel was hanged, in a trial that borderlined on judicial murder. Big Bear and his fellow chief Poundmaker were sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted to long prison terms. Although the sentences were later reduced, and Big Bear released after only a couple of years in a Canadian prison, he soon sickened and died, about a year after his release. Many say, as in the case of Chief Joseph, that Big Bear did of a broken heart. If Big Bear was the kind of warrior chief that Crazy Horse was, and had Riel's rebellion took place right after Custer's Last Stand, when the Metis-Cree-Blackfoot alliance might have even linked up with the Sioux (the Sioux and the Blackfoot were enemies, but they might have considered an alliance of convienence in a war against the hated Whites), history would have been changed - with Canada's western provinces quite possible included into the United States with the possible allowance of a sovereign Indian n