Big Bear: The End of Freedom

Jenifer Lepiano was a writer and drama teacher in Toronto.

One hundred years after Big Bear was found guilty of insurrection and rebellion for his part in the uprisings at Frog Lake and Fort Pitt, the words of appeal which he spoke on behalf of his people still resonate with a desperate hope. Unlike Louis Riel, Big Bear never became a martyr. He was released from his Manitoba penitentiary a year before he died, abandoned by all but his daughter, Earth Child. His life had been a struggle, in the early years of Canada’s nationhood, against the disintegration of the prairie Cree.

Hugh Dempsey reconstructs this struggle in a meticulously researched and sensitively developed study of the North-West during Big Bear’s lifetime. Through his own interviews and correspondence with Big Bear’s grandson, Four Souls, whom Dempsey claims as a “sort of” cousin, he gives an Indian voice to his portrait of the part-Ojibwa chief. The result should not disappoint even those whose closest encounter with Big Bear has been Rudy Wiebe’s monumental The Temptations of Big Bear (McClelland and Stewart, 1973). The historian’s Big Bear emerges with undiminished stature as a “highly intelligent political leader,” a man of wit and humour, a mystic. He is a tragic figure in the classic sense of someone whose clarity of vision is obscured by the gods’ shadow. “He did not hate either the white man or the government,” Dempsey tells us, “for they were facts of life.” He believed he could use the white man’s laws to buy time for his people.

He was wrong. And in spite of the treaty which he was eventually forced to sign, Big Bear can not be called Canadian. Dempsey has subtitled his work “The End of Freedom.” It is a haunting study.