The Red River Valley & the Real Riel Resistance

The old Canadian folk song entitled “The Red River Valley” has become for me one of the greatest human artifacts, on the same ineffable level as Grimm's fairy tales, Bach, the Bible or Leonardo – way beyond any individual's life.

I've listened to forty or fifty renditions of it recently, and have the suspicion that it may be one of the most recorded songs in human history, although I have no way of knowing that. There are already too many recordings of it in YouTube for me to bear. The version I like best, and to which I've listened countless times over and over again, is this one by Stevie Nicks and Chris Isaak:

The Red River runs northward from below Fargo/Moorhead up through Winnipeg into Lake Winnipeg and the historical context of the song's origin was from 1870, plus or minus twenty years when the “Indians” were being “removed,” Canada was reaching from coast to coast, the Hudson's Bay Company was being bought out, there was the “French problem,” there was the threat of the “Americans” taking over that territory, and a spectacular explosion of greedy individualistic exploitation.

One history of the times that I like is Maggie Siggins' Riel: A Life of Revolution (1994). There are probably better accounts of those times but this one, focussing on the leader of the Métis (the mix of French and Indian) against Macdonald and “Anglo” Canada, but Siggins' 500 pages were a good start for me.

It also has surprized me that it has only been within the last twenty years or so that we have really understood that this was the context of the song, “The Red River Valley.” One very good historical account of the song's origin was done by the Manitoba Historical Society in 2013, The True Story of the Song “Red River Valley”

The predominant previous view was that it was a U.S. cowboy song about how lonely he was, even though it really didn't fit very well with the Marlboro Man imagery. But if you see it as a mature expression of love in the middle of military occupation and confrontation and the hanging of Louis Riel and what he symbolized, a song that takes a Métis woman's perspective, perhaps even written for that perspective from a sensitive soul from the Gaelic tradition, it becomes much more than a cowboy's whining. It becomes a transcendence of war by the human spirit, and the expression our wish for that transcendence.

I think of Riel's effort in that light, less as Rebellion and more as Resistance to Anglo domination.

The Lyrics:

From this valley they say you are going,
We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile,
For they say you are taking the sunshine
Which has brightened our pathways a while.

Chorus

Come and sit by my side if you love me;
Do not hasten to bid me adieu,
But remember the Red River Valley,
And the girl that has loved you so true.

I've been thinking a long time, my darling,
Of the sweet words you never would say,
Now, alas, must my fond hopes all vanish?
For they say you are going away.

Won't you think of the valley you're leaving,
Oh, how lonely and sad it will be,
Just think of the fond heart you're breaking,
And the grief you are causing to me.

From this valley they say you are going,
When you go, may your darling go too?
Would you leave her behind unprotected,
When she loves no one other than you.

As you go to your home by the ocean,
May you never forget those sweet hours,
That we spent in the Red River Valley,
And the love we exchanged 'mid the flowers.

I have promised you, darling, that never
Will a word from my lips cause you pain,
And my life, it will be yours forever,
If you only will love me again.

They will bury me where you have wandered,
Near the hills where the daffodils grow,
When you're gone from the Red River valley,
For I can't live without you I know.