Woman chronicles Louis Riel’s legacy through stamps

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This article was published 19/02/2019 (2654 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Stamps might not be the first way people think about learning about Louis Riel, but a local woman has found they can shed light on the history of the founder of Manitoba.

Donna Boles, president Prairie Mountain Philatelic Society, has put together a collection of stamps that follow the legacy of Riel through Canadian history.

She displayed her collection of Riel stamps at the society’s stamp show at the Park Avenue Activity Centre on Monday. Her gathering starts with a stamp from 1938 showing the gates of Upper Fort Gary, the location Riel turned back land surveyors from the Hudson Bay Company and took over the fort.

“The Métis said, ‘This isn’t your land to sell,’” she said. “they were worried about their culture, their language, their land, everything.”

Boles said she learned much about the man and the early history of Manitoba by collecting stamps. While she has been collecting for 51 years, she only started her Riel effort approximately five years ago, after becoming frustrated with the lack of information put out about the province’s founder.

“I wasn’t finding the Louis Riel information being promoted on Louis Riel Day so I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to see if I can dig up some stuff and learn my own story,’ and there’s lots out there.”

The collection includes what Boles describes as a ‘philatelic mystery.’ A red ink stamp showing a figure wearing a hat with “Liberté” written across it, but stamp collectors are still trying to figure out if it was created during Riel’s provisional government.

Boles also has stamps from the Louis Riel post office in Winnipeg, which was run by the family from until 1963. She said she knew about the existence of the post office before diving into Riel stamps, but didn’t know the finer details of it.

Riel was first put on a stamp for Manitoba’s centennial but the stamp didn’t recognize him as the founder of the province. That didn’t happen until 1988, Boles said.

The most recent stamp in her Riel collection is from 2017, which commemorates the 50-year anniversary of the Louis Riel opera, which the government first commissioned for Canada’s centennial in 1967.

Boles said putting together the collection was about the “thrill of the hunt.” Her stamp collection is almost complete, but she’s still looking to get her hands on a full sheet of Riel stamps from a local collector.

“You might be missing a piece of your story, so you’re trying to find that,” she said.

The early history of the province is intertwined with stamps. Boles said Manitoba was known as the “postage stamp province” when it first entered Confederation in 1870 because of its small size and square shape.

For Boles, stamp collecting allows her to view history through a more critical lens, especially about a man with a controversial place in the history of the country. Boles said she was taught Riel was a “bad guy” in school but has since that time learned much more about him by putting together the history of his stamps.

“I think we need to remember that Manitoba is very rich in history,” she said. “We tend to think that other provinces have more. No, we are very, very rich here.”

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