During March of 1869, the Hudson's Bay Company sells all of Rupert's Land to the central government of Canada. The government of Canada begins to assert itself in what today is Manitoba by sending lieutenant governor William McDougall and crews of surveyors to the Red River. The natives and the Metis were alarmed that no one from the Canadian government was consulting them about the move to divide Rupert's Land into parcels that would be eventually given or sold to future settlers. This move from Ottawa threatened to destroy their traditional method of hunting, and more importantly, threatened their way of life. So the Metis created the Metis National Committee and hired a charismatic, bilingual Montreal-educated 25 year old Metis, Louis Riel.
On November 2nd, 1869, Louis Riel establishes a legal provisional government in Rubert's Land in the Red River Settlement. As secretary (later to become president) of the Metis National Committee, he feared that Anglo-Protestant settlers from Ontario would arrive in large numbers to settle in what was traditionally Metis land (the Metis were a people of mixed European and Aboriginal ancestry).
The video above is the 1979 film Riel.
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