Historians are frequently asked to serve up heroes to reinforce national identity or morality. They are expected by some to be storytellers in the same manner that village elders and wise men once transmitted past glories orally to succeeding generations. Herodotus, the man generally called the father of history, was fascinated with the exploits of a large variety of peoples, but professional historians generally see him as a spinner of tales based on shaky evidence and myth. More recently, post-modernist literary critics have tried to cast the entire historical enterprise as mere storytelling.

  Historians themselves came to prefer another ancient Greek, Thucydides, even though his approach to history was more narrowly focused on war, diplomacy and politics. Believing that the past repeated itself, he set out on a quest to provide a true account. Unless an account was true to the past, it might not be used as a guide by future generations. Consequently, there was more humanity and were fewer heroes in Thucydides's history.

  Herodotus's broad cultural approach and Thucydides's more narrow and exacting method remain the twin poles within which contemporary historians continue to work. Popular historians such as Pierre Berton remain intent on the story line and vivid characterization with larger-than-life individuals, whereas professional historians take a more analytical approach. They try not only to recount the past but also to correct misconceptions that have been passed on as history. A true account remains their quest.

  The discipline of history is thereby antithetical to the search for heroes. As history seeks to assess the strengths and weaknesses of past societies and individuals, its practitioners face special difficulties in Canada, a country where anti-Americanism remains rampant more in English-speaking quarters. The Americans have global wealth, power and prestige, this line of thought goes, but because Canada scores at the top among countries on the United Nations human development index, we must have had heroes at least as great as theirs. We need heroes to assert our distinctiveness in the face of the American colossus. If only our historians would write about them.

  Who are Canadian heroes popularly conceived? As long as white males dominated the teaching and writing of history, the answers were easy enough. Dead generals and politicians sufficed. Politicians never quite fit the bill because they generally died in their beds, and partisanship worked against politicians conforming to the ideal. In the case of the country's first prime minister, the redoubtable Sir John A. Macdonald, drinking served as a further liability. And William Lyon Mackenzie King was always ruled out - despite his repeated successes at the polls - because of his mother fixation, peculiar relations with the opposite sex and spiritualist encounters.

  Occasionally a minor political figure such as Thomas D'Arcy McGee came along to enjoy brief renown. McGee was not only a politician but also an important cultural nationalist who had the misfortune to be assassinated in 1868, a year after the Confederation of four British North American colonies. For a decade, McGee served to inspire the Canada First Movement, a small group intent on creating a new nationality that would surmount regional differences, but thereafter his reputation waned, except among Irish Canadians, who kept his memory alive into the 1930s.

  Military leaders who died in the field with their boots on were once the most suitable national heroes. General James Wolfe served admirably in this capacity up to the 1950s when a National Film Board documentary portrayed his manly British victory over the effeminate French General Montcalm at Quebec in 1759. Generations of Ontario's schoolchildren intoned the lyrics of The Maple Leaf Forever that began with the words: "In days of yore from Britain's shores, Wolfe the dauntless hero came. . . ." The 18th-century painter Benjamin West immortalized Wolfe's death on a giant canvas intended to celebrate the victory of British arms in Canada.

  Wolfe faded from prominence as a crisis in French-English relations erupted during the 1960s. O Canada squeezed out its unofficial predecessor that so offended new bicultural sensibilities. At the same time, art historians noted that West's portrait was not put together until several decades after the general's death. It was essentially a genre painting conforming to European artistic conventions. Attempting to portray a "noble savage," West placed a representative of the First Nations dutifully sitting below a dying Wolfe and gazing up at the hero in sublime contemplation of his greatness. For their part, historians concluded that Wolfe had been no better than a good regimental commander who had finally been lucky to find a means to scale the heights to Quebec's upper town.

  In portrayals of Wolfe and of General Sir Isaac Brock, another Brit who emerged as a hero following his death at Queenston Heights during the War of 1812, we see how supposedly national figures were used to promote ethnic and regional identities that were unrepresentative of the country at large. By their very nature, heroes balkanize rather than promote unity.

  Canada's principal language minority therefore had to have a counter hero whose importance was skilfully crafted by Quebec's pre-eminent historian, Canon Lionel Groulx. He began teaching Canadian history at the Université de Montréal in 1915 and was so offended by the federal government's appropriation of French Canada's past during the First World War that he succeeded in elevating an obscure 17th-century youth into a Quebec nationalist icon.

  Ottawa had made the mistake of using a representation of a man named Adam Dollard des Ormeaux in its recruiting posters. All that was known about Dollard des Ormeaux at the time was that he, a small band of young Frenchmen and 40 aboriginal allies had been killed by the Iroquois confederacy at a moment when it was thought the Iroquois were planning to attack Montreal.

  Although the federal government portrayed Dollard des Ormeaux as an example of self-sacrifice in Canadian military service, Groulx successfully changed the slain young man into a model of dedicated service to French Canada and to the Roman Catholic religion. Dollard des Ormeaux was portrayed as having saved Montreal from extinction because no Iroquois attack was launched against Montreal in 1660 when he and the others were slaughtered. He became the saviour of New France who was portrayed in school textbooks as a hero for Quebec's youth to emulate. In 1960, Canada Post commemorated the 300th anniversary of his death with a stamp.

  Who hears of Dollard des Ormeaux today, even in Quebec? Almost no one. Historians showed that he and his bands had been only thieves intent on robbing the Iroquois of their furs. Fears of an attack on Montreal were only rumours. Full frontal assaults on forts such as Montreal were European tactics; aboriginal peoples preferred guerrilla warfare. The episode is only worthy of historical notice because it probably represented the death of the last Huron warriors in North America.

  The way such heroes have been eclipsed shows how history has shifted its focus away from national victories and politico-military narratives. This tendency has been reinforced by the 20th century's revulsion at cults of personality in countries such as Germany, the former Soviet Union and China. Canada's aboriginal peoples can no longer be vilified or our greatest trading partner seen as the chief enemy. Such characterizations were only functional while nationalism battled imperialism and the country fought in both world wars.

  Canada today must be placed within a global context that inhibits the portrayal of its national history as a series of parochial battles involving caricatures. A democratic country needs a democratic history that gives full expression to the varieties of its people's experiences. As attention to regional, ethnic and cultural/linguistic differences has expanded, new heroes have sprung up that dominant majorities see as anti-heroes.

  Louis Riel, the Métis leader and "father of Manitoba," is Canada's quintessential minority hero. Since he was hanged by the Canadian government following the abortive 1885 Northwest Rebellion, each generation has interpreted Riel differently. His memory remains hotly contested.

  Riel may have forced the birth of Manitoba in 1869, but his leadership in 1885 proved fatal for the Métis people. A religious millenarian who spent time in a mental hospital, Riel entertained visions of the papacy moving from Rome to Saint-Boniface. Bishop Taché of Manitoba told his Quebec colleagues that Riel was "a miserable schismatic and heretic."

  Riel fiddled with his visions during the Northwest Rebellion. He refused to countenance Gabriel Dumont's plans for guerrilla war, which alone might have brought victory to the Métis and their Indian allies. Today there is movement afoot to accord Riel a posthumous pardon, but what good that will do a dead U.S. citizen (as Riel had become) I will never know. The politics of commemoration and history are different.

  Not only do most historical heroes turn out to be flawed humans, but they have also generally been men. As a cult of heroes rose in the late 19th century and as women were shunted to the sides of the historical profession, Quebec women extolled the virtues of the women of New France, and Ontario women found a heroine in Laura Secord.

  Secord had managed to cross enemy lines to inform a British commander of an impending American attack at Beaver Dams during the War of 1812. No one was prouder of her accomplishment than the woman herself. She constantly petitioned the government for recognition and a pension, but it was not until the Prince of Wales took an interest during his visit to Canada in 1860 that her larger star began to rise. Although genuine heroines should not be seen to profit materially from their acts any more than heroes should, Secord's place in the public pantheon was not secured until the commercialization of her name. The iconography of her images on those chocolate boxes conveys much about how womanhood has been represented in 20th-century Canada.

  Heroism does exist in individual acts of bravery, but heroines and heroes are generally those nipped so young in life that their heroism is conflated with the ideal of the hero. First World War flying ace Billy Bishop is an example of someone who outlived his earlier reputation. For this reason, a national poll recently registered one-legged runner Terry Fox as the country's outstanding hero. The choice was fitting, even if his selection confused heroes with heroism.

Prof. Terry Crowley is a faculty member in the Department of History.