As for why Thatcher took such an interest in the sculpture in the first place, Frances Kaye's research has suggested that many in Regina believed the sculpture had been commissioned for purely political purposes: in doing so, he could present himself as a "friend" to First Peoples three weeks before an election in which he hoped to attract Métis, Non-Status, and First Nations support: "Whether or not Thatcher ever articulated the goal to himself, he seems to have understood that in his Riel - for he made it his Riel statue - he was reinventing the Indian... and setting him up as the bourgeois, Europeanized, assimilated man."