Monuments as Safe Spaces

There has been so much going on over the last 9 months that I have found it overwhelming. Kobe Bryant and Chadwick Boseman’s deaths, Donald Trump’s continued foray into alt-right politics, Black Lives Matter protests including the destruction of monuments, police brutality, all in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. 2020 is going to be one of those historic landmark years for better or for worse. I’ve found this year so challenging to wrap my head around that I have been paralyzed from my ability to write here, but I have a lot of thoughts. Today, I am going to let some of those thoughts leak out of brain starting with some thoughts about monuments as being inclusive and safe spaces. Let’s see what comes out.

Black Lives Matter protests have spurred much illegal destruction of monuments of controversial figures in the United States. This has spurred conversations in Canada regarding our monuments, most notably that of John A. MacDonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister, the pride of Kingston, Ontario, and the father of Canada’s Indigenous Residential School System. On June 22, CBC’s All in a Day radio program had a discussion regarding MacDonald’s statue in Kingston’s town square as well as the Faculty of Law which is named after MacDonald at Queen’s University. Two Indigenous women gave opinions and expressed how MacDonald’s commemoration in these spaces makes them feel unsafe and unwelcome and how something needs to be changed whether it’s a removal of the statue or some sort of modification to additional context. More recently, Mi’kmaq Elder and residential school survivor Marie Knockwood of Abegweit First Nation in Prince Edward Island is campaigning to have MacDonald’s statue removed from Charlottetown’s downtown area by educating people in the streets.

Many people scoff at the idea of the removal MacDonald’s monuments across Canada arguing that he’s the father of confederation and without him there wouldn’t be a Canada, or that we’d be erasing history, or that we should not judge him by a modern lens (i.e. all white people were racists in the late-nineteenth century therefore we can’t judge him for being a racist), or that the act of giving into the demands of minorities is somehow a reverse-racist act toward white people (yeah, I don’t get that one either).

The issue with this debate is that of narrative. For historical figures, multiple narratives surround them coming from different segments of the population. Some of these narratives are positive, and some are negative. Here are some narratives surrounding MacDonald:

• He is the father of the confederation of Canada and founded a country without going to war with Britain
• He initiated the construction of a transnational railroad that connects the provinces from east to west
• He successfully fostered a partnership with the province of Québec despite linguistic, religious, and cultural differences bringing English and French Canada together into one country
• He founded a federal police service, the Northwest Mounted Police (now known as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police), designed to oppress and subjugate Indigenous People
• He founded the Indian Residential School System designed to rid children of their Indigenous culture and language through physical, mental, and emotional abuse which has perpetuated intergenerational trauma that Indigenous people still feel today
• He signed treaties with First Nations of Canada to obtain land in exchange for certain benefits
• He passed The Indian Act designed to disqualify First Nation individuals from receiving treaty benefits and which over time would eliminate any individual being able to claim legal recognition as an Indian
• He charged a head tax on Chinese people to enter the country even though he needed them to build his railroad. Chinese workers were often given the most dangerous roles and many died. Once the railroad was completed and he didn’t need the Chinese workers anymore, he increased the head tax to curb Chinese immigration to Canada

I just thought of these off the top of my head (forgive me for not wanting to do a ton of research for this post). While I might be missing some nuance and details here and there, all of these narratives are true, more or less. What’s interesting about us as a public is that we pick and choose the narratives we want to embrace and dismiss the ones that contradict the persona we’re trying build around a historical figure. In other words, we have a tendency to construct myths around real people and try to sell these myths as the whole truth. The white population of Canada has generally embraced the first three narratives on my list. The perspectives of other segments of the population such as Indigenous people are largely ignored by the majority and they seem to be systemically excluded from the various curricula in Canadian education. This was demonstrated to me by how I went through 13 years (1989-2003) of public education in Canada without learning about Indian Residential Schools. Residential schools were also ignored in my Canadian History survey courses at the University of Ottawa (2007-2008).

My point in saying all of this is that historical figures are complicated and we cannot ignore true and verified narratives that don’t support the myth that we have embraced about a historic figure. We have to embrace and acknowledge all of it. The anti-Indigenous policies and legislation that MacDonald implemented are not false. They’re not debatable. His racism was rather overt. And while anti-Indigenous racism may have been the norm in Canada among whites, I find it bizarre that MacDonald would throw money at churches to open these schools with no federal oversight. I find it challenging that children had to attend schools hundreds of miles away from home when I am sure there were suitable sites much closer to, if not on reserve. Why did the schools have to be boarding schools and children have to sleep there? Why couldn’t parents have regular access to their children? This does not feel like your typical run-of-the-mill racism of that time period. This feels more like a powerful man deciding that certain human lives were not as valuable as his due to their culture, skin colour, and language but decided their lives could increase in value if their morals and values became more aligned with his. As a result 2,800 children died because of this overtly racist attitude and thousands more suffered physical, emotional, and mental pain which has been passed down generation to generation. Noting the intergenerational problems that MacDonald founded, if we added the subsequent suicides and homicides that have resulted due to his legacy, I’m wouldn’t be surprised if that death toll rose higher than 10,000 people.

Knowing this, we need to be OK with marginalized people speaking up every once and while and saying, “I’m not OK with this person, and I don’t think he should be honoured in this way.” We also should not be surprised if they get angry when the majority ignores their legitimate concerns. I am not suggesting that MacDonald not be honoured at all, but I am suggesting that we reassess how we honour him because certainly there is far more to his story that we fail to acknowledge. However, I should say that I am opposed to the illegal destruction or removal of statues. If the mob destroys the statue, it sort of eliminates the opportunity to have a meaningful dialogue about the person since it just escalates the conflict. That being said, keeping the monument without having a meaningful dialogue is equally destructive.

Now, pro-MacDonald monument people will argue that we will erase history if we remove the MacDonald statues. I personally disagree and would argue that the opposite is true. If we remove a monument due to a reassessment of one’s track record, it means that we have learned something new and found a better way to commemorate a person’s legacy and have given voice to more narratives and to more segments of the population. In fact the larger narrative is enriched, truer, and more thoughtful.