Banishing Unsavory History to the Dustbin Doesn't Work
It should go without saying that we live in a world of constant change.
One of those changes is profound, even in a world besieged by pandemic.
I’m referring to the recent tsunami wave of consciousness of our colonial past. For Americans, it’s acknowledging a groundswell of resentment for more than two centuries of mistreatment of indigenous and black people. Even the Confederate flag, revered by millions, has come into disrepute.
Closer to home, we’ve just recognized that residential schools were evil—yet it’s only the tip of the iceberg of our colonial history.
History is not about the past—it’s about the present and the future. Without the past there is no present or future. Anyone who thinks otherwise simply isn’t paying attention!
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In just three years my clipping file on this contentious subject has grown to be an inch and a-half thick. Surfing online is a bottomless hole.
So, where to begin?
How about with a few of the more recent newspaper headlines?
● Broadcasters grapple with stereotypes from past
● Halifax to review use of ‘Micmac’ on city signs
● Residential-school survivors call for monuments of honour
● Vandalism sparks monument scrutiny
● Task force wants to erase Cornwallis from Halifax
● Memorializing anybody risks false worship
● P.E.I. statue of first prime minister doused in red paint
And on and on and on....
If you still don’t think statues can be lightning rods for political and philosophical discontent, think again.
For well over a century the variations of a smiling Aunt Jemima logo have graced packages of pancake mix and syrup bottles. But times have changed.
In June an Albuquerque, New Mexico man was charged with shooting one of a group of protesters who were attempting to tear down a bronze statue of Spanish conquistador Juan de Onate outside a museum. While revered as a “cultural father figure” by many of Spanish ancestry, Onate is reviled by others for his brutality among Native Americans.
Police had to use tear gas and flash bangs to disperse the shooter’s armed friends while arresting him. Aside from the attempted homicide, Police Chief Michael Geier told news reporters that if suspicions of organized vigilanteism were confirmed, his department would prosecute “to the fullest extent of the law, including federal hate group designation”.
That’s an extreme example of attempted revisionism and, in this particular case, consequence. On a much gentler plane, also in June 2020, Canadian and American pancake lovers lost a household standby, ‘Aunt Jemima.’ For 131 years the smiling face of a middle-aged black woman has graced the packaging of pancake batter and syrup. Even the syrup bottle was part of the image, being shaped “like a matronly woman”. But the current company owner, Quaker Oats, decided that their logo was based on a “racial stereotype” and had to go.
Coincidentally(?), within hours of the announcement, Uncle Ben, the grandfatherly looking black man on rice packages was also retired—or “evolved” in the words of a company spokesperson. Other leading brand logos that have been recently come under review by their manufacturers are Cream of Wheat and Colgate-Palmolive’s Darkie brand toothpaste.
Referring to the smiling black chef holding a bowl of cereal on the Cream of Wheat package, a spokesperson for maker B&G Foods said, “We understand there are concerns regarding the chef image, and we are committed to evaluating our packaging and will proactively take steps to ensure that we and our brands do not inadvertently contribute to systemic racism.”
(I’m not familiar with Darkie tooth paste but I must confess that I, a white man of Anglo-Saxon descent who grew up using the other three products, never perceived the logos of Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben or the Cream of Wheat chef as being demeaning to their portrayed race. Heck, as a longtime bottle collector, I actually thought the amber-glass figural syrup bottle attractive. Does that make me insensitive—or worse?)
Which takes us into the very grey area of personal perception. Not everyone, not even those who sincerely believe themselves to be attuned to the finer points of equal rights and respect, views this touchy subject through the same telescope.
In fact, it can be argued that some people have the telescope turned around—but more on that later.
The statue of Capt. James Cook in Victoria's Inner Harbour was recently attacked by vandals. He's probably the greatest naval explorer of all time. Obviously, the members of the Captain Cook Society don't have a problem with his legacy.
2020, which has entered the history books as the year of the worst pandemic since the Asian ‘Flu of 1918-19, also recorded another major news event, one that, thanks to communications technology, went viral: the death of black man George Floyd while being arrested by Minneapolis police officers. Video images of his being held in what proved to be a fatal choke-hold swept the globe and sparked protests, rioting and retaliation across the U.S. and in Canada. Even Britain felt the repercussions when protesters in London, taking other acts of outrage over Floyd’s death as their cue, attacked a monument to a prominent slave-trader, Robert Milligan.
Responded Mayor Sadiq Khan: “It is an uncomfortable truth that our nation and city [owe] a large part of its wealth to its role in the slave trade and while this is reflected in our public realm, the contributions of many of our communities to life in our capital [have] been been wilfully ignored.”
Khan gave notice that other statutes of “imperialist figures” could be removed by the city, while, in Bristol, the statue of another 17th-century slave trader was dumped in the harbour.
All of which sparked calls for Oxford University to remove a statue of African imperialist Cecil Rhodes who made his fortune from diamonds mined by exploited black workers. Not even his beneficial Rhodes Scholarships are enough to win him forgiveness. At least the protesters contented themselves with cries of “Take it down!” and a sit-in rather than indulging in vandalism or violence.
(A large statue of Rhodes, erected in 1934, had already been removed from the University of Cape Town in 2015. And the Rhodes Scholarships noted above were renamed the Mandela Rhodes Scholarships in 2003.)
The 2020 tidal wave of protest also washed away King Leopold II’s statue in Antwerp, Belgium. Officials removed it with a crane after it was daubed with paint, saying they’d make repairs but without committing to when or if it would be returned to its downtown pedestal. Leopold is held personally responsible for his nation’s oft-brutal governance of its African colonies from 1885-1908. An estimated 10 million Congolese died during those two decades of exploitation of the country’s rubber resources.
In Edinburgh, Scotland, calls were made for the removal of a statue of Henry Dundas, an 18th-century politician who fought tooth-and-nail for 15 years to delay Britain’s abolition of slavery. There would be “absolutely no sense of loss” if the statue came down and was replaced “with something else or left as a plinth,” said City Councillor Adam McVey.
Even Sir Winston Churchill, venerated as Britain’s Second World War prime minister, has come under fire with protesters daubing “was a racist” on his statue in London.
Even Sir Winston Churchill has been called out as a racist. --Wikipedia Photo
No one can deny Churchill’s monumental role and contributions to his nation and to history but anyone who has read his memoirs knows he bluntly expressed racist views unworthy of an Archie Bunker. In this case, Mayor Khan defended Churchill’s memory and memorial: “Nobody’s perfect, whether it’s Churchill, whether it’s Ghandi, whether it’s Malcolm X.” He thinks the solution is education: teaching children about “historical figures warts and all”.
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I could go on indefinitely citing examples of the growing rejection of some of the most unsavoury chapters in the history of the western world but I’m going to turn the magnifying glass closer to home.
In Port Alberni, some parents and residents recently demanded the renaming of the local high school and a road which honour the memory of a former member of parliament who spent most of his public career speaking out against Asian immigrants.
In Victoria, the namesake of George Jay Elementary School was publicly damned for his public career-long resistance to Asian children being included in the public school system and in the community at large.
There’s a movement afoot to rename Mount Douglas and Mount Douglas Park PKOLS (pqals), meaning “White Head” in Senkoten dialect as the mountain, to quote Wikipedia, was “a culturally significant gathering and meeting place of the Sencoten and Lekwungen peoples, a site for ceremonies and sharing important news”.
To erase its present name from the maps in the name of colonial correction would be truly ironic as James (later Sir James) Douglas, a mulatto, made the only real attempt by successive colonial and 19th-century provincial governments to come to terms with First Nations tribes by negotiating land rights. In recent years the resulting Douglas Treaties, as they’re known, have drawn mounting criticism of their own. At least Douglas tried. No, he wasn’t perfect, either, but he absolutely shines when compared with other pioneering politicians. He is in fact, if not in the widely accepted sense, one of our Fathers of Confederation. Without Sir James Douglas there would be no province of British Columbia today, we’d be an American state.
This brings us back to Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Winston Churchill, to name but two of the “great” names of history whose careers and personal philosophies have now come to be viewed (by some) as less than stellar.
Without Prime Minister Macdonald there would have been no Confederation. Canada as we know it would never have existed except as a geographically and culturally fractured eastern continental collective that, with the possible exception of Quebec, would inevitably have been devoured by the U.S. How do we weigh an achievement like that against his creation of residential schools which have come to be viewed as nothing less than deliberate cultural genocide?
Churchill’s role as leader of the besieged British Isles is considered to be one of the inspirational highlights of the worst war in history. But, as expressed in his own writings, he looked down—way down—upon people of colour. His was the view that made Great Britain’s the world’s all time greatest empire—the view that people of less advanced cultures were placed on this earth for the benefit of the ‘enlightened’ and the powerful.
Again, how do we reconcile these extremes?
Well, this, in turn, brings us to the new catch-word of various levels of Canadian government: Reconciliation.
It’s been coined to address our attempts to atone for the residential schools but has morphed into a catch-all for the attempts now underway and proposed to reinvent our governmental and public approaches to our First Nations and Metis peoples.
Colonialism has finally become a dirty word. We have so much to answer for, so many errors, sins and omissions of the past to correct, where to begin?
Who better to ask than our First Nations and Metis? And, of course, other victims of systemic racial oppression, such as our Asian and black immigrants.
(A personal aside, if I may: I grew up in 1950s Saanich (okay, Victoria) and went to school with a smattering of black, Indo- and Chinese-Canadians. No First Nations children shared my classrooms—I didn’t even meet any until I went berry picking one summer in my early teens—and if any of my schoolmates were Jewish I never knew or cared. I remember Mahoney (pronounced ‘Mownie’) Singh as one of the most popular kids in my elementary class. Discrimination? I don’t recall seeing, hearing or experiencing anything that would qualify as such.
Or was I deafened and blinded by my white privilege?
(Me, the kid who thrived on American western movies where the hero or the cavalry whupped the Indians every time. Take that, Geronimo!
(Innocent as I was, even as I grew older, I can remember the feeling of self-righteousness when the civil rights movement, with all its inspiration and ugliness, swept our southern neighbours. Not in my Canada, eh? Black people oppressed in Canada? No way!
(Well, I’ve come to know better. And as for British Columbia, its very name a target for revision in recent years, I have to confess that, for all my acquired knowledge of provincial history, I’m a late-bloomer when it comes to recognizing our colonial past as such. By which I mean that I instinctively accepted the white settlement of what would become Canada’s westernmost province as the natural order of things.)
Well, I’ve learned a bit in recent years. And I’m still learning.
One thing I do know is that toppling and defacing statues isn’t the answer. This is ignorance betting ignorance. If we want to defy the famed and cynical quote of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history,” we must use the lessons of the past for that very purpose—as lessons that teach us to do better.
In other words, we shouldn’t just condemn—sometimes, it appears, on scant evidence—but seek out and learn the truth from credible if not irrefutable sources then, armed with that knowledge, set our course. There’s a danger here, of course, that truth, like beauty, can be in the eye of the beholder. As has been said, to the victors belong not just the spoils but the power to write history as they see it. Our colonial history as it has been presented and recorded since the arrival of the first Europeans certainly confirms this.
Cynical philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Another way to learn is to listen—not just to academics but to the very people who have experienced generational and systemic discrimination and oppression. In July 2019, The Canadian Press reported that the Manitoba Metis Federation wasn’t supporting a petition to change Winnipeg streets and schools named after Viscount Garnet Joseph Wolseley the 19th-century officer who, on orders of Prime Minister Macdonald, suppressed the Red River Resistance and “caused great harm to Metis and other indigenous people”.
After a two-day conference, Federation president David Chartrand and cabinet came to the decision that the names of “those who harmed the Metis ancestors” should be retained to “ensure their destructive legacies are not forgotten or repeated”. The MMF’s conclusion: “controversial names and monuments can create good teaching moments”.
I’m going to sign off with another news report, “Residential-school survivors call for monuments of honour,” from last January.
Stephanie Scott, Director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, is in favour of monuments—those which honour residential-school survivors and their families. She wants federal, provincial and territorial governments to build monuments in capital cities across Canada.
“Canadians need to know the truth and understand what happened in order to foster true reconciliation and healing,” she told the House of Commons heritage committee. “Commemoration and education are critical to understand the complicated and difficult history that we share as Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.”
She also wants a National Day to mark truth and reconciliation that acknowledges survivors and the human-rights violations they endured. “We have seen time and again what a difference education can make to the journey we are now all on together to reconcile our past and create a bright future.”
What’s that I hear? “Yeah, yeah, enough already, time to move on.”
We’ve had numerous formal government apologies and, in some cases, cash settlements, in recent years for policies of the past that are now recognized as not being just regrettable and unthinking but even malevolent.
Move on? Not near good enough. The time is long past to recognize the past, “warts and all,” to quote the good mayor of London, and make things right for the present and for the future.
In short: actually learn from history!
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