History catches up with Komagata Maru villain — and it’s good riddance

At a news event Friday morning, federal Minister of Public Services Carla Qualtrough and Minister of Defence Harjit Sajjan announced the removal of Henry Herbert Stevens’ name from a federal public building at 125 10th Ave. E. in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.

The building will not be renamed but, in the spirit of Indigenous reconciliation, the ministers recognized a newly painted mural on the building as a “symbolic gesture of reconciliation to the victims of the Komagata Maru incident” and as a way of commemorating “the kindness of spirit” demonstrated by the nearby Indigenous Peoples at that time.

Unlike his peers on the Pantheon of Canadian Villainry, Stevens placed no bounties on the scalps of Indigenous people, nor did he indiscriminately order their hangings. Rather, Stevens’ crimes against humanity were committed against Sikh and Punjabi immigrants, and his limited historical contribution — he held various cabinet postings and also a short stint as the chairperson of the Vancouver Board of Trade later in his life — was in helping close the doors on Asian immigration in the first half of the 20th century.

In 1914, Stevens was a member of Parliament from Vancouver during the Komagata Maru incident. And at the time, he was the loudest voice of white supremacy on the West Coast, whipping up mobs and hysteria to support the Canadian government in turning away this chartered vessel from Burrard Inlet and back to India at naval gunpoint.

The 376 passengers on the Komagata Maru were not “boat people.” Nor were they refugee “migrants,” such as those central to current-day political storylines in the U.S. and Europe. They were equal citizens of the British Empire, and many of the Sikhs aboard the vessel were veterans of the Indian Army, soldiers who had fought on behalf of the Crown in conflicts such as the Boer War or Boxer Rebellion. Yet they were forced to return to India.

Even a century ago, Stevens’ racist rhetoric was extremist, even though it was the era of race politics, when miscegenation laws were still enforced in the U.S. and our politicians and newspapers openly advocated for Canada being a “white man’s country.”

“I challenge any man living to bring out a single instance in the whole history of the Indian nation to show that their civilization has done anything at all to uplift the other races of the world. I say their civilization is unproductive of good to the human race as a whole,” Stevens outrageously stated at the time.

In August 2008, then prime minister Stephen Harper publicly apologized for the Komagata Maru incident.

The opinion of Canadians on removing monuments and renaming buildings varies widely depending on where one is situated on the political spectrum. According to a poll by the Angus Reid Institute, the removal of a John A. Macdonald statue outside of Victoria City Hall last fall was opposed by 80 per cent of respondents who had voted for the Conservatives in the 2015 federal election.

Whereas, in comparison, only 40 per cent of NDP voters were against the removal.

The hesitation against revising public memorials or removing statues — regardless of who is on the pedestal — is understandable. After all, removing a public monument doesn’t change history. And nor should we want it to. The sins, as much as the virtues, of our previous generations inform who we are today.

And then there are the perils of forgetting. As has been repeated to the point of becoming a cliché, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

So for as much pushback and heel-digging as Victoria City Hall’s Witness Reconciliation Program received last year for taking down John A. Macdonald’s statue, city officials deserve an equal amount of praise in erecting a replacement plaque that explains why the statue was removed. It contextualized Macdonald’s legacy and it opened space for a more nuanced reading of the man considered this country’s founding father.

H.H. Stevens, however, was no John A. Macdonald. He was a local politician in early 20th century Vancouver, a marginal port town on the extreme edge of the British Empire wherein Canada was still a dominion.

And had the Komagata Maru been permitted to dock, as it should have been, Stevens would long ago have been forgotten.

But instead he gained a public profile by fanning the baser populist sentiments of the city’s underclasses from that era — not all that different than how a former reality TV star turned current U.S. president does so today.

And it earned him, named in his honour, a nondescript, low-storey government building in a Vancouver suburb — more acclaim than he is worth and for what he actually contributed to Canada.

It’s time to exile him to the footnotes.

Future generations are better off not crossing paths, inadvertently or otherwise, with such an undignified individual.

Source: History catches up with Komagata Maru villain — and it’s good riddanceH.H. Stevens was the loudest voice of white supremacy on the West Coast, and it’s about time his name was scrubbed from a Vancouver government building, Jagdeesh Mann writes.