Coates: Condemning historical figures like Ryerson and John A. Macdonald must not distract us from true reconciliation

2022/06/06 Leave a comment

Condemnation and renaming are easy compared to addressing the substantive issues, where action is more needed, not to mention the regrettable lack of nuance in understanding history and context:

With the decision to rename itself Toronto Metropolitan University, the former Ryerson University — known briefly as “University X” — fumbled the opportunity to use public criticism of Egerton Ryerson as a learning opportunity, instead bowing to the passionate protests of activists who believe that condemning a handful of historical figures is one way to address generations of discrimination and paternalism. 

Attacking the reputation of Ryerson, one of the most effective educational reformers in Canadian history, requires a narrow reading of his career. Regardless, he is now a dead letter in Canadian public life, and efforts to expunge his name from schools, monuments and other public facilities will no doubt continue apace. 

The number one target in the country is now Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald — like Ryerson, singled out for his role in Indigenous residential schools. Across the country, statues in Macdonald’s honour have been removed or doused in red paint, and public bodies are having earnest discussions about removing his name from schools and other facilities. 

There is nothing wrong with calling out or re-examining the public memory of historical figures for their actions. However, reading history reductively, losing sight of context, and misreading personal responsibility do not help us to understand the past. 

Right now, for good reason, the country is focused on a specific policy — residential schools — with the belief that by removing the tributes to the architects of the school movement we can turn a page. This approach is seriously misguided. 

Residential school education was horrific, its multi-generational negative effects still not fully understood. A system purportedly designed to provide personal opportunity to Indigenous students was instead used to attack Indigenous cultures, undermine centuries-old languages, destroy Indigenous families, and assimilate Aboriginal peoples. Dealing with the long-term impact of the residential schools has rightly become a national priority. 

We must, however, remember that the residential school concept was not foisted on an unwilling nation by its government. Virtually all non-Indigenous Canadians of that time, led by the Christian churches and supported by non-Indigenous advocates for Indigenous peoples, favoured residential schools. As late as the 1960s and 1970s, many non-Indigenous Canadians still defended the schools as clearly being a “good thing” and a sign of the benevolent state. 

Most Canadians did not know — or did not want to know — what happened in the schools. They neither expected nor countenanced the violence and brutality, but encouraged teachers and principals to undermine Indigenous language and culture, believing this was in Indigenous people’s best interests.

In today’s efforts to assign accountability for wrongs of the past, the tendency to focus on individuals — whatever their roles in establishing the institutions — simply misses the point. It was racism and a nationwide sense of cultural superiority that backstopped all of Canada’s aggressive actions against Indigenous peoples. If dismantling a statue or renaming a school (or university) serves some, it also deflects attention from where responsibility properly rests: with society at large. 

Criticizing early promoters of residential schools misses the historical mark. 

With Ryerson’s name now removed from a campus, and Macdonald’s image being assailed across Canada, where next? There are thousands of targets, including the political leaders, government and church officials, and public supporters who expanded the residential school system, including its rapid acceleration after the Second World War. 

Let’s consider two potential targets, modern-era political leaders who espoused simple ideas of potentially destructive impact on Indigenous peoples. They wanted to eliminate the Indian Act and Indian status, break up the reserves, abandon treaties, and integrate Indigenous peoples into the Canadian mainstream. Their stated goal sounded honourable to some — producing “real” equality among all Canadians — and there had been consultations, of a sort, with Indigenous groups. 

The 1969 White Paper was one of the most aggressive Indigenous policy initiatives in Canadian history, designed to remove barriers between peoples and overcome decades of discrimination and state paternalism. The response from First Nations was ferocious. Indigenous leaders organized protests and demanded the federal government retract its policy. The government did so, to the dismay of many non-Indigenous Canadians who wanted to remove the “special status” afforded Indigenous peoples. The contemporary Indigenous rights movement in Canada owes a great deal to the reaction to this ill-conceived and assimilationist strategy. 

The Prime Minister was Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His minister of Indian and Northern Affairs was future prime minister Jean Chrétien. They were the architects of the White Paper of 1969. Trudeau believed “no society can be built on historical might-have-beens,” and opposed Indigenous land claim negotiations, modern treaties, and the concept of historical redress. 

The Trudeau government’s much-touted “Just Society” had a blind spot when it came to Indigenous peoples. The government’s preference for state intervention and the inherent paternalism of federal policy in the 1960s and 70s arguably accelerated the decline of Indigenous language and culture, fostering a culture of welfare dependency in Indigenous communities. 

Would it be appropriate for critics of government policy to focus their anger on Trudeau and Chrétien, leading to more monument destruction and renaming? Absolutely not; we can use our time and effort much better. Besides, when faced with sustained Indigenous anger, the Liberal government backed down. Unlike residential schools, which had major effects across generations, the White Paper brought to the surface the core ideas and values of the government of the day.

The past is a complicated place. It should not be reduced to memes and social-media messages. Historical leaders are people, with personal foibles, living in and reflecting their places and times. Democracies hold leaders accountable during their political lives. Historians and the public determine their legacy. Attitudes toward the leaders and their actions change over time, as the debate about John A. Macdonald demonstrates. But these discussions should be handled with caution. 

The piecemeal and reactive redoing of historical nomenclature, however well meaning, produces distortions of history. This said, Canada is desperately overdue for a rethinking of the many people and events we memorialize. 

Names and monuments should not be fixed for all time. New Zealand, now also known as Aotearoa, and Australia have both ventured down this road, with considerable achievement. New Zealanders are increasingly comfortable with both Maori names and cultural references in public affairs; Australia’s newly elected prime minister, Anthony Albanese, was introduced on a stage where the Australian flag shared pride of place with the flags of Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islanders.

There is so much to recognize and celebrate in Indigenous cultures that Canada should get on with it. Indigenous peoples, cultures and knowledge need to be more prominently recognized across Canada. The same holds for women, minority groups, and events either poorly or inaccurately represented in our historical nomenclature. A cautious renaming process in Canada could actually produce the most thoughtful and comprehensive historical and cultural reuniting in the nation’s history. 

Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples requires thoughtful and engaged reflection. Changing the names of institutions and tearing down monuments might gratify some, but there is a better way. Toronto Metropolitan University will hardly provide a rallying cry for a nation seeking real healing with Indigenous peoples. 

If Canada is to find common ground with First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, the country must reverse the lens, begin to view history from Indigenous perspectives and listen respectfully to elders and knowledge keepers. 

This reckoning will take more than attacks on historical figures. The problem rests not with a few individuals but with the profound sense of racial superiority that animated public policy for generations, underpinning a suite of government initiatives that marginalized and overwhelmed Indigenous peoples. For all of our condemnation of historical decisions that are now seen as egregious and destructive, Canadians remain largely oblivious to the paternalism and discrimination toward Indigenous people that is part of our national reality.

Canada is, by international standards, a remarkably successful country, even if it is built significantly on the displacement and domination of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. They were sacrificed in the interests of the nation, with most non-Indigenous peoples truly believing that assimilation and cultural domination was the only legitimate path forward. This position, dangerously and tragically wrong, animated the government for a century and a half, to be replaced in our time by a more evolved but still paternalistic approach to Indigenous affairs. 

This country needs to devote a great deal of effort to improving relationships with Indigenous communities. To Canada’s collective good fortune, Indigenous peoples remain open to such discussions and to rebuilding Confederation, despite the painful destruction of the past. 

We can do much more than try to eliminate historical guilt by changing a few names and sloshing paint on some statues. Instead, the country needs to listen closely to First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples and build a policy agenda inspired by Indigenous priorities, a deep understanding of the multi-generational impacts of racism, and a real commitment to lasting reconciliation. 

Ken Coates is a Distinguished Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Saskatchewan.

Source: Condemning historical figures like Ryerson and John A. Macdonald must not distract us from true reconciliation

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The conservative case for toppling statues: Why ‘bad men’ shouldn’t be revered in the public square

2020/09/30 2 Comments

Interesting categorization of monuments of historical figures:

It may have been the easiest political no-brainer of the year when Conservative leader Erin O’Toole rushed to condemn the unruly mob that brought Sir John A. Macdonald’s statue tumbling down in Montreal last month.

Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has won elections by outflanking the NDP to the left, thought about it for a day or two and then denounced the “vandalism” that has “no place in a society that abides by the rule of law.”

Trudeau’s advisers have likely seen polling that shows only 11 per cent of Canadians approve of mobs spontaneously pulling down statues and only 31 per cent of people support some political process that removes the statues of politicians, even if the person implemented racist policies.

In general, Canadians like statues and monuments of their first prime minister and people who vote Conservative especially like them. But as McGill University political theory professor Jacob T. Levy argues, maybe revering “great men” isn’t a good way to figure out public morals. Levy thinks we should be thinking a little harder about who we idolize.

For support and to help convince conservatives, Levy points to the words of 18th century Scottish economist Adam Smith, who gave the world “the invisible hand” of the free market and whose classical liberal economics were vital to 20th century conservatism.Smith believed we are hard-wired to venerate powerful people, whether they are morally upright or not, and that this is an impulse we should fight back against.

“Even when the order of society seems to require that we should oppose them, we can hardly bring ourselves to do it,” wrote Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. We look at political leaders in “delusive colours in which the imagination is apt to paint in,” creating a “peculiar sympathy.”

Levy also points to the words of Lord Acton, who famously said that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

Levy argues that if Smith and Acton are right, then we are honouring the wrong people almost across the board. And that extends to people like Macdonald, whose triumphs in government are marked in equal measure by outrages, said Levy in an interview with the National Post.

“There’s no doing without Macdonald in Canadian political history. But that doesn’t mean that celebration has to be a uncritical or has to conceal what is actually a very complicated institutional legacy,” said Levy.

In an article for the Niskanen Center in the United States, Levy divides these historical leaders into three categories. The first are people who committed dishonourable acts and are celebrated precisely for those acts, like Jefferson Davis, who is remembered as the president of the confederacy during the U.S. civil war and a defender of slavery.There are also people who lived unimpeachable public lives, like George Washington, who also owned slaves in his private life. When Washington is publicly revered, it’s for his role as a founding father rather than his private sins.

In Levy’s view, Macdonald represents a middle-ground because he is venerated for a record that has troubling moments along with the great triumphs.

“His wrongs were official wrongs. The head tax and the treatment of First Nations, those are as much a part of his legacy as building Confederation in a way that differs from the private slave-owning of American founders,” said Levy. “That means that his legacy is contested in the same way that the moral character of Canadian Confederation is contested. And I don’t think there’s any way to set aside either part of that.”

Smith believed that we sympathize with the dead and pile on affection, especially “when they are in danger of being forgot by everybody.” Because the dead can’t defend themselves people are moved to do it for them or to hold off on criticism.

Levy’s response to that is simple: Sir John A. could handle criticism when he was alive and he can surely handle it now.

“We not only overestimate the moral standing of rulers, we overestimate the harm in moral criticism of the dead,” wrote Levy.

Although conservatives are more likely to defend statues and monuments, progressives are not immune from the phenomenon that Smith describes. The death of United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg provoked a massive wave of grief, even beyond the borders of the U.S.

“I absolutely think we’re seeing that Smithian dynamic at work,” said Levy. “There’s been 15 years worth of half tongue-in-cheek idolatry about her. There’s a wildly excessive personalization of the relationship to her.”

It’s not just world leaders either. We venerate celebrities and athletes, no matter how many times they disappoint us.

The polling on these monuments suggests that many people are more disturbed by the mob action than the actual removal of the statues. When Trudeau gave his comments about the incident in Montreal he singled out the lawlessness for criticism and almost nothing else.

Levy believes, though, at the heart of it is our out-sized and often irrational affection for the people who lead us.

“There is widespread and justifiable aversion to the sight and the phenomenon of people no one elected taking matters into their own hands,” said Levy. “But the politics of taking statues down through lawful procedures gets so controversial that I’m inclined to doubt that the mob scene is really what’s doing most of the emotional work.”

Source: The conservative case for toppling statues: Why ‘bad men’ shouldn’t be revered in the public square

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Douglas Todd: Renowned sculptor touts ‘shock’ rebuttal to, not destruction of, historical statues

2020/09/12 Leave a comment

Yet another piece on sculptures and monuments of historical figures, with a similar sensible take to Tom McMahon’s Enough with John A. Macdonald. Where Are the Indigenous Monuments?:

Since he sees himself as a creator rather than a destroyer, one of Canada’s most renowned sculptors says his heart is broken almost every time another supposedly permanent public statue is vandalized, beheaded or toppled.

Timothy Schmalz, whose large figurative pieces are on display from Rome to Vancouver, has an alternative idea, which he says might shock.

Schmalz is putting the final touches now on Monument of Oppression in his massive studio in St. Jacob’s, Ont., where he’s also created life-sized statues dedicated to women workers, asylum seekers, veterans, homeless people, miners, Samuel de Champlain and Indigenous and African visionaries, not to mention his musical icon, Gordon Lightfoot.
Detail from Timothy Schwarz’s bronze monument to migrants and asylum seekers, installed last year in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. (Handout)

The Monument of Oppression is made up of two hands stretching up from what looks like a prison cell in the ground. “It’s almost like the figures from the past are coming back and reaching out — and the oppressed are having visibility, and it’s a haunting visibility.”

Instead of demonstrators beheading a statue of Macdonald in Montreal in August, or Victoria City council surreptitiously removing another statue of him in 2018, Schmalz asks us to imagine erecting the Monument of Oppression adjacent to a likeness of Canada’s first prime minister, “with the hands going through the bars and reaching toward the statue.”

That, Schmalz suggests, is a more productive way of dealing with the multi-edged legacy of Macdonald, a dynamic Scotsman who both created the vision for the nation of Canada but also supported establishing residential schools dedicated in part to “Christianizing” Indigenous people.

Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer associated with the “founding” of North and South America, also has a disputed history, which has led activists to recently haul down his statues.

Similar removals and debates have arisen over 19th–century B.C. Chief Justice Matthew Begbie, who had to sentence to death five Indigenous men that a jury had found guilty of murder, but who also learned Indigenous dialects, defended Chinese labourers and had strong friendships with many chiefs.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying some Europeans weren’t brutal, say, 100 years ago and further back,” Schmalz said.

“Some early British settlers came to Canada and had this idea they had the real culture and the superior morality. It was actually called the White Man’s Burden. They looked around at the natives and thought, ‘Oh, we’ll make them good British subjects.’ You can acknowledge the settlers’ error and insensitivity.”

But the sculptor says our diverse society should not deal with the inevitable messiness of history by defacing or smashing, in 15 minutes, works of craftsmanship that skilled artists took years to complete.

“You can’t destroy the whole idea of history. Instead of removing it, you have to face it and learn from it. It’s very dangerous to condemn people from 100 and 200 years ago with the morality of today, which is evolving. By doing so you’re saying that our cultural past is absolutely evil. But that’s historically inaccurate and simply untrue.”

Schmalz emphasizes the value of having figurative public statues over more abstract ones, whose meanings are usually vague. He’s created a powerful series called The Homeless Jesus, depicting a shrouded figure sleeping on a bench, one of which is in Vancouver. And he’s currently sculpting a stunning piece, as big as a truck, dedicated to the victims of human trafficking.

Schmalz hopes the piece will serve as a commentary on how slavery, via human trafficking, continues today. Yet somehow, he laments, the modern-day travesty of forced labour, including for sex, is often ignored, unlike slavery of the past.

“I can’t think of one single nation of the world that did not practise slavery, including among Indigenous people. It was a universal thing.” If every historic statue that had some link to past slavery was destroyed, he said, we’d have to eliminate most of the monuments of Rome.

“Should we destroy the Colosseum because it was built by slave labour? We don’t want to just go around the world and destroy. Simply because someone might be sensitive or offended, you can’t edit out our whole history. You have to learn from it.”

Schmalz has worked for three decades as a sculptor, typically 14 hours a day. In addition to standing up for the craftsmanship of artists who creating public monuments, he worries that people who just want to tear them down are revealing their arrogance.

“You are assuming, if you were in that place in that specific time, that you would do something different.”

But, at age 50, he knows most people are simply creatures of their era, conforming to whatever happens to be the unexamined moral beliefs, good, bad and indifferent, of the dominant culture.

That’s why Schmalz reacts when people become devoted to censoring figures of the past. He thinks it’s healthier to focus on the future, and what he calls “finding the truth within specific cultures and philosophies.”

His life-sized piece portraying victims of human trafficking gets us responding to problems in the here and now. And Monument of Oppression forces us to think about how things that many celebrated have caused damage to others.

Destroying symbols from history is easy. But truth-finding, he knows, requires facing up to the moral complexity of the real world.

Source: Douglas Todd: Renowned sculptor touts ‘shock’ rebuttal to, not destruction of, historical statues

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Patrick Luciani: If we’re cancelling historical villains, why not Norman Bethune?

2020/08/12 Leave a comment

Valid question:

The Western world is toppling statues of historical villains at a furious pace. Tributes to everyone from Christopher Columbus, U.S. presidents, colonizers, Confederates, or really, anyone suspected of being on the wrong side of the current political times, are falling around the world.

But the process of eliminating bad guys tends to inevitably get out of hand. Winston Churchill’s statue in London, for instance, had to be covered up for a recent anti-racism rally before the vandals got to it; apparently, helping to defeat the Nazis no longer qualifies as being on the right side of history.

It’s even open season on Christian symbols and statues of saints. That’s reminiscent of the French Revolution, when the Robespierre-led mobs defaced and destroyed such statues as they sought to turn Notre Dame into a “temple of reason.”

Not to be left out, we in Canada are on the way to taking Sir John A. Macdonald’s name off schools and getting rid of his statues, and are now moving on to other historical figures. The alteration and return of a monument to Samuel de Champlain in Orillia, Ont., has been delayed, but statues to Giovanni Caboto will probably be spared given that few recognize his name (hint: Canada’s Columbus). In the case of educator and legislator Egerton Ryerson, who wrote a report recommending special schools for Indigenous boys, an idea that helped lay the ground for the residential school system, I suspect taking down a statue would not be enough; the name of Toronto’s Ryerson University is surely not long for this world. And petitions are out to rename the streets that honour British politician Henry Dundas, because of his weak anti-slavery position. In short, we’re doing anything to rid ourselves of anyone with the taint of past sins.

But apparently, not all history is vulnerable.

One statue that remains unmolested is the one of Norman Bethune that sits peacefully on the campus of the University of Toronto. Yet, if ever there was a statue associated with the evils of a political idea, it is the good doctor’s. While his defenders will remind us of his courageous work saving lives during the war between Japan and China through his battlefield medical innovations, a complete story tells of a nasty and reckless surgeon who never quite earned the respect of his Canadian colleagues, and who sternly defended Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, whose regimes starved and killed millions.

The mythology surrounding Bethune didn’t originate in Canada; it was created by Mao himself in a famous essay read by schoolchildren throughout China. Today, we use Bethune’s memory to attract thousands of Chinese tourists to his birthplace in Gravenhurst, Ont.

The Chinese Communist system he believed in has gone on to cause atrocities – not just during the Cultural Revolution, but also in the 1989 slaughter at Tiananmen Square, in the disastrous one-child policy, and in the continuing oppression and internment of thousands of Uyghurs. And let’s not forget that the government that emerged from that system has illegally imprisoned two Canadians on trumped-up charges to blackmail our government over the Huawei affair. One would think this might merit some reaction by the cancelling community.

There might be a reason that Bethune has been left off the list of political targets: he was a Marxist supporter, and thus a philosophical friend of the modern left. It’s the same reason others on the left, from Tommy Douglas to suffragette Nellie McClung – who both supported eugenics as a solution to extreme mental illness and poverty – are often given a free ride.

But the worm is turning on this cancel culture. In the United States, the name of feminist hero Margaret Sanger is being erased from American history because of her defence of eugenics in the 1920s, despite her position on women’s rights and her founding of Planned Parenthood. Can Nellie McClung and Tommy Douglas be far behind?

Shakespeare was right when he wrote that whatever good people do will be buried with their bones, while their sins live on forever. In a world that loses its historical memory, you’ll find no understanding, no forgiveness and no mercy.

So leave Norman Bethune’s statue in peace and let it stand, warts and all – but let’s also leave the statues of Sir John A., and the memories of Nellie McClung and Tommy Douglas. Otherwise we risk entering a brave new world where history disappears, and all ideas merely favour the present.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-if-were-cancelling-historical-villains-why-not-norman-bethune/

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The case for keeping ‘Langevin Block’ – Peter Shawn Taylor, Begbie’s Statue – Bill McKee

2017/07/04 1 Comment

I agree with Taylor on the risks of ignoring the historical context and focusing only on one aspect of their role in Canadian society. Those who forget (or erase) history, are condemned to repeat it, albeit with twists. McKee’s point on interpretative panels is a better way:

Taken on its own, Langevin’s quotation is a devastating indictment to modern ears. But what if we let the tape roll a bit longer? Later in that same speech, for example, Langevin said it was his intention to give every native child who graduates from residential school a free homestead. And in response to Langevin, Edward Blake, the leader of the Liberal party of the day, not only used words to describe Indigenous men and women that would be considered horrific today, he also complained that Ottawa’s plan was overly generous. The Liberal party of the day wanted to spend far less on the native file.

Extreme narrow focus on a few sentences of one speech may provide damning evidence of Langevin’s unfitness for present-day memorialization. But in the context of his time, Langevin actually stands among the more enlightened representatives of the federal government. As for the accusation that Langevin believed in assimilation of the Indigenous community—a concept now properly and universally considered abhorrent—he is guilty as charged.

But assimilation was conventional wisdom among all elite thinkers of his era. If statements in support of it are to be considered sufficient reason for removal from the historical record, then every politician of note in Canada prior to the 21st century must eventually be struck from the record—from Macdonald to Sir Wilfrid Laurier on down. Even Pierre Trudeau, often considered the father of an inclusive, multicultural Canada, was a confirmed assimilationist. His 1969 White Paper on “Indian Policy” planned to eliminate Indigenous status entirely. When such a plan was firmly rejected by the Indigenous community, Trudeau replied bitterly, “We’ll keep them in the ghetto for as long as they want.” Is the legacy of Trudeau senior next on the list for erasure?

And entirely ignored within the current debate over Langevin and the residential school issue is his stature as a key Francophone Quebec federalist during the crucial pre-Confederation era, which was the reason his name ended up on a federal building in the first place. Reconciliation between French and English was once considered a great Canadian virtue. It should still count for something today.

As for Cornwallis, in 1749 he did declare a bounty of 10 British guineas for every Mi’kmaq scalp delivered to him during a colonial-era conflict known as Father Le Loutre’s War. Like Langevin’s speech on residential schools, singular attention on this one act seems sufficient to declare him unfit for present-day consumption. By any standard, scalping is an horrific act. But once again history throws up some uncomfortable facts.

Father Le Loutre’s War (1749 to 1755) was the handiwork of French Catholic priest Jean-Louis Le Loutre, who goaded local Mi’kmaq tribes into conflict with the British in hopes of reclaiming New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for the French. For added motivation, he explicitly promised to pay Mi’kmaq warriors a bounty for English scalps. And they delivered. In 1753, for example, Le Loutre was reimbursed 1,800 French livres by the colonial government in Quebec City for sums he paid to the Mi’kmaq for 18 English scalps.

The payment of scalp bounties was unsettlingly common throughout North America during the entire colonial period. It was, in fact, standing French policy to offer payments for the scalps of the English—men, women and children—as a subsidy to ensure the continued loyalty of allied Indigenous tribes. Scalp bounties in the English-speaking colonies generally only appeared when a war was on; and their value waned and fluxed depending on the public’s panic level. It thus seems unfair to use Cornwallis’s scalping proclamation as conclusive evidence against him when both sides in this ancient conflict, including those Mi’kmaq nations who today demand Cornwallis’s expulsion from the public square, were fully engaged in the repulsive tactic.

And while Amherst is widely considered to be the father of modern germ warfare for allegedly handing out smallpox-infected blankets to Indigenous foes, this is a falsehood. There is no proof he ever did such a thing. Amherst responded positively to the suggestion from a fellow officer in a letter dated July 16, 1763, but this came a month after the one and only time British troops actually stooped to such a tactic—during a native siege of Fort Pitt (near present-day Pittsburgh) on June 24, 1763.

Finally, Begbie was indeed responsible for sentencing six Indigenous leaders to hanging for their role in the killing of 20 non-natives during B.C.’s Chilcotin War. Yet condemning him into oblivion on this basis ignores his vast record of support and understanding for the province’s Indigenous communities at all other times. He was fluent in several Indigenous languages, recognized the concept of Aboriginal title in his rulings and took a strong position against racism. Begbie was perhaps the most liberal and native-friendly judge of his time. As for his controversial hanging decision, which the B.C. government recently apologized for, he had no choice. The death penalty was mandatory for murder cases. Despite all this, his own law society has removed him from the firmament.

To our great disadvantage, Canada has become obsessed with replaying a slow-motion, high-definition version of our past. Historical figures are now judged by intense focus on individual statements or actions. One ‘infraction’ at odds with current acceptable standards has become sufficient evidence for expulsion from present-day society. Yet it is reasonable, if not inevitable, to expect that every notable figure from the past has probably said or done something that will grate against modern sensibilities, particularly with respect to Indigenous relations. It is therefore only a matter of time before every statue, park and street named for an historical character in Canada is declared incompatible with the present.

But while the fraught relationship between colonial Canada and Indigenous peoples is an important component of our history, it is not its entirety. We should not allow current attention being paid to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings, necessary and disturbing as they may be, to become a mechanism that strips Canada of our most significant characters and events. Or removes the context and detail from the stories of who we are and where we came from.

Source: The case for keeping ‘Langevin Block’ – Macleans.ca

Bill McKee, the former curator of B.C. history at the Museum of Canadian History in Ottawa makes a sensible suggestion on how to keep historical names and statues while acknowledging the less savoury aspects of their legacy:

Removing his [Begbie’s] statue will accomplish nothing of general benefit. It would help to hide this sad part of our history. In its absence, no one will remember or learn a lesson to understand the native side of the Chilcotin War, and the complex story behind the execution of the chiefs.

I would suggest, rather than removing this important statue, a more useful step would be to provide interpretive panels explaining all parts of the life of Matthew Baillie Begbie, around the statue, similar to an interpretive exhibition in Vancouver’s Chinatown, just east of Carrell Street. The exhibition could highlight his impact upon our history, and focus on his impact upon First Nations, not as an aside, but a central part of our history.

Another important way to recognize the cost of the arrival of the British and Canadian fur traders, the participants in the several gold rushes and of the British colonial society upon our First Nations would be to erect another large statue recognizing the story of the Chilcotin War and the resulting executions of indigenous leaders. The funding could come from the public, as well as the City of New Westminster and the governments of B.C. and Canada. It could be located on the site of the former cemetery next to the new high school or near the courthouse, where the remains of the chiefs were possibly buried. I would think the site near the high school would be a chance to highlight the story of our First Nations to young people in New Westminster.

I also want to point out that the statue of Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie was created by Elek Imredy, a refugee who came to Canada from Hungary, after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution. Many people will recognize his “Girl in a Wetsuit” statue off of Stanley Park, at the entrance to Burrard Inlet, which was created at the request of the City of Vancouver. These statues are a reflection of the contributions of the many immigrants and refugees who have contributed to our history.

Please don’t remove the statue of Matthew Baillie Begbie.

Source: Opinion: Removing statue of Judge Begbie benefits no one

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