BIRTHDAY SPOILERS?
Canada 150 questioned
The decision by a Lethbridge art gallery to post a sticker deriding the Canada’s 150th birthday as a celebration of First Nations oppression has stimulated controversy.
Last week, the sign, which turns the sesquicentennial’s stylized maple leaf upside down with the words Colonialism 150, caught the eye of Calgary’s Paul Bakhmut, who said its presence on the front door of the publicly funded Southern Alberta Art Gallery is inappropriate.
“It’s completely unacceptable ... I couldn’t believe my eyes,” said the 28-year-old history buff.
“I believe in freedom of speech, but this is a publicly funded institution, and it appears most people have no idea what these symbols stand for.”
He said the image appears to have been supplied by a “very fringe group” and doesn’t constructively explore Canada’s treatment of its First Nations people.
“Every nation has good and bad parts in its history and should be examined but this is not what this does — this is just rejection of Canada,” he said.
The controversy comes just as the exhibit Shame and Prejudice by artist Kent Monkman, offering a scathing sesquicentennial look at Canada’s treatment of First Nations people, has opened at the Glenbow Museum.
Bakhmut pointed to a website explaining the Colonialism 150 outlook whose author Eric Ritskes speaks of “refusing Canada” due to “the violence of its founding and maintenance, and its profound, ongoing mechanisms of exclusion; this is a call to refuse its false sense of belonging.”
Ritskes, a University of Toronto sociology and equity studies PhD candidate, said he supplied the Colonialism 150 sticker to the Lethbridge gallery after it approached him.
“I was contacted by someone from the art gallery who was interested in displaying varying perspectives of Canada 150 and asked if they could use the image,” said Ritskes via email.
He said it’s perfectly fair and appropriate for the gallery to display that perspective among those supplied by others and that it’s time Canadians admitted to their country’s dark history.
“It is a celebration of 150 years of the theft of indigenous lands, 150 years of genocide, 150 years of colonialism that is on top of the tens of thousands of years of indigenous sovereignty,” he said.
Bakhmut said those viewpoints make the sticker all the more intolerable.
“You’d be hard-pressed to find a country with a better human rights record and of righting those past wrongs,” he said.
He said Lethbridge’s acknowledgment of the Second World War internment of Japanese Canadians, reflected in the presence of its Nikka Yuko Gardens, “is a much better way to talk about these issues.”
But past and ongoing issues of First Nations’ alienation can’t be ignored, and the Colonialism 150 is an expression of that that’s as valid as any, said gallery spokeswoman Nicole Hembroff.
“If we want to move forward, we have to acknowledge that,” she said. “There are so many things that Canada’s done that are positive and other things that need to be discussed.”
The sticker has been visible for weeks and hasn’t attracted any direct complaints, she added.
Lethbridge Mayor Chris Spearman defended the sticker, tweeting that his city has to recognize its significant First Nations population, and that Canada can be celebrated while realizing its warts.
“This isn’t trashing Canada,” he said. “It is a recognition that higher rates of poverty, unemployment and discrimination exist.”