It’s absurd to think a new name can change history

Change Calgary’s name to the Stoney Nakoda word “Wichispa Oyade?” No, thanks.

You don’t resolve the injustices done to one group’s heritage by obliterating another group’s history. This name-change suggestion is just the latest absurdity that treats history as though it were as erasable as chalk marks on a blackboard. The city of Calgary was not built by the Stoney Nakoda, yet they’ve sent the Alberta government a list of place names they’d like changed and Calgary is one.

Canmore and the Bow River are two others. In the years since Calgary’s founding in 1883, it has accumulated a history of its own, which is dignified by the name Col. James Macleod bestowed on the city. He chose “Calgary” after his sister’s home in Scotland. And so what if he did?

The Langevin Bridge was changed to Reconciliation Bridge earlier this year, even though reconciliation ought to mean going forward, not backward to undo things. And in Ontario, people are looking askance at schools and public places named after Sir John A. Macdonald and other prominent figures, demanding the names be expunged because of their links to the Indian residential school system.

That system needs to be remembered for the tragedy that it was, but it was not the sole event in Canada’s history and there is no justification for everything now to revolve around it. History cannot be unwritten or undone. Yet, the creeping tentacles of revisionism seem to be stretching in all directions.

The foundation for this revisionism is an incredible arrogance based on the premise that those of us alive today are the most enlightened, superior people who have ever lived. Therefore, we have a duty to tidy up the past as though it were an apartment needing to be put into move-in condition. But why are we the most enlightened and superior? Because we have smartphones? Our world is in as big a mess as ever; clearly, we have not reached any sort of enlightened plane of thought.

A friend of mine whose grandparents were Scottish settlers in Alberta says of the proposed changes for Calgary and Canmore: “Of course, people of Scottish heritage aren’t supposed to be offended by the shuffling off of two Scottish place names. We no longer count. No one else counts.”

This revisionism even extends to Remembrance Day, about which I’ve heard rumblings in recent years that its best-before date has come and gone. That pernicious attitude was neatly summed up in a recent column in the Guardian by Simon Jenkins who writes that “we really ought to get over it.” He proposes that next year, which incidentally marks the 100th anniversary of the Armistice, there should just be a “Forgetting Day, a Move On Day, a Fresh Start Day.”

Move on to what, though? Some phoney blank slate?

We cannot pretend to live in a brand new world of our own invention untouched by the history we’ve tried to consign to oblivion. Brushing chalk dust from the eraser can’t sever our links to the dead and to the events of their lives.

As William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” And why has this degenerated into a competition among histories to see whose should take precedence, with the losers destined to be blotted out?

For all that we like to say condescendingly that those who came before us were “products of their time,” the fact remains that people today are as bigoted, ignorant, obtuse and racist as those of past generations. A glance at social media will instantly confirm this.

We seem to have learned nothing from all our histories, which are now being set against one another to see which will predominate.

For good or bad, millions of events happened that make up every ethnic group’s history. There is room in the present for all of it.

Mayor Naheed Nenshi isn’t in favour of changing Calgary’s name, but he said, “Let’s keep talking.” Let’s not.

We seem to have learned nothing from all our histories, which are now being set against one another.