Push to strip first PM’s name from prize
The main association of Canadian history scholars has joined the movement to stop celebrating Sir John A. Macdonald as a national hero with a proposal to strip his name from a prestigious prize.
In an email sent this week, Canadian Historical Association president Adele Perry advised members that the association’s elected council voted last month to rename the 40-year-old Sir John A. Macdonald prize the “CHA prize for Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History.” Association members will make a final decision next May at their annual meeting.
James Daschuk, a University of Regina historian and winner of the Sir John A. Macdonald prize in 2014, said the change would be overdue.
“It is incumbent on us as historians maybe to
‘WE’RE FINDING MORE AND MORE PEOPLE WHO WERE NOT PERFECT’
lead the way, to provide information for citizens and political leaders,” he said in an interview. He said he would be surprised if the change was not overwhelmingly approved.
His own prize-winning book, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, was an indictment of Macdonald’s treatment of Indigenous people.
“As a white scholar, I was able to take winning the prize in stride and just think of it as an ironic thing that my work, which exposed Macdonald’s inhumanity, won the Macdonald prize,” he said. “I can imagine a time when an Indigenous scholar wins the prize, and it’s going to be a slap in the face.”
The prize, which includes a $5,000 cheque provided by sponsor Manulife, was first awarded in 1977. It is given to “the non-fiction work of Canadian history judged to have made the most significant contribution to an understanding of the Canadian past.”
Christopher Dummitt, a history professor at Trent University and a member of the association, said the move to rename the prize is evidence of the “purity spiral” the historical profession has entered.
“We’re finding more and more people who were not perfect according to our contemporary standards, and we’re trying to make sure that we don’t celebrate or even honour any of those figures,” he said.
“Now that it has reached Canada’s first and probably most important prime minister, it suggests that it’s not going to end.”
The historians’ move follows a call last summer by the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario to have Macdonald’s name removed from schools in the province in recognition of “his central role as an architect of genocide against Indigenous peoples ... and the ways in which his namesake buildings can contribute to an unsafe space to learn and to work.”
Macdonald was prime minister when the federal government approved the first residential schools in the country.
In an article last September in the Winnipeg Free Press, Perry, the association president and a history professor at the University of Manitoba, said it is “too easy” to excuse Macdonald as a man of his time. “Macdonald’s commitment to white supremacy and his centrality to a suite of policies that meet the usual definition of genocide were noted during his lifetime,” she wrote.
In an interview Tuesday, Perry said that as association president she prefers not to take a public stance on the renaming. “As historians, we’re very mindful of questions about commemoration,” she said.
Jonathan Swainger, a history professor at the University of Northern British Columbia, said removing Macdonald’s name deprives historians of a “teachable moment” to illustrate how a figure once venerated also had serious flaws.
“There is no question the man was, in our terms, racist, but the simple fact is he wasn’t living in 2017. For him to have behaved and thought otherwise would have made him a very anomalous character,” Swainger said.
He worries the association has replaced scholarship with advocacy. “I’m not sure what the goal is, other than trying perhaps to be a contemporary advocate of a number of very important contemporary issues,” he said. “And it seems to me that when historians start becoming advocates, they cease being historians.”
The association, created in 1922 to foster the scholarly study of Canadian history, has nearly 1,000 members, mostly from academia.
Alan Sears, a professor of education at the University of New Brunswick, said the debate over renaming is helping promote a re-examination of Macdonald’s legacy. “What we decide to commemorate says something about us now, and we’re at a pretty critical moment right now in the Canadian conversation between Indigenous and settler peoples,” he said.
Robert Bothwell, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, called the proposed renaming “symbolic politics” and chose to put it in historical context. “Defacing monuments and condemning the past go back to ancient Egypt, so why should we be surprised that the custom lingers?” he asked.