National Post (National Edition)
Historians vote to rename Macdonald prize
The main association of Canadian history scholars has voted to remove Sir John A. Macdonald’s name from a prestigious prize, joining a movement to stop celebrating the country’s first prime minister as a hero.
The decision to rename the 40-year-old prize the “CHA prize for Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History” came Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association in Regina. Members voted 122-11 in favour of the change, two sources said.
James Daschuk, a University of Regina historian and winner of the Sir John A. Macdonald prize in 2014, said the name change is a small gesture for historians to make at a time of reconciliation with Indigenous people.
“It’s often the argument that Macdonald did a lot of good things,” Daschuk said in an interview. “He built the country. But he built the country on the backs of the Indigenous people."
Daschuk called Macdonald “a polarizing figure,” and in the months since association president Adele Perry of the University of Manitoba announced the proposed change, there has been animated debate. Writing in the association journal Intersections, Perry quoted some of the responses the association has received from members, whom she did not identify.
“I don’t think it is appropriate to name such an important historical prize after a person who has, at best, a mixed historical legacy, and at worst, was a key player in Indigenous cultural genocide in Canada,” one member wrote. Another noted Macdonald’s role in “whitesupremacist and genocidal policies whose profoundly damaging repercussions are felt to this day” and argued that changing the name provides a “teachable moment.”
On the other side of the debate, one member said it was “ahistorical and arrogant” to “condemn a man so associated with the founding of Canada because he was a product of his age.” Another called the name change “political correctness gone insane” and accused the association of caving into “fad and revision.”
Macdonald was prime minister when the federal government approved the first residential schools. Daschuk, author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, showed how Macdonald’s government used hunger as a weapon to force Indigenous communities on to reserves.
Christopher Dummitt, a history professor at Trent University, dropped his association membership over the move to strip Macdonald’s name from the $5,000 prize.
He called the change “a bad idea, because it is essentially against history, against recognizing the full complexity of the past. It’s about eradicating figures of honour from the past.” He said its adoption by association members reflects “a moral puritanism.”