The power of esthetic protest
Toppling statues no more political than erecting them, says Tiffany MacLellan.
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission published testimony that an unknown number of Indigenous children placed within the Indian Residential School (IRS) system were presumed deceased, yet public apathy surrounding this policy of colonial assimilation pervaded. According to Abacus Data, for instance, 67 per cent of Canadians knew little or nothing about the IRS system prior to spring 2021.
However, in late May, Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation disclosed that the unmarked remains of
215 children had been found on the former site of the Kamloops IRS. Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan later discovered 751 unmarked graves near the Marieval residential school. New sites keep emerging as the weeks pass. The consistent discovery of burial sites has placed the omnipresence of current and past colonial violence firmly within public discourse.
And part of this discourse is taking place esthetically, through the removal or defacement of monuments that exalt non-Indigenous historical figures who were instrumental to the establishment, maintenance and defence of Canada's residential school system.
The city councils that serve Kingston and Prince Edward County both voted to remove their statues of Sir John A. Macdonald, who introduced the residential schools in 1883. At the time of this article, the City of Hamilton had draped its monument to Canada's first prime minister in a black fabric bound by red rope. The presumed authority of Charlottetown's rendition of the statue was challenged by the placement of 215 pairs of shoes — symbolically drawing a direct line between political responsibility and the newly discovered burial site.
In Toronto, a monument of Egerton Ryerson, who was the chief architect of the residential system, has not only been toppled, defaced, and put in conversation with Indigenous ceremonial dances, but also decapitated. The head of the statue was discovered on land that the Six Nations of the Grand River has claimed and is defending against appropriation by local developers. What remained of the monument was tossed in the river.
Statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II were also toppled at the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature recently — a representation of how Indigenous groups feel about the health of their constitutional relationship with the Crown.
Monuments like these did not become political; they always were. Public sites of memory and monumentality have always been leveraged as critical devices for the building of the nation-state. These monuments redact, edit and omit histories in order to bind and constitute community. They are tools that distil a sense of patriotism, promote non-Indigenous logics that presume that ownership over the land is settled, and revere those who contributed to the formation of the state on the backs of — and at an enormous cost to — others.
The defacement and dissent esthetically performed with and around these monuments unsettle the national imaginaries of non-Indigenous peoples occupying this land. These engagements provide an opportunity for Canadians to reformulate their relationship with Indigenous sovereignty by creating space to reflect and account for past harms committed by the state. A monument's removal, defacement or relocation illustrates the force public esthetics can have in sparking debate, rethinking history and making clear the needs, positions and concerns of subjugated political communities.
The production of counter-monuments is not merely symbolic; they are the fodder that forms how we think about the material conditions of others. They are spaces where constituents can recast historical narratives that fuel demands for material change. So, too, they question the historical authority of Macdonald, Ryerson and the queens, therefore providing an opening for the public to re-engage with the past, listen better, and continue the ongoing work of repair, redress and restitution.
Materializations of national memory abound. Engage them — esthetically.
Tiffany MacLellan lives on the traditional unceded territory of Algonquin Anishnaabeg People. Her PhD focuses on how esthetics can reaffirm and interrupt narratives about state violence and the possibility of political transformation therein.