Beware of quick fixes to history, expert says

Historian Raymond Blake is not so sure about renaming and removing public landmarks named for historical figures viewed as controversial by modern standards.

“Any time you do things quickly, you sometimes don’t get them right or you don’t understand all of the implications of something. Certainly when you’re looking at the past, it’s multi-dimensional,” said Blake, head of the University of Regina history department.

In Regina, discussions are ongoing about renaming schools and streets — specifically Davin School, which was named for Nicholas Flood Davin, and Dewdney Avenue, named for Edgar Dewdney.

Davin wrote a report in 1879 that led to the widespread institution of residential schools in Canada. Dewdney was involved in setting up the reserve system for Indigenous people.

Blake called Davin a “very multidimensional figure.”

“He was noted for a long time as one of the first people to push for provinces out west; he was identifying back in the 1890s that women

Any time you sort of focus on one element, whether in the present or the past … I think we’re doing a disservice to our children.

didn’t have votes … which was quite extraordinary for the time,” said Blake.

Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, is the target of an Ontario teachers’ union.

Last week, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario moved to urge that province’s school districts to rename schools and buildings bearing Macdonald’s name, as he was the “architect of genocide against Indigenous peoples.”

“As we know,” said Blake, “residential schools were a blight on Canadian society, but yet John A. Macdonald created Canada and he created the North-West Mounted Police … How do we judge John A. Macdonald? Any time you look at people out of the historical context, they’re going to be wanting,” added Blake.

He pointed to Tommy Douglas, a Saskatchewan premier who founded medicare and yet defended eugenics in his master’s thesis.

Premier Brad Wall mentioned likewise in a Facebook post on Thursday.

“Is it not a short walk between the calls to remove the name of our first prime minister from schools, to the closing of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., or the removal of Tommy Douglas’ name from a Saskatoon school?” Wall wrote.

“Let us use these namesakes for the opportunity to teach our history,” Wall added.

Blake agreed.

“Any time you sort of focus on one element, whether in the present or the past … I think we’re doing a disservice to our children,” said Blake. “We have to learn history, and I think once you take the Davin name off … (you lose) a real opportunity to learn.

“We want to be just in our own time,” added Blake, “and we can learn from history to say, ‘There were problems, there were evils, there were things done that shouldn’t have been done, let us not do the same sorts of things…’ ”

Blake warned against getting caught up in symbols at the cost of making real change.

Relating to education, he mentioned the below-average graduation rates of Indigenous students and inadequate funding of schools on reserves.

“We’re interested in symbols, but what happens to the real substantive issues? … Are we making enemies or creating divisions over superficial issues, rather than dealing with substantive ones that we as a society need to be concerned about?”