Rewriting history with good intentions
Stanley Park may soon disappear. No, not because developers want to replace its towering Douglas firs with condo towers — though I’m sure the notion has them salivating like Pavlov’s dogs — but because the park’s name may be changed.
Not that Lord Stanley himself did anything wrong, other than donating a silver cup to the National Hockey League. He’s simply a representative of his time that saw the original inhabitants of North America as “sauvages,” savages with no rights.
So the Vancouver Parks Board has started a “colonial audit” to identity the ways in which earlier generations of later arrivals wronged the Indigenous peoples who once occupied the shores of Burrard Inlet.
By the way, has anyone investigated whether Sir Harry Burrard-Neale deserves to have an arm of the Salish Sea named after him?
All this is part of a movement to rewrite history the way it should have been. And in case there’s any doubt, I’m against it.
That probably puts me into a group that the Prince George Citizen’s editor Neil Godbout derided as “historically-illiterate, culturally-entitled white people.” So be it.
What we have is what we have. To deny it is to deny what makes us, us.
What’s needed is a change of attitude, not a change of names. Renaming a Conservative party Liberal doesn’t change its policies.
In January of this year, the statue of Lord Cornwallis was quietly taken down in Halifax. In 1749, he signed a so-called scalping bounty, declaring “a reward of ten Guineas be granted for every Indian Micmac taken or killed.”
Earlier this year, the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario urged school boards across Ontario to remove Sir. John A. Macdonald’s name from public schools.
Hector-Louis Langevin already had his name stripped off the Ottawa building that houses the prime minister's office. Both Macdonald and Langevin are accused of fostering the residential school system that attempted to “take the Indian out of the child.”
Fort Amherst in Prince Edward Island could become Fort No-Name, thus honouring Loblaws’ marketing genius instead of a military hero who made the mistake of endorsing a scheme to distribute smallpox-tainted blankets among the Mi’kmaqs as a “method … to Extirpate this Execrable Race.”
The whole thing begins to sound like a Harry Potter story, filled with references to “He-Whose-Name-Must-Not-Be-Spoken.”
As the National Post editorialized sardonically, Amherst fought the Mi’kmags, and the Mi’kmaqs won.
Granted, Cornwallis, Amherst, Macdonald, and Langevin were racists. But I challenge you to find any prominent politician of that time who wasn’t.
They were products of their time and culture. Would Canada have elected a prime minister in 1867 who promoted, let’s say, women’s equality, gay rights, and a carbon tax? Not bleeping likely. If you expunge Macdonald, who would you substitute as a “founder of Canada”? Who else would you credit as the driving force behind our first transcontinental railway? Donald Smith? Cornelius Van Horne? I’d wager that any serious study of their lives would unearth equally unsavory details about them.
Who’s next for de-throning? Terry Fox? St. Francis? Why not God? After all, tradition claims he impregnated a teenage virgin. She may have consented, but the imbalance of power far surpassed any allegations against Harvey Weinstein.
Also, according to the Bible, God committed the greatest genocide ever, far exceeding Hitler’s Holocaust, when he drowned every human on earth except one family.
So should we strike God from the national anthem? Delete “the supremacy of God” from the preamble to Canada’s Constitution? Remove the initials “D.G.” — Dei Gratia, by the grace of God — from our coins?
It’s all right; I’m not being serious. I’m merely making a case that if you’re going to rewrite history, you need to know how far you’re willing to go.
Because all of these were products of their time. They will inevitably reflect the views that were common in their time. Which is not ours.
Revising history used to be a trademark of the Communist regime in Russia. To abolish all association with the former Russian tsars, the Kremlin renamed St. Petersburg as Leningrad, Tsaritsyn as Stalingrad, and Novonikolayevsk (named for Tsar Nicholas II) as Novisibirsk.
Changing names to suit a later social ethic is like the paradox of time travel. You go back in time to right a wrong, and then discover that by altering the past you’ve eliminated yourself from the present. Right or wrong, we need our past. Or like Stanley Park, you may find you don’t exist any longer.
Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca