Where is message about reconciliation?

Why honour, sanitize or normalize Amherst’s awful record by naming national park after him?

Allow me to take issue with Earle Lockerby’s latest comment piece, “A simplistic approach” (Aug. 22).

After three separate opportunities and prodding from me, and much loose talk about “reconciliation” with Indigenous people in Canada, Lockerby still refused to answer a very simple question about whether he would support the Mi’kmaq of P.E.I. in their legal case involving their ownership of unceded and ancestral land at the Mill River golf resort. I think that, in and of itself, is especially telling.

Moreover, I would like Lockerby to put himself in the shoes of the Mi’kmaq for a change and ask himself how he would feel if he had to see the name of a British general — who engaged in germ warfare against other Indigenous peoples of North America and never once stepped foot on P.E.I. — adorning a national park in this province. What message about reconciliation does that send to the Mi’kmaq of this province? Why honour, sanitize or normalize Amherst’s awful record (or racist colonialism for that matter) by naming a national park after him? How hurtful, disrespectful and devaluing is that to the Mi’kmaq?

The names on buildings, streets and parks in this country change all the time. Renaming the park in Rocky Point is about making one very small step to repair the damage visited upon the First Peoples of this land.

As a recent editorial in the Globe and Mail argued correctly: “History should not be forgotten, and it shouldn’t be buried. But we don’t have to build statues to errors, or evil. And we don’t have to maintain memorials to great acts of wrongdoing, just because they are ‘part of history.’ There’s a difference between remembering and honouring.”