Rewriting our history won’t make it go away
Or what about the description of a few days of beautiful weather in fall as “Indian summer”? That’s a lovely phrase — there is nothing offensive about it at all.
Or maybe we should tell Pauline Johnson, the much-loved Canadian poet — and an Indigenous person herself — that her sensitive and thoughtful poem “Cry of an Indian Wife” is somehow deemed by these outraged historical revisionists to be a racist poem?
The fact is that although Columbus got it a bit wrong, the word “Indian” has been part of our language and history for more than 500 years. That’s not about to go away.
But for reasons that appear to make sense to these people only, they have removed the title given to the work by the artist and replaced it with an Indigenous geographical term associated with one of the nearby Indigenous groups, in order to remove what they call a racial insult.
But just a minute here! When one examines anyone’s history, one is bound to find warts. For instance, virtually all Indigenous tribes practised slavery. On the West Coast, slavery was a particularly important part of the culture of most tribes. Ocean trips would be made up and down the coast — as far as California — to forcibly capture slaves. This was part of their history.
No one would deny that slavery is one of the most egregious types of racism. Does it really make sense to substitute one allegedly racist name for another?
During the discussion over renaming the Langevin Block, Sen. Murray Sinclair made a very important point when he suggested that rather than tearing down existing statues and renaming buildings, we should consider using the names of important Indigenous people from the past when we build new ones. Then we will be adding to our history, as opposed to trying to revise it after the fact.
Let’s do that. And if it turns out that some of those important people are judged to be less than perfect by the standards of today, let us also remember that we will surely be judged to have been less than perfect by the standards of tomorrow.
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” he has the Ministry of Truth rewriting history to coincide with the fascist regime’s current propaganda needs.
The Ontario Art Gallery is not this kind of evil entity. I think these are well-intentioned people who are trying to do the right thing.
But they are not.
Leave Carr’s beautiful painting as it is. And leave our history alone, warts and all.