Sir John A. statue dodges scrutiny ... so far

But city’s urban Indigenous strategy may yet zero in on Gore Park fixture

Given the prominently displayed memorial to Canada’s first prime minister in Gore Park, it’s more than a little surprising that the latest wave of controversy over Sir John A. Macdonald hasn’t broken over Hamilton.

But given the distemper of our times, it may yet happen.

The most recent rush of criticism/ revisionism stems from the removal of a Macdonald statue from the front of city hall in Victoria, B.C. The eviction was meant to be a gesture of reconciliation with local natives who abhor the 19th century political leader’s role in the creation of the vilified residential school system.

The now warehoused statue in Victoria only went up in 1982. By contrast, Hamilton’s 2.5-metre-tall bronze has been a fixture downtown since 1893, two years after Macdonald died.

Although in recent years some local Aboriginals have denounced the sculpture, the only attempt to potentially open it up to formal scrutiny took place last year when Mayor Fred Eisenberger and Coun. Aidan Johnson suggested creating an official review process to deal with complaints about public artwork.

But the mayor quickly dropped the motion in the face of opposition from several councillors who were concerned a vetting process could create an endless stream of provocative complaints about any number of local memorials to historical figures who don’t measure up to today’s standards of ethical behaviour.

But that doesn’t mean old Macdonald is out of the woods.

As Johnson noted at the time, we can reasonably expect the future of the statue to be debated in the context of developing the city’s urban Indigenous strategy, which is intended to bolster the city’s relationships with the local Indigenous community.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, about reassessing history.

The reputations of great historical figures are always changeable as each succeeding generation re-examines their personalities and motives.

The objectionable thing about the current mania for removing statues and erasing names is how simplistic the reinterpretations tend to be. That oversimplification taints the reappraisals with a puerile political correctness rather than strengthens them with a fair-minded rebalancing of facts.

We’ve seen this imposition of prevailing modern values on the past countless times. From Edward Cornwallis, the founder of Halifax, to Hector-Louis Langevin, a father of Confederation, previously honoured founders of Canada are now being treated as white supremacists whose names need to be stripped from street signs, parks and public schools.

Unfortunately, this blind rush to atone sees history as a black and white sketch rather than the multicoloured canvas it is.

Take Sir John A. Yes, he certainly was instrumental in creating the residential school system as a means of assimilating Indigenous people into Euro-Canadian culture. But he was also responsible for creating the North West Mounted Police, the forerunners of the RCMP. Their first mission was to prevent a repeat of the Cypress Hills massacre of Canadian natives by American hunters and to suppress illegal American whisky traders who were creating havoc among natives. That hardly sounds like the genocidal agenda of which Macdonald has been accused.

Like people, history is complicated. Reassessments need to take into account all aspects of a person’s life and times. Failure to recognize that is to suffer from historical amnesia.

When officials took down the statue in Victoria, they said they intended to “recontextualize” Macdonald in an appropriate way. Unfortunately, they mixed up the proper order of things. They should have recontextualized the statue by adding more information to it, not removing it as if were an object of shame.

If the day comes when Hamilton’s statue of “The old Chieftain” is reevaluated, hopefully all sides will bear in mind that, as with the present, the past is a tangled field of action peopled by complex personalities who lived not only their own lives but the life of their times.

To paraphrase English historian Sir Steven Runciman, those who can’t handle the fact that history is complicated should stick to the better-ordered lanes of fiction.