Oh, Henry: Signs of controversy in Dundas
Innocent message board becomes a battleground as debate over community’s namesake comes to light
It all started small enough: On June 1, Karen Schulman Dupuis pinned a message to the bulletin board at the corner of her Dundas home reading “Black Lives Matter,” one word following below the next, each bolded on a white sheet of printer paper.
The board, made of cork and hung beneath a “free little library,” was propped up by Schulman Dupuis last year to serve as a one-stop shop for community notices.
That slightly changed in light of Pride month and the death of George Floyd.
Posters of lost pets, dog walking gigs, landscaping services and community events were now accompanied by punchy, nearly daily messages surrounding anti-racism and LGBTQ rights.
“Social issues is something my family believes very strongly in,” said Schulman Dupuis, who moved to Autumn Leaf Road in 2017. “The intentions of these posters was to highlight the fact that a disproportionate number of Black and Indigenous Canadians are killed by police every year.”
She didn’t expect this initiative to spiral into an anonymous campaign of posters being discreetly taken down in the dead of night — or a debate over whether to change her neighbourhood’s name.
On June 10, Schulman Dupuis pinned a message outlining the ties of Dundas’ name to a proslavery Scottish politician of three centuries past.
“Dundas is named after Henry Dundas,” the message read, alluding to the 18th-century politician dubbed The Great Tyrant for his role in modifying a British anti-slavery bill that would delay the freedom of some 630,000 slaves by more than a decade.
The message made no suggestion of changing the name, and Schulman Dupuis said it was merely a means of sparking dialogue.
Nevertheless, the next day, it was gone.
So Schulman Dupuis put up a similar message: Dundas is named after a politician responsible for a bill that blocked the release of slaves. It added, in red font for emphasis: “And some racist who took this down already didn’t want you to know that.”
The message being placed in a plastic slip and stapled three times over didn’t save it from being scrapped again. Nor did it the next day, or the day after that.
Then, on Saturday, a sign. Someone returned to the board — this time with their own message. As part of a detailed argument, the message mentioned that “changing a name does not eradicate racism, (but) embracing other cultures does.” Schulman Dupuis left it up. “Was I shocked the (signs) were taken down? No. Was I disappointed? Yes. But it was never my intention to (change the name), instead to have a dialogue,” she said. Dundas was a recognized town up until amalgamation in 2000. It’s now considered a community, but there remain remnants of its independent past. The name exists as a postal address and it’s included in the region’s electoral riding name of Hamilton West-AncasterDundas.
There haven’t been any official pleas to change the name locally, but the sign-scrapping campaign is a microcosm of the widespread outcry in recent weeks calling for communities to distance themselves from historically prejudiced pasts.
In Toronto, a petition urging the city to consider renaming Dundas Street because of the name’s ties to colonialism and slavery has garnered more than 10,000 signatures.
NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, also MPP for Hamilton Centre, took to Twitter and echoed the same.
And that’s in addition to what’s occurring south of the border, where a national movement to topple perceived symbols of racism and oppression like monuments and statues has gripped the United States. It begs the question: Is a name just a name — and in no way indicative of present-day biases?
“This is part of global recognition that these monuments (and streets) aren’t just innocuous and doing nothing,” Melanie Newton, an associate professor of history of the Caribbean and the Atlantic World at the University of Toronto, told The Star’s “This Matters” podcast.
“In terms of the history of urban planning and in terms what has been celebrated in street names and monuments are figures who were central conquests in colonization, slavery and systems of imperial domination.”
History is often written by the victors in systems of urban and municipal developments. To ignore that, Newton said, is to effectively celebrate historically harmful structures of power. “These (monuments and streets) reassure those in power that, ‘Yes, society changes. Voting policy has changed.’ But structures and hierarchies of power established in the past continue to shape who has power and privilege in the present.”