Renaming is not rewriting history

Re: Letter to the editor, entitled Rewriting the past, Citizen, Jan. 20

Mr. Groner seems to have got rather mixed up in his short letter about changing names and rewriting the past: they are not the same thing. Having cities named after long-deceased royalty were historic choices, not “the way it was” or indelible historic events.

As a society, Canadians have always been re-vamping the antiquated choices of our forbears.

Canada long allowed people to go bankrupt paying medical bills, sanctioned government and legal business exclusively in just one of the founding settler languages and kept women from the vote.

In time, thank goodness, we changed all that, transformations of far greater difficulty and import than replacing the aforementioned regal names. To do so is not rewriting history, it is namechanging – something, it must be added, that early settlers did with ignorant abandon to the fully occupied and intensively named lands of the Songhees (Victoria), Lheidli Tenneh (Prince George), Tsimshian (Prince Rupert) and Cree, who already had a name for the area whites renamed Prince Albert – Kistahpinanihk.

Commemorating Joseph Trutch is a different and far more questionable matter than honouring 19th century royals sipping tea in faraway Britain. Trutch succeeded the comparatively more sympathetic James Douglas as governor and quickly cancelled his predecessor’s policies of negotiating equitable treaties with the rightful owners flanks that were coming to be known as British Columbia (another name, come to think of it, worthy of reconsideration).

Douglas strongly promoted resolution of the land question.

Had fair treaty-making been pursued in the mid 19th century, non-Natives would probably have been able to negotiate deals with far less sticker shock than what happens now under the B.C. Treaty Process. Trutch’s dismissal of doing this has cost all of us billions in money which should alone disqualify him for having anything but a public toilet bear his name. And when you probe his words as well as actions, his vileness is even more glaring. He wrote of Indigenous people as being “bestial rather than human” and in response to pragmatic suggestions that natives and their rights needed to be fairly dealt with, he opined: “I think they are the ugliest & laziest creatures I ever saw, & we shod [sic], as soon think of being afraid think of our dogs as of them.”

His nasty polluting ideas, as I say, helped put the land question on hold for more than a century, a racism-inspired deed for which he deserves not grateful commemoration but our continuing contempt.

Norman Dale, Prince George