We must learn both good and bad of history
As Confederate monuments fall in the American South, it’s worth considering what lessons Canada might draw as we grapple with how to commemorate our own fraught history.
The first is that talk of protecting history is often pretext for protecting privilege.
In fact, no one is proposing that histories of the American Civil War be torn out of textbooks. They are simply asking that these symbols of oppression not be allowed to stand. Most of these monuments were products not of the war but of a period beginning three decades later during which many southern states sought to idealize the so-called Lost Cause of the Confederacy and to lend legitimacy to policies of segregation and disenfranchisement then being imposed. They were installed and stood for more than a century as racist propaganda. They fall as a symbol of progress.
A country can remember the darker aspects of its past without honouring them, as Germany has so clearly demonstrated. There are no easy answers when it comes to reconciling the present and the past. It is a mark of progress that we now understand that aspects of history celebrated in the textbooks of years past are unquestionably shameful by today’s standards. Those textbooks are being rewritten, and they should be.
More problematic, however, is to judge people from the past based on our current moral standards. Clearly there are extreme, clear-cut cases, including the Confederate leaders, but most examples are more confounding. The founding fathers of the United States, for instance, who often owned slaves and exhibited many of the flaws of their age, are widely honoured not to glorify their roles as oppressors, but to recognize their contributions.
A similar case can be made for Canada’s own embattled and notably flawed founding fathers. A growing awareness of the roles that John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, and other early Canadian politicians played in Indigenous oppression has understandably and perhaps inevitably led to calls for a Canadian iconoclasm. But surely there is a way we can honour their contribution while giving full recognition to the damage they wrought.
The resolution tabled last week at a meeting of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario urging the province’s school boards to remove Sir John A. Macdonald’s name from public schools is entirely understandable. But it dismisses too casually his role as father of the country, architect of Confederation and the British North America Act, and prime mover of the transcontinental railway that tied this nation together.
That said, if schools are going to continue to honour Macdonald by using his name, then they must teach not only about how he united the country, but also about the transgressions he committed along the way, some of which tested even the moral standards of his less compassionate time: intentionally starving Indigenous people to move them off land he needed for his railway; cruelly pressing First Nations onto reserves; imposing a head tax, among other racist policies, on Chinese immigrants.
We should be able to honour Canada’s founding, but we must not do so without grappling with the damage done in the process.
Perhaps most important, as we continue to rewrite our history with new public monuments and tributes and curricula, we should strive to honour and commemorate those who have too often been excluded from our histories. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission called on governments to erect monuments in Ottawa and each of the provincial and territorial capitals to the victims of the residential school system. This is the moment to act.
It is fitting that Sir John A. Macdonald stands on a plinth on Parliament Hill, surveying his creation. The unfinished project he began 150 years ago is well worth celebrating. But we cannot reflect in good faith on that founding without considering its place in generations of Indigenous injustice. When we are asked to look at Macdonald and consider his accomplishments we should be asked, too, to look at those who were injured along the way.