Welcome to Sir John A.’s ‘decolonized’ home
Parks Canada’s changes at Bellevue House distort life, accomplishments of the country’s founding prime minister
Sir John A. Macdonald furnished his home with mahogany derived from slave plantations in the Caribbean. He combed his hair with the shells of now-endangered turtles. He exhibited parrot-based design motifs as a possible way of showing off the “perceived social and intellectual superiority” of his race.
And the country he built remains “steeped in racism” and encoded by “colonialism.”
These are just some of the take-aways from a new “decolonized” visitor experience unveiled on the weekend by Parks Canada at Macdonald’s Kingston, Ont., home.
Bellevue House, an Italianate home in the suburbs of Kingston, was only occupied by Macdonald for two years in the 1840s, well before he became the key architect of Canada’s creation as an independent dominion in 1867.
Nevertheless, it remains the only Canadian historic site dedicated exclusively to a man largely credited as the country’s founder.
The site came due for a revamp in 2016, soon after the election of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It was closed completely between 2018 and 2024 as Parks Canada both renovated the building and redid the curation.
A managerial report says this process was accelerated by “the confirmation of residential school mass graves sites findings in 2021.” The sentence notably contains two falsehoods; the 2021 discoveries they reference were never “mass graves,” and there has been no “confirmation” beyond early results from ground-penetrating radar scans.
In official materials, Parks Canada stresses that the redesign will explore the “complex legacy” of Macdonald and stress “the colonial systems he helped encode into government.”
Before opening day, Parks Canada gave an exclusive tour of the new “decolonized” home to the U.S. publication National Parks Traveler.
Writer Jennifer Bain noted that virtually every room of the home contained some reference to Indigenous suffering or assimilation.
A sign in the parlour notes at the outset that, unlike the privately held items contained in Bellevue House, pre-contact Indigenous homes “were filled with tools to be shared.” The kitchen contains signs on how “European occupation adversely impacted Indigenous diets.”
“Looking at a picture perfect Victorian dining room that many would admire, I am asked to consider how Indigenous culture and traditions were stolen through colonization and assimilation,” wrote Bain.
The nursery includes the cradle that would have likely held Macdonald’s first son (who died in infancy), but is mostly employed as an illustration as to how, unlike white people, “Indigenous mothers kept their babies close.”
A nearby sign then outlines the “violent assimilation and abuse” of the Indian Residential School system.
Bellevue House’s social media accounts are similarly committed to finding dark legacies in even the home’s most quotidian objects.
When curators installed a preserved 1822 piano at the home, a Facebook post said the instrument would act as a means to explore “colonial power, class structure and privilege from the 1840s, through Confederation, and onto the present day.”
A sewing needle case decorated with parrot heads illustrates how Europeans of the era fetishized parrots “as a way to show off their perceived social and intellectual superiority.”
Macdonald’s comb and reading glasses are made from the shells of a Hawksbill sea turtle, which curators note is now an endangered species subject to import controls. “At Bellevue House, these items help present the story of Sir John A. Macdonald, politics and power,” says a caption.
The profile in National Parks Traveler noted that visitors to the house are issued with numbers from one to five and then segregated based on which numbers they receive. Only the “ones” are allowed to enter through the front door, while everyone else has to go through the servant’s entrance, with the “fives” all assigned the lowest caste rating of “the uninvited.”
As has been covered in detail by National Post, Macdonald is unique in being the central figure in both Canada’s birth, and some of its most ignominious legacies.
Without Macdonald, it’s possible Canada would never have assumed its current shape as a transcontinental confederation shielded from U.S. territorial expansion. Any close analysis of his personal papers also reveals a figure who is much more complex than the colonialist bogeyman he’s often portrayed as. At various points, Macdonald backed voting rights for both women and Canadian Indigenous, both of which would not be fulfilled until decades after his death.
At the same time, Macdonald’s 19-year tenure as Canada’s first prime minister oversaw the deliberate subjugation of whole regions of previously autonomous First Nations. With the notable exception of the Indian Act (which was passed by his Liberal party opponents), it was Macdonald’s government that instituted all of the most coercive measures against Indigenous people, including the Indian Residential School System, the Potlatch Ban and the Pass System.
In sharp contrast to a figure with which he’s often compared — inaugural U.S. president George Washington — Macdonald was also a profoundly corrupt machine politician. “The level of corruption in the Canadian political process of the period, especially under the auspices of John A. Macdonald, is truly astounding even to the cynic,” wrote historian R.T. Naylor in 1975.
But the Bellevue House redesign also seems to focus attention on an issue over which Macdonald’s legacy is actually pretty clean: slavery.
Macdonald grew up in a Canada notable for being the first corner of the British Empire to outlaw slave importation, and he was 19 when London passed the 1834 Slavery Abolition Act.
On March 21, a post on Bellevue House’s Facebook page noted that much of Macdonald’s furniture was made of imported Caribbean mahogany. “The logging of mahogany was made possible with labour from enslaved Africans. Colonial slave owners profited from the sale of the wood while also clearing land for plantation crops,” it says.