Where is the monument to Aboriginal Peoples?

Here in Ottawa, the feds have planned a new Memorial to the Victims of Communism with construction to begin later his year.

Should things proceed as planned, it’ll end up in the heart of the national capital on a 5,000-square-metre patch of grass between the Supreme Court and Library and Archives Canada.

The thing is, not everyone is pleased about the new monument.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin recently criticized the memorial design’s “bleak and brutal” style.

Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson called the $5.5-million monument “overwhelming” and a blight on the Supreme Court precinct.

Others, such as Ottawa-Centre MP Paul Dewar, have called on the government to move it to a different location.

I can’t argue with any of them. The monument plans are big — really big — and it strikes the wrong chord next to the Supreme Court, a symbol of Canadian justice and freedom, which shouldn’t be overshadowed.

More importantly, although communism may be the reason many Canadians and their parents and grandparents moved to this country, it isn’t really a struggle native to Canada.

Communism was never a serious threat to Canadian democracy and putting the memorial in such a prominent location — alongside the court and just down the street from Parliament — gives it a false importance within Canada’s historical narrative.

A memorial to the victims of communism isn’t a bad idea by any means, but a space so near the cores of Canadian justice and democracy should be reserved for something at the heart of Canada’s history.

Canada’s capital has lots of statues and cenotaphs— the National War Memorial, the Peacekeeping Monument, the Royal Canadian Navy Monument.

But there’s one gaping hole in Ottawa’s catalogue of memorials and monuments, one overwhelming omission that has yet to be recognized by the government and that could quite rightly take over such a prominent space in the national capital: a national monument to Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples.

Canada has an embarrassing history of racism and discrimination when it comes to indigenous peoples.

The country’s treatment of its Aboriginal Peoples is perhaps the most horrible, jarring stain on its history.

Since colonization, Canada’s indigenous peoples have suffered strife and segregation at the hands of settlers.

European diseases decimated indigenous populations during the first centuries after Columbus, as virgin soil epidemics ravaged communities whose inhabitants hadn’t developed the same antibodies as settlers.

Colonizers drove Aboriginal Peoples off their lands and away from their traditional hunting and fishing grounds.

Later, residential schools left families broken, and assimilated cultures, languages and religious practices.

Successive governments segregated the country into separate racial groups and cemented their imposed racial hierarchy with legislation like the Indian Act.

In places like Newfoundland, entire populations of indigenous people disappeared from the map.

Today, aboriginal Canadians continue to struggle with the problems that took root centuries ago during colonialism — from addiction to prejudice.

Still, Ottawa’s only national memorial to indigenous peoples is a statue in Confederation Park dedicated to aboriginal war veterans.

For everything Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples have endured, for all the malice they have been subjected to, all the racial prejudice they have been dealt, there is nothing on the scale of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism dedicated to them.

The Canadian government keeps looking outwards for new memorials — to communism, to the Holocaust — when the monument it most desperately needs to build is for the people who were, and are, suffering right under its nose.