No controversy over Tecumseh, Brock statues

City raising monuments instead of razing them

He’s been dead for more than two centuries but legendary Shawnee War Chief Tecumseh still stands, larger than life and defiant as always, between Windsor and a potential public art and political correctness controversy.

These are challenging times for people who believe in preserving history, no matter how ugly and brutal, and object to seeing the past and its often nasty players wiped from memory because they don’t meet today’s pristine ethical benchmarks.

In Halifax, they’ve been squabbling for months over whether to remove a now-cloaked statue of the city’s founder, Edward Cornwallis, because he offered a bounty on Indigenous scalps in retaliation for an attack on settlers.

In Toronto radical students want Ryerson University renamed and its founder’s statue pulled down because he supported the concept of residential schools for First Nations.

And in Ottawa the name of a Father of Confederation, Hector-Louis Langevin, has been yanked from a parliamentary building for his role in the residential school controversy and our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, has been vilified for his stand on the same issue and now they want to take his name off schools. The question, as legendary Toronto Sun columnist and former Windsor Star colleague Mark Bonokoski put it: “How deep and how politically correct do you want to go?”

Bonokoski pointed out that there are grounds, especially over his rejection of Jewish refugees trying to escape Nazi Germany, to bounce the statute of our wartime Liberal prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, from Parliament Hill and even to insist on the renaming of Canada, which comes from a Huron-Iroquois word and represents “cultural appropriation.”

In the U.S., we are witnessing an ongoing crusade against all symbols of the Confederacy — with scores of statues and memorials, even in cemeteries, being hauled away in the dead of night — and no decent person will say it’s a step too far because that ground has been tainted by the ugly, destructive presence of neo-Nazis, KKK members and other vermin who’ve crawled out from under the rocks.

But here in Windsor all is calm. While other cities debate razing statues, we’re moving in the opposite direction with the imminent raising of a bronze monument honouring two giants of Canadian history, Chief Tecumseh and MajorGeneral Sir Isaac Brock, in the roundabout being constructed west of Ambassador Bridge.

The 205th anniversary of their daring achievement, the Capture of Detroit, passed under the radar last week, which was understandable given our focus on commemorating this city’s bloodiest day, the disastrous 1942 Dieppe Raid.

But by late September or early October, barring a hiccup, Tecumseh and Brock will be on guard at the gateway to Olde Sandwich.

It’s the short-lived but brilliant alliance and obvious mutual respect between these two unlikely figures, a British officer prepared to risk his meagre resources on a desperate gamble, and a daring Shawnee chief trying to rally his people in defence of their land against American encroachment, that puts this project all but off-limits to criticism.

Given the current climate, I doubt anyone could raise money and gain approvals for a statue honouring an upper-class English soldier and colonial administrator who had a low opinion of the populace, a nice word for “rabble,” that he was governing.

But Brock and Tecumseh, killed just a year apart while battling American invaders, have been joined at the hip, figuratively speaking, down through Canadian history and that, pardon any cynicism, ticks all the correct boxes.

By the way, Mark Williams, the Essex County sculptor guiding this complicated project to the finish line, enjoys teasing American friends about how Detroit was captured, with limited bloodshed, by the greatly outnumbered folks on our side of the river. When they express eye-rolling disbelief, he adds: “Oh, and by the way, we also burned your White House to the ground.”

They, of course, think he’s kidding. A real joker.