Monday, 20 August 2018
Righteous Indigenization
by
The radical politics of statue removal, which initially targeted various Confederate monuments, has migrated northward. It started this past January when the Mi’kmaq First Nation demanded the removal of a statue of Edward Cornwallis in Halifax (the city that he founded in 1749) on the grounds that Cornwallis, as governor of Nova Scotia, put a bounty on Mi’kmaq persons as punishment for a violent raid on a sawmill. Anyone who killed or imprisoned a Mi’kmaq received a cash reward for the deed.
The City of Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, has upped the ante with a far more radical measure. The councilors in a 7-1 vote recently ordered the removal of a bronze statue of Sir John A. Macdonald from its place at City Hall where it had been standing since 1982. Mayor Lisa Helps chose to avoid public discussion, consulting only with the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, who plan to conduct a “blessing, cleansing, and healing” ceremony on this site. The statue is to be put in storage while the municipal government, in the Orwellian words of Helps, attempts to “recontextualize” Macdonald’s place in history. [continue reading at the link above]
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| The statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Victoria City Hall was wrapped in foam and strapped to a flat-bed truck on Saturday morning to be placed in storage after Victoria city council voted that MacDonald is a symbol of "White Supremacy". |
The radical politics of statue removal, which initially targeted various Confederate monuments, has migrated northward. It started this past January when the Mi’kmaq First Nation demanded the removal of a statue of Edward Cornwallis in Halifax (the city that he founded in 1749) on the grounds that Cornwallis, as governor of Nova Scotia, put a bounty on Mi’kmaq persons as punishment for a violent raid on a sawmill. Anyone who killed or imprisoned a Mi’kmaq received a cash reward for the deed.
The City of Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, has upped the ante with a far more radical measure. The councilors in a 7-1 vote recently ordered the removal of a bronze statue of Sir John A. Macdonald from its place at City Hall where it had been standing since 1982. Mayor Lisa Helps chose to avoid public discussion, consulting only with the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, who plan to conduct a “blessing, cleansing, and healing” ceremony on this site. The statue is to be put in storage while the municipal government, in the Orwellian words of Helps, attempts to “recontextualize” Macdonald’s place in history. [continue reading at the link above]
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