The fashion of the moment is to fall all over ourselves de-historicizing our surroundings, which means making statues fall all over themselves as we knock them down for being colonialist.
Is it time to make a law (statute) that stands up for the status of statues? These words derive from the Latin verb "stare" -- to stand. Is it time to stand up for History and the memorialization of significant historical figures? Their significance arose because they embody the signs of their times, and if we don't keep track of past times we will certainly lose our way in present times, as we are doing: getting lost in willed-amnesia.
The past can be erased from collective memory but it can't be erased: it lives on in the present. It made the present and made us what we are. That's pretty immemorial.
By "re-claiming our history", groups often mean obscuring the past and adopting an alternative identitarian narrative -- projecting backwards a story which is actually about the present. The most clear view of history is in the stories of individual lives. From biographies and memoirs we learn about an era. Some people don't read biography however, and for them a statue with a plaque may be the only window on the past. Let's not close it. If you don't like the story on the plaque, don't stand there staring, just amble on by.
We can stand-down our nation-builders, but we can't dam the stream of their influence. We can topple from their platforms Macdonald and Ryerson, Duncan Campbell Scott, Susanna Moodie and L.M. Montgomery, Tom Tomson, Emily Carr and Nellie McClung ... but we can't take currents out of a river that has already flowed.
Here stand a couple of colonials (PAINTER/writer Emily Carr and POET/administrator Duncan Campbell Scott):
JustJestsHear their spirits alive and chatting in the night, in the short story "Gardens of History" (see Shifting Landscapes, an Anthology, VIAPA, 2021)
"Why do they hate us, Dunc?"
"Search me, Em. The future is a foreign country."
"In what kind of future do people stop studying
the past and start 'curating' it?"
"I don't know. Why don't you go paint a mountain? I'm reading."
