How Do We Tell Shared Stories from the Past?

Original statue

The concrete pedestal that supported the tall Samuel de Champlain monument is now empty.  In 2017, Parks Canada which owns the monument, took it down to clean it.  The City of Orillia asked for time to consider its future and has spent the past year or so discussing this in a special committee made up of city, federal, Indigenous and local community representatives.  They held public consultations and recently gave their report to Parks Canada.

The Orillia city council recently voted to have the monument put back in its original form and to have it accompanied by “something that better reflects both its historical context and current sentiments toward reconciliation”. (Global News)

Not everyone was pleased with this decision.  Many still feel that the statue is disrespectful to Indigenous peoples.  In researching the history of this statue, I found out that it’s original purpose in 1915 was to improve English/French relations by honouring a French explorer.  That is why Champlain is dressed in full court attire including a cape and spurs.  The age old English/French discord imported from Europe is what the monument is about.  

European/Indigenous relationships is not what the monument is about.  If it was, then the importance of Indigenous support to the newcomers would have been evident in the design of the statue.  The plaque on the old statue read in part, that the statue was “erected to commemorate the advent into Ontario of the white race.”  You only have to look at the size of the figures and their position in the monument (the standing priest and fur trader loom over the four sitting Wendat men) to understand that this is about the advent of white men.

Small red dresses and ribbons were tied to the fence

On Canada Day this year a protest was held at the place where the monument once was.  The pedestal is surrounded by a seven foot high wire fence.  The Indigenous protesters decorated the fence with ribbons in the Anishinaabeg colours for the four directions; yellow, red, black and white.  They also pinned small red dresses to the fence in memory of all the murdered and missing Indigenous women that have been harmed by those who hold colonial worldviews.  

Orange Shirt Day symbol

There was an orange Tshirt to symbolize the Orange Shirt Day that remembers all the Indigenous children who lived and died in the Indian Residential schools.  There were four large pieces of cloth in the four colours as well.

My partner and I walked around the whole fence.  We noticed that some of the red dresses and ribbons had fallen off. My partner repaired every bit of it and retied one of the big cloth corners that had come loose.  

It seemed to be one way to show respect for those that were not okay with the statue coming back in its original form.  I loved how the ribbons and dresses made the wire fence more beautiful, more vibrant.  And when the wind blew, the ribbons danced in it, brought it to life.  The sun made the ribbons shine brightly.

A few weeks later, I met one of the organizers of the protest at a local Steampunk Festival.  She had a table at the festival to explain the Red Dress campaign to festival goers.  She proudly showed me her copy of the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls that she had received at the Final Ceremony in Hull earlier this year.  We told her about repairing the fallen pieces and she told us that the pieces they left there had been vandalized a few times already.  She also told me that when the statue was still in place, people had used the eye sockets of the Indigenous people in the statue to butt out cigarettes.

This ongoing debate about a statue is happening across Canada.  These statues become focal points for the story we are telling, the story that is called history.  Who do we venerate?  How bad do actions have to be, to stop venerating someone from the past? Some people feel that we should never speak ill of the dead.  But then how do we learn from the mistakes of history?  How do we tell both sides of the story, or the many sides of the story?  Can a statue created a hundred years ago tell the story of today or do we need something new?

I will keep following this story because it is part of our new story in Canada.  It is important that we listen to all the experiences that came from our history, not just those of the victors.  It is important that we work together to figure this out and that we wrestle with our own versions of the history of this land that we now call Canada.  We have to remember that art is very powerful and it speaks its own language.  We also have to remember that we have creative people among us who can create new ways of telling this complex story.  And we have to be able to imagine the story from all the points of view in order to really know what happened and then what choices we will make for the future…. together.