If an angry mob tears down a statue, has history been erased?
Hardly. In fact, history may very well have occurred in the act of tearing down the monument.
The destruction of Confederate monuments throughout the United States during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 produced some of the most iconic images of the largest civil-rights mobilizations since the Civil Rights Era. Years from now, images of the destruction of these monuments will appear in schoolchildren’s history textbooks.
The leading question of history’s imminent erasure comes up often enough on matters of contested commemoration, albeit typically in more sedate circumstances. It’s more than a little ironic that what gets mischaracterized as an assault on public memory by a “woke mob” usually involves active members of a given community working in concert with elected officials and through the normal channels of public discourse. Places and spaces are being commemorated, dedicated, and rededicated fairly frequently in communities large and small all over the world, all without ever having a negative impact on history.
Recent debates regarding John A. Macdonald, his statue in front of Queen’s Park, and his eponymous parkway in Ottawa have, predictably, brought up similar concerns.
Allow me to allay them.
Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway to be renamed in Ottawa | APTN News
Monuments, museums, memorials, and public memory are my business as a public historian. It may surprise you to learn that most people in my profession aren’t opposed to changes in commemoration — even occasionally violent changes, such as the toppling of a monument.
While most of us would prefer a careful dismantling of a taboo statue and a public effort to determine what to do with the old monument and what, if anything, should replace it, the destruction of a monument can be a cathartic experience for a society. Consider the Nazi monuments destroyed by the Red Army as it liberated Europe from Hitler nearly 80 years ago.
History didn’t disappear with the destruction of those monuments — it was made.
Similarly, removing commemorations to John A. Macdonald and other people from Canada’s history who were complicit in the genocide of Indigenous people may feel very cathartic for those Canadians troubled by this painful and still largely unacknowledged colonial legacy.
The process of identifying a troublesome commemoration, researching the context for its creation, explaining why it may no longer reflect the community’s values, ideals, or aspirations, and then engaging with the public to find a better alternative can provide a more historically enriching experience than was the case when the commemoration first occurred.
It is a problem inherent to sculpting lifelike representations of people (most often white men) in stone or metal and then mounting them on pedestals: they become, as intended, larger than life and beyond scrutiny.
They are historical artifacts in that they can be representative of the time and place and people that erected them — but they are not history incarnate.
Consider Montreal’s Macdonald monument, whose statue was torn down by protesters during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
Activists in Montreal topple a statue of John A. Macdonald
The context of that monument’s creation had much to do with the cultural politics of commemoration between Montreal’s French and English communities around the turn of the 20th century. The decision to create the monument was made by leading members of the city’s English-speaking business community, many of whom also happened to be supporters of Macdonald’s Conservative Party. When it was unveiled, the assembled orators spoke of Macdonald’s great contribution to the British Empire, and the crowd sang “Rule, Britannia!” Macdonald’s contribution to “creating Canada” was almost an afterthought. The monument’s location — a prominent and new public park in what was then the commercial nexus of the city’s English-speaking Western half — reflected the interests and values of the men who’d championed the monument’s creation.
Neither the public nor any historians were involved in any capacity.
And it is highly unlikely that John A. Macdonald ever did anything of historic significance on the site of the monument, as the park had been a cemetery up until three years after Macdonald’s first term in office had ended.
If history matters, then the contextual history of monuments and other forms of commemoration matters equally.
Even the history on our historical markers shouldn’t escape our scrutiny, as history is far from static. The more we learn about the past, the more the picture comes into focus.
Take, for instance, the very first historical marker ever commissioned by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, just over a century ago. Located on the grounds of Montreal’s McGill University, it is supposed to mark the location of the Iroquoian community of Hochelaga, which Cartier visited on his second voyage to Canada, in 1535.
It is a fine monument. The only issue is that it is located about two blocks away from where artifacts thought to be from Hochelaga were found, and historians and anthropologists have since concluded those artifacts likely were not from the community Cartier visited. If that wasn’t bad enough, McGill actually moved the monument even farther away from that location about seven years ago — to shine a light on the university’s commitment to preserving Indigenous culture and history.
And why did the monument end up on McGill’s campus in the first place?
In part, because it looked nicer on a university campus than in a busy city intersection.
Removing this monument certainly wouldn’t erase history; it obscures the history it is meant to commemorate.
Agenda segment, November 2, 2020: Does renaming restore or erase history?
Historical revisionism is a term often used to disparage the work historians actually do, which is to revise, reconsider, and re-evaluate all that we think we know about the past. The Second World War, perhaps the single “best known” historical event, remains the subject of constant study by historians. That said, sometimes monuments can be used to deliberately obfuscate historical reality. There are, for example, several monuments to war criminals and Nazi collaborators in Canada. Though the advocates of these monuments defend those they venerate, the historical record and the consensus of historians is quite clear — they have no place in a nation that helped defeat the Nazis.
Revising extant commemoration offers new opportunities for commemoration and, more important, offers new opportunities for greater public participation in the commemoration process. This helps us create monuments and memorials that more accurately reflect who we are. Most public monuments in Canada were put up after the First World War but before the Great Depression and were commissioned almost exclusively by men of British cultural origins — without any public involvement. Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find a community in Canada that wouldn't actively pursue as much public input as possible in a new commemorative project.
That we are finally coming to a reckoning with our past is not an issue for me as a historian. Quite the opposite: these are the conversations we should have been having long ago. Societies that survive evolve, and part of that societal evolution means taking a good long look in the mirror. If our society finds aspects of our history — including those formerly held in high esteem — to now be disreputable and recommends that new commemorations take their place, history isn’t being erased. On the contrary, it’s blossoming. We’re learning and making conscientious and considerate choices based on new information. No historian worth their salt could possibly oppose this.
Canada’s history is rich and complex, but it is also poorly appreciated — far too much of the country’s story has been ignored or marginalized because it didn’t fit a tightly controlled and narrowly focused narrative. Rather than make false idols of the figures who have dominated public memory for over a century and a half, we should consider turning our attention to all the stories we don’t yet know well enough.
Canada’s history is still yours to discover.