HALIFAX – A Canadian historian is questioning a decision by Halifax educators to change the name of a school in a bid to distance itself from a historic figure that aboriginals say was guilty of ethnic cleansing.
Jack Granatstein said Thursday that Halifax Regional School Board is trying to rewrite history by severing the connection to Edward Cornwallis, a British governor who founded the city in 1749.
“You can’t go around trying to undo history or make history perfect,” Granatstein, a historian with the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, said from Toronto.
“It’s inevitably rewriting history. It’s saying, ‘Our values today are the only ones that should apply, therefore we can’t use the name of someone who had different values 300 years ago.'”
The Halifax board voted unanimously Wednesday to strip Cornwallis Junior High of its name after coming under pressure from natives and a Mi’kmaq school board member to expunge it.
Native elder and author Daniel Paul launched the fight about 25 years ago to have monuments and public tributes to Cornwallis changed or taken down.
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Paul argues that the legacy of the army officer and colonial administrator is stained by a bounty he placed on native people in 1749 as a way to punish them for not paying homage to the King. Cornwallis, who spearheaded colonization of the area for the British in the mid-1700s, decreed that each scalp would fetch 10 pounds.
Paul said the initiative amounted to nothing more than an attempt to exterminate Mi’kmaq in the area.
“You can’t remove him from history, but it should be taught that he issued this proclamation for the scalps of people in an effort to ethnically cleanse the province,” he said in Halifax.
“Do you need to celebrate him as a hero? The answer is no.”
Paul, 72, said he’s not trying to erase Cornwallis from the history books. Instead, he wants monuments, tributes and other markers he sees as celebrations to be removed.
He said he will lobby to have a statue of Cornwallis removed from a downtown park also named after him. He suggested the green space be renamed Freedom Park.
Granatstein said it’s a tricky business applying today’s moral and ethical principles on earlier times.
“People, who by our standards today, are seen as viciously anti-Indian, in the 1700s were seen as great patriotic soldiers who made it safe for whites to live in Nova Scotia,” he said. “You can’t apply today’s standards to people of the past. That just gets silly.”
He cited the example of a building in Toronto named after one of the country’s first female lawyers. It turned out she was an anti-Semite and the building was given another name.
An official with the school board did not return calls Thursday.
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