Not everybody is happy about some of the historical people that schools and statues are honouring.
“We’ve been putting people literally on pedestals when we build statues to them, and maybe what we’ve got to do is think about who our ancestors were, and how their actions created the conditions that we’re still experiencing today,” Jim Daschuk, University of Regina associate professor, said.
Sir John A. Macdonald, the father of confederation, also has a lesser known story, Daschuk said.
“He oversaw the managed famine that drove people to reserves and away from the railway, that’s the ethnic cleansing of southwestern Saskatchewan, the Indian residential school system, the pass system,” Daschuk said.
After Ontario teachers called for the name of Canada’s first prime minister to be removed from public elementary schools, Premier Brad Wall was quick to call it a slippery slope.
“To those who would say: ‘No, wipe his name from every building, no, you better, because of the words he said and things that he and others acted on,’ which was context at the time, then you’d have to apply the same to people like Lincoln or people like Tommy Douglas,” Wall said in a phone interview.
Edgar Dewdney, who has a street and a plaque in his honour, is even more controversial than the first prime minister, Daschuk said.
“Dewdney was the man who gave John A. MacDonald the idea to starve Indigenous people into submission. He also oversaw the establishment of the Indian residential school system, the illegal pass system that kept First Nations incarcerated on their reserves,” Daschuk said. “That guy was a snake.”
“The folks who live on Dewdney Avenue and use it as a conduit are reminded every single day of the person who marginalized and oppressed their ancestors,” Daschuk said.
“To me that would be an ongoing insult.”
Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway has previously called for the renaming of Dewdney Avenue and now wants to see more education around the first Canadian prime minister’s history as well.
“The truth is John A. Macdonald during his term as prime minister was directly responsible for acts of genocide and government policy implementation for the forcible containment of Indigenous people as well as the use of starvation tactics to clear the plains for setters,” she said in a written statement.
“If the truth was shared about his involvement in these horrible moments of Canadian history maybe more people would understand why his name and legacy shouldn’t be honoured.”
Despite a checkered past, Nicholas Flood Davin also has a Regina school bearing his name.
“He was the person who wrote the report that recommended the establishment of residential schools,” Daschuk said.
“I think it’s incumbent on us as citizens of Regina to start thinking about these things. They’re not benign symbols. They’re representations of power, the old school power, and to some extent power that continues into the 21st century.”
Minister Ralph Goodale said the Canadian government is committed to reconciliation but noted that removing names was not included in the calls to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“What is healthy about this, is a full discussion in the public domain, so that people have an opportunity to learn and to be educated about the flow of history,” he said.
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