The evolution of protest in Canada - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

After watching Drew Hayden Taylor’s play Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion at the Blyth Festival, and then, at home, rereading former Lieutenant Governor James Bartleman’s autobiography Raisin Wine, I became distinctly aware we in Huron County have been divorced from Indigenous issues.

 

I recall reading that, in the time of Tiger Dunlop, Native people camped on the islands at the foot of the Maitland River in the summer to catch and preserve fish for the winter. There are also Indigenous people living north of us near Southampton and south of us, where the 1995 rebellion over land at Ipperwash cost Dudley George his life, but, in general, we live divorced from the Native culture.    

 

So, both the play and the book were a reintroduction to the Native peoples’ struggles with the arrival of European settlers and the subsequent taking over of land that had previously been inhabited by Native people. Bartleman, the son of a white father and Indigenous mother, explains that native people had an established community in the Parry Sound area in the late 1800s, growing crops and building houses. But the government of the day decided the land was good enough for European settlers, so it took it over and told the Native people they must move north. An area of the community wasn’t used and Native people would return to it each summer in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Bartleman was growing up.

 

Decades later, Hayden Taylor was growing up on a reserve near Peterborough and he created a career as a writer of television shows, successful plays and novels.

 

As Canada approached its 150th anniversary in 2017, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa wanted something to mark the anniversary. Hayden Taylor was commissioned to write Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion. The play was a success but, if you remember, Native protests sprung up in Canada and the 2017 commemoration was buried in protests.

 

I remember looking forward to the 2017 event because I had been just 20 when Canada held its 100th anniversary of Confederation in 1967 and, working in a summer job at the Huron Expositor, I covered centennial events and saw how Canada grew and changed with the celebration.

 

But, 50 years later, things had changed. Native people didn’t appreciate the celebration of a relatively “recent” event when you considered their long ownership of the land.  They threw paint on a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald outside of the Ontario legislature. 

 

They painted and tore down a statue of Egerton Ryerson on the grounds of Ryerson University, my alma mater, because Ryerson was blamed for starting residential schools. Soon afterward, the name of the university was eventually changed to Toronto Metropolitan University.

 

Meanwhile, the city of Toronto considered changing the name of nearby Dundas Street because Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, had amended a motion in the British parliament in 1792 to add the word “gradually” to a bill promoted by fellow parliamentarian  and abolitionist William Wilberforce’s attempt to end slavery, delaying the abolition of slavery in the British Empire by as much as 15 years. 

 

After consideration (and time going by), Toronto decided not to change the name of Dundas Street because it would cost millions to buy new street signs on the long street, but it did change the name of Dundas Square in 2024 to Sankofa Square.
Things have calmed down since 2017. Earlier this year, having established that the hoardering around Sir John’s statue at Queen’s Park had been infested with rats, the province tore the cover off.

 

Still, I can’t help but wonder how much the  reaction related to the 2017 celebration  cost Hayden Taylor in lost royalties because the name Sir John A. had become poison. His portrayal of Macdonald is hardly flattering, seen getting drunker as the show progresses, but anything that used the Macdonald name was unacceptable when the protests were hot. 

 

I long remember that Macdonald is a man of mixed reputations in history, helping, for instance, to begin residential schools and oppose the Riel Rebellion, while at the same time creating confederation and spearheading the drive for a transcontinental railway.

 

Things are so much different in the U.S. George Washington, the first president after the American Revolution, and Benjamin Franklin, who oversaw the writing of the U.S. Constitution, were both slave owners. In fact, Franklin had children with a slave who became his romantic partner.

 

That the sins of the founders can be ignored in the U.S., but played up in Canada is just one of the profound differences between our two countries.