Get thee gone, Sir John. History is all about context.

Sir John A. Macdonald’s statue is set to be removed from Victoria’s city hall, the mayor saying it was especially upsetting for Indigenous people to walk past “a very poignant symbol of colonial violence of the residential school system.” She’s right.

Actually it stands in front of, not the main Victorian-era building, but an ugly two-storey city hall annex built in the 1960s, a decade rife with criminally bad architecture, and it looks ludicrously out of place.

City hall was designed the way the Victorians preferred it, two huge fists punched into the ground with a shout, “By God, we are the Victorians.” But by then we were truly Canadian, as in significantly Scottish, funless and thrifty. The locals felt the design was too extravagant — shades of the PM’s residence now — so it was scaled back to one giant fist in the Second Empire style, which is gentler and more attractive than our hyper-Gothic parliament buildings.

And here comes the context. John A. Macdonald was the first prime minister of Canada, a father of Confederation, and a great national power in himself for 50 years. A federalist, he built a trans-Canada railroad, dealt with the Americans deftly, and kept the French and English more or less on an even keel.

Most of all, he was Scottish. All sentences with the word “Scottish” in them should save it for the end. It explains everything, his achievements, his drive, and, I suppose, his being a famous drunk.

His great sin — he was the originator of the residential school system — has only been widely discussed in recent years. His entry in CanadaHistory.com does not mention it. It does not mention Indigenous people at all.

In 1883, Macdonald said Indians were “savages,” although I imagine most white people said that in 1883. He liked what he was being told on how to deal with them, and as historian Sean Carleton quotes him, said this: “Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”

His views on the treatment of native people were noted at the time and often questioned, Carleton points out.

The scholar Ian Mosby directly ties him to deliberate death: “Macdonald’s tenure as Supt General of Indian Affairs (1878-1887) saw the implementation of NWT Gov. Edgar Dewdney’s prairie starvation policies. These led directly to the deaths of as many as a third of the population of affected First Nations.” Indigenous Studies Professor Robert Innes at the University of Saskatchewan tells me that “Macdonald’s railroad was built on genocide he approved.”

Read more:

City of Victoria to remove statue of John A. Macdonald from city hall steps

Sir John A. Macdonald: Architect of genocide or Canada’s founding father?

Readers’ Letters: Don’t remove statue of PM

Mosby has also written on the long-term effects of malnutrition and hunger within the residential schools themselves. At this point, I recall the suffering of the Indigenous children brought from the residential school to my grade school classes. They were treated monstrously in their residential school and in our mainstream white school.

No adult ever told me why “the Indian kids” were humiliated and beaten, not teachers, not parents. I could not understand why they came to class with identical clothes and identical haircuts.

It marked forever the way I saw adults, as possible abusers of power, always with a complicit audience. Equally, I cannot see photos of Indigenous children in their classes at residential school without a sickness in my soul. I am unable to describe the things I saw and did not understand.

Never be casual about the sufferings of others, even though many pompous Ottawa commentators glory in it. How many generations will it take for them to recover?

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I myself do not wish to see any statue of Sir John A. without a large plaque explaining, among other things, what he did to the first people of this land. No, make that what he did to little children and their loving parents in creating the residential school system. We stole those children and we broke them.

I once walked through a museum aghast. It was the Musée du quai Branly — Jacques Chirac in Paris, packed with stolen Indigenous goods looted by French colonialists for centuries. It’s basically a crime scene. Its context would be centuries of French racial slaughter, and Parisians are now beginning to see the horror of it. Context is invaluable. Twitter is a terrible place because short tweets cannot offer context, are plucked out of nowhere and used to torment people. Americans don’t do context, they just bomb. They think all of their pointless wars of recent history stand alone, not realizing they’re just Vietnam over and over again.

In other words, don’t pluck out bits of history to stand alone. Best to provide a backgrounder to Macdonald’s life and work — good, bad and reprehensible—for every statue and every school named after him nationwide.

If context isn’t provided, leave the statue in museum basements.