HALIFAX— The Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) is entering the final stages of a public conversation on reconciliation, colonialism, and the legacy of its founding father.

More than 50 people filled the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre in Halifax on Tuesday night as the “Task Force on the Commemoration of Edward Cornwallis and the Recognition and Commemoration of Indigenous History” held the last of its public engagement sessions.

The session took the form of a series of conversation circles, where residents were asked to weigh in on the way history, particularly Mi’kmaq history, should be commemorated in HRM.

“We have two major parts of our mandate: the first part is to make recommendations to council on the commemoration of Edward Cornwallis, so the statue and the city assets that bear his name,” said one of the task force co-chairs, Dr. Monica MacDonald, in an interview Tuesday.

“The other part, which we’re focusing on tonight, is what recommendations can we make to council in terms of recognizing and commemoration of Indigenous history, Mi’kmaq history.”

The first round of public engagement sessions were held in June and focused largely on Cornwallis, MacDonald said. The second round of sessions kicked off at the Zatzman Sportsplex in Dartmouth to a crowd of more than 20 people on Monday night.

Edward Cornwallis was appointed as governor of Nova Scotia in 1749, and settled the land that would become Halifax. The same year, Cornwallis issued what would be called the ‘Scalping Proclamation,’ which offered a bounty to anyone who killed a Mi’kmaq adult or child.

Cornwallis’ legacy became the subject of national scrutiny last year, reaching a head in January 2018 when Halifax regional council voted to remove his commemorative statue from the park bearing his name in the city’s South End. The statue, originally erected in the mid-1900s, has been in storage since.

“People do tend to focus on the statue,” MacDonald said.

While part of the task force’s mandate is to address the future of the statue, along with that of the street and park named for Cornwallis, she hoped this week’s sessions would focus more broadly on the way history is recognized throughout the municipality.

“We’re trying to look at the much bigger picture, so that’s why we really want people to think about the larger picture of commemoration,” she said.

As for whether or not the Cornwallis statue will be erected again in the future, MacDonald said it won’t be clear until the recommendations go to council, but that the task force heard a lot of ideas during its June sessions.

“A lot of people talked about the fact that they did not want the statue to go up in its present form,” said MacDonald.

“People talked about perhaps putting it back up in another context with a more educational component, people talked about placing it elsewhere in the city or donating it to a museum, or some people just wanted it left in storage or destroyed.”

MacDonald said the recommendations the task force makes to council could take a variety of shapes, including recommendations on funding mechanisms and support programs to help facilitate new commemorative efforts, and the shape processes like this one should take in the future.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The task force plans to use public feedback from both engagement sessions to develop a report to go to council by December 2020.

In the meantime, MacDonald stressed that residents are invited to weigh in by emailing clerks@halifax.ca.

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a Halifax-based journalist and a freelance contributor for Star Halifax. Follow her on Twitter: @jsrutgers

Read more about: