Making Peace with Victoria & the Lion Part 3: The Long View
Original Kitchener, Ontario | December 10 2022
Stages of proglacial lake development in the region of the current North American Great Lakes - wikipedia
Preface
I’ll say this for that cowardly midnight vandal who likes to splatter blood-red paint over images of exalted personages, choosing targets for scorn and rage who can’t hear, think, say anything or do anything, bad or good, because they’ve been dead for more than 100 years: He, she or they got me thinking, talking and writing.
He, she or they have helped me realize my place in the world. When my parents decided to cross the ocean to settle in Ontario, I didn’t have any say in the matter. In worldly terms, they probably would have been much better off staying where they were. The Town of Trenton was a provincial backwater compared to The Hague, the world-class city, complete with a world-class beach, that we left behind. But I grew to love the place where we landed: the streets, the fields, the drumlins, the river, the bay, the Great Lake, the air force base, the railroad junction, the road from Montreal to Dundas and points west … . If opportunities had found me there, I would never have left.
I’ve been generally content as a resident in these parts since I left Quinte Country and arrived in Waterloo to go to school 45 years ago. I’ve been an engaged citizen in Kitchener for 30 of those years, and in the County/Region (not “K-W”) as a whole through my involvement with the region-wide Arts Council. I started caring deeply about what happens to this province since Mike Harris profaned it with his perverse revolution, starting in 1995. During the referendum later that same year, the thundering irony of the Quebecois adopting the ultra-Protestant come-outer ways of the Bostonnais struck me profoundly. When Doug Ford destroyed all those tree seedlings during Arbour Week, 2019, I defiantly made the Grand River watershed my country. Now, through the deeds of the midnight statue vandal, I’ve started feeling, thinking and testifying like a true-hearted Canadian.
Recap
This is the third instalment of a projected series of seven thought pieces related to the subject of statue removal in Waterloo Country. Making Friendly on the Statue Removal Front Part 1 proposes that we’d all be better if we found ways “to reconcile the ongoing presence of the statue of Queen Victoria and the Lion, right there where she has stood for 111 years, with all that we aspire to be, individually and collectively, for the next 111 years.”
Making Friendly with Victoria & the Lion Part 2 equates “reconciliation … with the quest for peace – real peace, meaning a resolution of tensions or differences to the satisfaction and benefit of all concerned.” This means that to fully reconcile the Empress Victoria’s ongoing presence in bronze near the historic heart of the City of Kitchener, we’d have to come to an understanding that is as close to universal as possible. Although what the midnight paint splatterer has set in motion, both here and in Wilmot, constitutes an attack on the very idea of Canada, there is no intention here to mount a defensive, “us versus them” counter-attack. The objective is peace, not victory.
Canadian Exceptionalism
The second post in this series also introduces what will be a central theme in these musings: Times have changed since the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire erected this memorial to their late Queen, but their gift to what was then still the town of Berlin could serve as a symbol of an aspect of Canada’s story that is more relevant today than it was in 1911: the theme of peaceful transition. The fact that we have never made an abrupt, total break from all that came before is the essence of what can be considered Canadian exceptionalism.
What I’m proposing is that we make the best of this aspect of the story of how Canada became a modern nation state by taking the statue in question – a vestige of a once mighty empire – and reimagining it as a symbol of what distinguishes us from all the revolutionary republics of this hemisphere and around the world. That doesn’t mean that we’re at odds with what has been the norm for more than two centuries, or that we’re better than what can be called the “American Standard” of rule under presidents and commanders-in-chief. I’m advocating resisting conformity and emphasizing difference in order to make reconciliation possible.
When continuity and peaceful transition are taken as the primary theme of the narrative, everything that happened before 1867 becomes as significant as all that has come to pass since. The same goes for 1759 or 1776: Key dates become turning points, marking steps taken along the way, rather than the birth of a nation state or the dawn of a new order. With a long view of history, federations, constitutions, even borders, become provisional arrangements, not expressions of divine will or evidence of manifest national destinies.
Accounts that cover thousands of years with various twists and turns along the way offer many advantages, including serving as an antidote for new Thousand Year Reich propositions of one kind or another. Empires come, and empires go. The vast domain Victoria embodied was a relatively late chapter, which, as it turned out, was close to final: That particular configuration had only a few more decades left in its run after her reign ended. If we take our time, the offending statue becomes just another wondrous relic of empire, like the pyramids of Egypt, the Colosseum in Rome, l’Arc de triomph in Paris, or, for that matter, the dollars and bits evoking Spanish gold and silver in our wallets and purses, or the July and August pages in those new calendars and planners for 2023.
Canada conceived this way is more compatible with Indigenous accounts of the story of how we all got to where we are today than, say, “last spike” tales of continental conquest, which imagine the True North strong and free as a kind of mini-USA. There’s a relationship between the revolution-liberation storyline – disruption, the dethroning of legacy rule, and the republican principles of standardized citizenship, regardless of birth or historical circumstance – and the imposition of modern democratic order on nations and peoples to replace their traditional ways of being and belonging. The role of Queen Victoria and her successors in Canada as a modern nation state is somewhat analogous to that of hereditary chiefs of the Six Nations of Grand River Country, a traditional order that the Canadian government tried to replace with a modern political structure going on a century ago.
The Long View
A narrative arc that begins, let’s say with the Ice Age, is particularly well suited for viewing the world from here in the Laurentian-Great Lakes area. There is evidence all around us of multiple points of origin and storylines that run parallel but also intersect, merging and diverging as things unfold. I’m writing from the perspective of an adopted, loyal resident of Ontario, which, as a product of such intersections, stands as a special kind of nation that remains, for the most part, waiting to be discovered, recognized and realized for what it is.
In the Canadian context, from sea to sea to sea to the borderline, the narratives interwoven with one another become even more varied and complex. An emphasis on continuity and peaceful transition over longer spans of time can help us accept, celebrate, and benefit from the fact that Canada, the settler dominion, has multiple origins:
Québec nation;
Acadia nation;
Atlantic Canada as a extension of New England into areas where New France was also a presence;
Upper Canada, now Ontario, as a colony of refugees from the secessionist states planted in what had been frontier Quebec;
Newfoundland nation, with its origins in the Atlantic fishing trades, where Basques, Spaniards, Portuguese, French and Netherlandish interests and practices intersected with those of the British, thistle, shamrock and rose.
The Labrador shores are something else again, related, in some ways, to Newfoundland but also to Greenland and Iceland. From there, we enter the vast expanses around Hudson Bay that the Old Empire designated as Rupert’s Land. Like Québec, this story begins with the fur trade.
The Métis nation story begins with the encounter between the peoples of the land and France in North America, and then becomes part of North West and Hudson’s Bay Company territory, which extended out into the northern reaches of the Great Plains and the Mountains, where it meets
Pacific Canada, and
Arctic Canada …
Each of these Canadas has its own points of origin and unique cultural and economic patterns; each with a distinct pre-Canadian Indigenous presence that remains, against all odds, a vital force; each with distinct relations with the rest of what began as England and France in America, and with the rest of the Empire, its components, its allies and its enemies, on all continents across the Seven Seas.
We are, and have always been, plural.
Origins in Happenstance
Another distinguishing element is that these points of origin usually began as encounters with geography. In all cases, the role of chance far outweighs the prevalence of willed self-determination driven by a sense of mission, a vision or a specific ambition (as distinct from generic greed, aggression, curiosity or wanderlust). They just happened. But that’s what nations are: miraculous accidents of germination, birth, kinship, inheritance, encounter and adaptation that take root, grow, and if blessed with peace and sustenance, flourish in art, culture and general enjoyment: A harmonious, secure and vibrant nation is a happy place.
In many ways, a collectivity founded on a principle, an idea, a text or a theological formulation is the antithesis of a nation born through unanticipated and unintentional encounter. Canada’s more natural and organic nature leads us towards carrying on, making the best of what fate may bring, adapting, building on what exists, rather than breaking away, disrupting or being in endless pursuit of a better deal. The separatist, essentially Protestant, impulse that has been such a driving force in the colonies that seceded in 1776 is much less prominent here. Plural Canada has always leaned towards the Catholic side of that great divide, which is something that distinguishes this country from both the U.S. and England.
There is also “catholic” in the general sense of “broad or wide-ranging in tastes, interests, or the like; having sympathies with all; broad-minded; liberal … universal in extent; involving all; of interest to all.” A maritime empire like the one Victoria was charged with embodying was catholic in this way: all-encompassing, multifarious. A global dominion in which the sun is always rising and setting is in some ways the antithesis of an empire of liberty conquering a continent with modern nation-planting drives equipped with axes, ploughs, rifles, wagons and cradles on a succession of advancing frontiers.
Again, telling the story this way doesn’t have to be yet another way of separating the sheep from the goats, or reducing the story to two polarities that are intrinsically at odds with one another. We have far too many of those kinds of distinctions already, each with a measure of credibility but none that are anywhere near the whole truth. The purpose of the kind of differentiation I’m proposing here is to set the stage for reconciliation and genuine peace, not triumph and capitulation.
Making Peace with Victoria & the Lion Part 3: The Long View
Would it be politically incorrect to add to the statute of Queen Victoria and the Lion? I think not. I have a suggestion or two although will not make my suggestions in your blog. Personally may I suggest renaming Victoria Park with an Indigenous Name, and leave the statute. Furthermore, I would encourage some thought of removing the cannon from the island that is symbolically aimed at another statute.
Again, telling the story this way doesn’t have to be yet another way of separating the sheep from the goats, or reducing the story to two polarities that are intrinsically at odds with one another. We have far too many of those kinds of distinctions already, each with a measure of credibility but none that are anywhere near the whole truth. The purpose of the kind of differentiation I’m proposing here is to set the stage for reconciliation and genuine peace, not triumph and capitulation.