Making Peace With Victoria and the Lion Part 4: In the Bleak Midwinter
Making Peace With Victoria and the Lion Part 4: In the Bleak Midwinter
Original Kitchener, Ontario, Canada - December 24, 2022
As I sit down to start another chapter in these musings, the song “White Christmas” is going through my head. I heard a reference on the radio, and it ear-wormed its way into my consciousness. This is a song that celebrates living in a place with a full, four-season climate -- a place where, when winter comes, “the treetops glisten and children listen, to hear sleigh bells in the snow … .” If someone in California, Texas, Louisiana or Florida sings it, they’re saying, in effect, that they wish they were here in our corner of the world.
The refrain conveys the season's greetings: “May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be white.” But it isn’t Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Danny Kaye, the year 1942, or 1954, that come to mind. In December, 2022, it’s impossible to ignore the hard times we’ve stumbled our way into, the likes of which most of us have never seen in our lifetime. The snow in those photos we’ve been seeing of the tent encampments on Victoria Street and in Victoria Park over the last few weeks, and now the arrival of a Christmas blizzard negate everything that may seem merry or bright about the arrival of winter this time around.
Queen Victoria in statue form seems oblivious to all this. Cavaliere Raffaele Zaccaquini's sculpture was placed in a way that has the monarch facing away from the encampment on Roos Island. It may have been the intention to have her appear aloof, looking down on her subjects from up on that high stone plinth. Or maybe, since this is a memorial, her height is meant to signify that she is no longer of this world.
With regard to the connection between the monument and the encampment, it is worth noting that, unlike the tent city at Weber and Victoria, this one is an occupation. The purpose, as organizer Julian Ichim explained to a CBC KW reporter last summer, is to make sure we don’t follow Victoria’s example, and turn our backs:
“People care when it's in their face… . Poverty should not be something that is hidden, and that's what they want to do. They want to hide poverty. They want to criminalize poverty… . By bringing poverty here, we're bringing the struggle, the class struggle here, where people have their weddings, where people have things where they can't turn a blind eye and pretend that the horrors don't exist.”
The leaders of the occupation have issued demands: stop evicting campers on city and region land; decriminalize all drugs; stop increasing the police budget; use vacant properties in downtown Kitchener for low-income housing. When I last walked through the encampment, I noticed that removing the statue of Victoria from the park that bears her name is one of the demands.
Like the encampments, Victoria in bronze stands outdoors. She’s been exposed to the elements for 113 winters now. Unlike the flesh and blood of the living human beings who are facing a winter in those tents, limestone and bronze are impervious to weather: This monument was built to last. But it looks like time has started taking its toll. The wear and tear that is clearly visible on the metal is probably not a direct result of the paint vandal’s handiwork; it’s likely the chemicals that have been hastily and repeatedly applied to remove the blood-red stains that have been the most damaging.
It might have been better, as some supporters of the midnight paint vandal demanded at one point, if the paint had been left in place, at least for conservation purposes. When the anger against the prime ministers statues in Baden was at its height, I suggested painting them white for a time, to acknowledge that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with, and to protect the work from further damage. This would also have allowed the project to continue serving its purpose, which was to serve as an aid to help Canadians discover, talk about, and come to terms with our shared past.
I thought the statues were serving their intended purpose better than the founders of the project might have imagined, and readily acknowledge that the midnight paint vandal helped move the discussion to a higher, more meaningful plane. But now the offending images are locked away in storage somewhere, in the dark: out of sight, out of mind. Zaccaquini's Victoria and the Lion is also stimulating exploration and conversation, and again the vandalism has helped get us thinking. But that wasn’t the original purpose. The work is not, and never has been, a teaching aid for “history lessons.” It is an artefact, a landmark, and as part of the city’s original large public park, something that is historical in and of itself.
The statue is an integral part of the history of Berlin-Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. The story continues. Its role in the current controversies, including some striking parallels with the original statue controversy over the Kaiser’s bust in Berlin, Ontario, are deepening its meaning, and giving it new civic relevance. Each new chapter in the story adds to the historical significance of the statue as an artefact.
As I’ve said in previous posts, I’m writing from the point of view of a “conservatory progressive.” I’m trying to explain why I sincerely believe that we’d be far better off if we found a way to reconcile Victoria’s ongoing physical presence in bronzed effigy, right there where she has always stood, with all that we aspire to be, individually and collectively as a city, province and nation state.
My city is Kitchener, specifically, original Kitchener, i.e. the city’s heritage precincts, which include our historic civic, cultural and business district and that wonderful constellation of legacy neighbourhoods adjacent to it.
My Kitchener includes the encampment at Weber and Victoria. It also includes Julian Ichim and his people in those tents in the park. The community known as A Better Tent City lives on the periphery of the original city area, but their story begins downtown, a few steps from Kitchener City Hall, when Nadine Green began opening her heart and the doors of her convenience store to people who were homeless.
In some respects, Julian Ichim and Nadine Green are as different as night and day. A capacity for loving one's neighbour, and for giving generously of oneself is a kind of gift. In that respect, Green is the most gifted individual I’ve ever met. “God is working,” is her constant refrain, and she says it in a way that I find disarmingly convincing. To my mind, she’s the miracle, not the tiny house model. Ichim, on the other hand, talks of class struggle in classic Marxist-Leninist terms, which in this day and age sound almost as quaint as an old Tory resolve like "loyal she began, loyal she remains." But his steadfast dedication matches that of Nadine Green, and it makes sense that they are friends and allies in the service of the poor, the downtrodden, the vulnerable.
Basically, original Kitchener includes everything that has been built along streets that were laid out in the early modern grid pattern, before car-centric suburban development forms became the standard in the 1950s and ‘60s. This area began as what we now call a 20-minute city, where people were able to walk to the places where they worked, worshipped, gathered, shopped, served their community, and went to school. It remains by far the most pedestrian-friendly part of the city. The fact that the residents of the encampments don’t have cars is one of the many reasons why I think they belong in the part of the city where I live, and why the location the Region has selected for their new managed encampment, on the edge of an area designed for getting from place to place by car, may not be the best choice. It is, however, better than nothing, and winter is here, so there’s no time left to go back to the drawing board.
Original Kitchener also includes the people behind the original occupation, or, since it was taking land back, reclamation of the city’s historic central parklands: O:se Kenhionhata:tie Land Back Camp, “a group of TwoSpirit IndigiQueer folx and queer/trans or LGBTQ+ settler accomplices gathering in the Great Peace to celebrate, learn, and thrive in our cultures” representing “several Nations living under the peace of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum, and the Two Row Wampum.”
I don’t have anything like the strengths, the gifts, or the dedication of Nadine Green, Julian Ichim or the Land Back leaders. But I’m writing in the hope that my peculiar convictions are not an insurmountable barrier to being able to serve as something like an ally, and if that’s not possible, to being tolerated as a kind of conscientious objector by our more militant culture warriors with progressive and/or conservationist leanings.
This is not a neutral stance. Part of my objection to drawing the line using what I think is a misguided interpretation of a civic symbol is that it is simply bad strategy to needlessly alienate potential friends and allies. The danger is that those who are judged to be on the wrong side of the line could end up going over to the dark side, the empty side. This is the side of the political spectrum that foments and exploits hate, fear and resentment; the that side looks backward, to an imagined world that was simpler, more familiar, when men were men, and when women, and all the lower orders, in terms of class, ethnicity or race, knew their place. These are forces that would take us back to a time when bulldozing fields, woodlots and wetlands and building highways, parking lots, strip malls and vast suburban housing tracts constituted the way of progress and prosperity. And that is a line that I could never cross: There can be no reconciliation with a moral, ethical, spiritual and ideational vacuum.
Being a progressive is, simply, looking and moving forward, not back to some lost golden age. It is true that the glory days of the British Empire when it ruled the waves, and of the Empire of Liberty that dominated this continent, and from there the whole wide world, are long gone, and there is no going back. I’ve come to think of the UK and the US as two sides of the same imperial coin: London is to New York what Rome was to Constantinople. Canada originated as the product of both, heir to all the sins and omissions of Anglo-imperialism, but also all the benefits the twin empires of late modernity have brought us. The difference is that Canada is still emerging. What this land and its peoples can be remains ours to imagine and make happen.
This means that Canadians are forward-looking by their very nature. As a progressive, I support most of the stated objectives of both of these occupations/reclamations of Victoria Park. If I were writing a “year in review” piece, I would cite Recollections & Imaginings, the film and the vision of the abandoned Charles Street Terminal as an Indigenous community hub, as one of the highlights of 2022 from an arts, culture and even a heritage perspective. What I’m uncomfortable with is the predominance of certain militant, separatist, judgmental and reductionist tendencies which I have come to associate with armed, pugnacious, U.S.-style “Live Free or Die” insurrection.
I’m not suggesting we resume those old battles, or carry on with fighting that has gone on for more than 250 years now. The point is that Victoria Park and Willow River Park need not be polar opposites, or even mutually exclusive. I’m proposing that we start imagining reconciling left and right; East and West; foresight and hindsight; freedom and belonging; progress and conservation; prosperity and sustainability; Nadine Green’s gift of love with Julian Ichim’s dedication to social justice; liberals, democrats and greens with what remains of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire (now just IODE); Six Nations of Grand River Country with the United Empire Loyalists' Association. To me, that’s what living under the peace of the Dish With One Spoon wampum, Two Row wampum and the Covenant Chain could mean, if the wisdom keepers grant us permission to place our hopes there.
I honestly believe that the best step in that direction would be to agree to leave that statue alone for a time and start paying attention to matters that are urgent and immediately at hand. The first priority is keeping people from freezing or burning to death in those tents. We can look for a way to end the occupation of Roos Island without yielding to what is, in effect, a kind of civic blackmail. We can also start treating the encampments as communities, as voluntary settlements that can serve as a step towards belonging, and therefore as part of a permanent solution rather than as a problem to be solved.
To that end, let us, loyal Victorians and good-hearted republicans alike, follow the O:se Kenhionhata:tie Land Back lead and start developing a respectful affection for that old bus terminal now standing there empty and forlorn, and from there, get to work on imagining, not only a beautiful dream for the future of that property (which we, the people of the region own), but also how this structure can be put to good use immediately, to save lives, promote harmony and understanding, and perhaps share a few moments of good cheer as we endure the hardships of winter.
The illuminations on Roos Island, photo by Harold Russell, as posted December 12, 2020.
