Peace Making with Victoria & the Lion Part 6: Six Months Later
Original Kitchener, Ontario, Canada - May 24, 2023
Last November, I began a series of musings trying to express what is best described as a longing for a peaceful solution to the controversy over the Queen Victoria statue in Victoria / Willow Park (see links below). “Spring will arrive in stages,” I wrote, looking ahead at a time when winter was still approaching:
Groundhog Day/Candlemas; Lunar New Year; Black History Month; the vernal equinox; Nowruz, the Roman and Persian New Year; Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday, Good Friday, Easter; April Fools; Earth Day; Arbour Week; May Day … up to what is still Victoria Day / Fête de la Reine in these lands, and the beginning of another gardening season here in Ontario. That leaves ample time to do the work that needs to be done.
If we do it right, we‘ll be able to celebrate May 24, 2023 in Kitchener, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada like never before.
A new year was about to begin, and the City-led discussions on the future of the statue were underway, so I had high hopes.
Now the holiday Monday has come and gone; today is May 24, 2023, and little or nothing has changed. We had to be content celebrating like we usually do, buying plants at the nurseries, fireworks in New Dundee, and the usual flurry of articles about the relevance of this peculiar, only-in-Canada holiday, and the current relevance of monarchy itself, amplified this time around by the coronation of Charles III earlier this month.
Six months ago, I came away from the first “Witness Circle” session at the Kitchener Market thinking we were getting somewhere. After a sequence of five Evening Muse pieces, I had decided to hold back from making more public statements on the subject in order to be able to participate in the discussion process as prescribed. My convictions are not easily summarized, and likely to incite opposition; moreover, I’ve sworn off binary pro vs con debating of any and all kinds. So I went to the discussion session intending to keep my rather peculiar views on the subject mostly to myself, for the time being at least.
The opening presentations were deliberately slanted towards “the voices of Indigenous, Black and racialized community members.” Participants knew that before we signed up; personally, this was a major part of the reason I was there. I wanted to get a better sense of why this peculiar relic of a by-gone time, after standing there for more than a century without drawing much attention, had suddenly acquired so much meaning, causing so much pain, and inciting so much outrage.
Among the witnesses, I found the testimony of Ecological Landscape Designer Nicola Jane particularly compelling. I’d met her previously as a guest on the “community radio magazine” I put together every week, talking about her "Sankofa 100 Miles To Freedom Tour,” during which she visited various places in Southern Ontario in search of connections with African Diaspora women who came here as refugees from slavery. I invited her to return to the program and share what she said in the Witness Circle with radio listeners. To hear what she had to say, please follow this link.
After the opening statements, the rest of us in the assembly were given an opportunity to talk among ourselves. We were seated around tables of eight or so. The testimony of one participant at our table stands out in my memory: a young man, tense with rage but straining to hold it in check, spoke up first, starting by expressing his anger over the one-sided testimonials we’d just heard from the podium. “This is exactly what I expected,” he said. The process was rigged. He didn’t talk like a racist or as someone who is in denial of the great historical wrongs that Queen Victoria is being held responsible for, but as a genuine patriot -- as someone who loves his country, and is ready to stand up for it. It was courageous of him to turn up.
He started to relax a bit when he found the rest of us listening to what he had to say respectfully, and with some sympathy. What followed was a thoughtful discussion involving a diverse range of views on the subject. We were discouraged from coming up with solutions just yet, but the experience left me confident that we were on the way to finding one.
So when I heard that the City of Kitchener had decided to suspend the discussion process, I was disappointed. We’ve now been given an extension in terms of the timing, but are left without a forum or a process to follow. These are matters that should not be left unsettled indefinitely.
Meanwhile, spring has sprung. It was encouraging to see and hear the Kitchener Musical Society Band back in our city’s grand historic park on Sunday afternoon. It was uplifting to see the park in full spring glory, teeming with people that reflect Kitchener’s future more than its past, with the scatterlings from all parts of that empire on which the sun never set Queen Victoria was charged with embodying.
We know now, better than ever before, that this vast dominion was far from glorious and free. But it is also true that those inter-continental bonds that were put in place during the reigns of the Empress and her forbears are what has brought us all here, together in this place. Year by year, and lately at an accelerated pace, Kitchener, in step with urban and suburban Canada as a whole, gets closer to becoming the embodiment, in microcosm, of that inter-continental, multi-ethnic, polyglot empire that once spanned the globe.
The City’s decision to dedicate a permanent sacred fire space in the park in the site of the O:se Kenhionhata:tie Land Back encampment is a welcome development. We can also look forward to the return of the Roos Island and its bandstand to the people of Kitchener, to whom they belong, and for whose enjoyment the park exists.
Unfortunately, the occupation of Roos Island as a protest against the lack of affordable housing and other causes (including the nearby presence of the statue) isn’t being handled in a peaceable, reconciliatory and entirely truthful manner. The encampment was not, as originally reported, abandoned voluntarily, and those hired security guards with their fences are not there to protect the few campers who have not chosen to leave yet.
Meanwhile the statue still stands, but in a deplorable condition with that ill-considered signage in place, left vulnerable to further abuse, leaving both its latter day detractors and the few who quietly appreciate its presence left feeling frustrated and ignored. Reports from friends who live in the Victoria Park Neighbouhood about a late night rampage involving roaming youth playing with fireworks as weapons on Sunday, combined with the ongoing tension around Roos Island fill me with foreboding.
Meanwhile the decommissioned Grand River Transit site remains vacant, abandoned to the elements, fenced off from its surroundings, including the gateway to the Clock Tower Common, the lively new Gaukel Street walkway and creative hub, and a few brave businesses trying to keep going in this troubled vicinity -- Ellison’s Bistro; Hasty Market; Lookin’ For Heroes; Grand Surf Lounge; Mi Tienda Latina … .
As is made amply clear in the Recollections & Imaginings film project led by O:se Kenhionhata:tie Land Back last year, this could be part of the solution, even if only on a temporary basis while the future of the site remains undecided. Instead, the Region of Waterloo is stewarding the site like the owners of all those houses and storefronts around the downtown that have been boarded up and left to decay. These streets need some love; that block needs some life, now, not three, four, five years down the road.
Looking back over what has happened since the Witness Circle took place in November, it feels like it’s been one step forward, then another, and two steps back. Despite all the error, neglect and delay, I’m still a believer:
Of all the peoples, societies, cultures and nation states that exist in the world today, Canada is the best equipped to seek truth, accomplish reconciliation and achieve peaceful resolutions for deep-rooted conflicts precisely because of what this troubled statue symbolizes: historical continuity, peaceful transition, progress, global connections. And of all cities, Kitchener, the birthplace and capital of allophone, omnicultural Canada, built on land beside the Grand River granted to the Six Nations by Queen Victoria’s grandfather, is best equipped to lead the way.
If we do it right, we‘ll be able to celebrate May 24, 2024 in Kitchener, Grand/Willow River Country, Ontario, Canada like never before.