The Hamilton Spectator

City’s Indigenous community wants Macdonald statue removed from core

Gore Park commemoration included black silhouette images representing the 215 children found in B.C.

KEVIN WERNER STONEY CREEK NEWS

Every time NaWalka Geeshy Meegwun-Longfeather travels to downtown Hamilton he is confronted by the looming bronze Sir. John A. Macdonald statue at Gore Park.

“I’m reminded that my mother was forced to go to a Canadian Indian residential school,” said the Indigenous justice coordinator for the Hamilton Community Legal Clinic. “I am reminded at the age of five or six years old that a senior man who was an agent of the church raped my mother. This is the trauma. This is what I am reminded every time I see this statue in downtown Hamilton.”

NaWalka Geeshy Meegwun -Longfeather Lyndon George along with several other Indigenous people, held a commemoration at Gore Park Sunday, Father’s Day, in front of black silhouette images representing the 215 children, some as young as three, who were found in unmarked graves in a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

They called on councillors to at the very least during Aboriginal Month remove the statue and eliminate what is to the Indigenous community a symbol of the genocide by a white colonial government to eradicate their race rather than what most Canadians believe is celebrating the “Father of Confederation.”

Michael Blashko, a lawyer at the Hamilton Community Legal Clinic and a leader of the Queer Justice Project, said a letter has been drafted for people to sign and send to councillors to urge the city to remove the Macdonald statute. The statue was covered from head to toe to prevent Indigenous people from experiencing “trauma,” said event organizers.

Blashko said later that Hamilton should follow the move by Kingston’s council which voted 12-1 to remove its statue from its stone pedestal — where it was installed in 1895 — in his eastern Ontario hometown.

Councillors are scheduled to discuss the issue at a July emergency and community services committee meeting.

Dillon Henry, a member of the Turtle Clan, Onondaga, reminded the over 100 people who attended the morning event that Macdonald had a hand in establishing residential schools, which was designed to assimilate Indigenous children. The results, said Henry, were forced labour, sexual and physical abuse, and hundreds dumped into unmarked graves.

After the ceremony people, most carrying the black silhouettes, walked to city hall with Hamilton police blocking off James and Main streets, so they could place the cut-outs into the forecourt’s garden.

NaWalka Geeshy Meegwun said in an interview later that his single request to councillors is to remove the statue immediately and not wait until the end of the summer to decide if it should happen.

He said part of that “obligation” is for Mayor Fred Eisenberger to sit down and listen to the voices of the Indigenous people.

And if councillors don’t remove the statue after years of ignoring calls for it to be taken down?

“Well, let’s hope (Eisenberger) will listen.”

Scan to see more photos and video from the rally at thespec.com

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2021-06-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

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