Check it Out: Truth brings reconciliation
BY JOAN JANZEN
joanjanzen@yahoo.com
Did you hear about the guy who was trying to steal all the head statues at the museum? Apparently he got busted.
Well, there’s no need to steal statues, because statues are continually being dismantled throughout the world. As part of the anti-racism healing process, Charlottetown’s city councillors voted to keep the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister. Charlottetown is home of Canadian Confederation, where John A. Macdonald worked out details of the Confederation of Canada. Charlottetown’s mayor, Philip Brown, said “It’s good to re-examine our history.”
An Indigenous activist suggested it wasn’t necessary to tear down the statue. Jenene Woldridge said “Why don’t we have signage that tells his true story? Without truth we don’t get to reconciliation.” As a result, the city council decided that the full story needs to be told, not just parts of it, and will keep the statue.
Her comments carried much more weight than the vandalism of the statue which took place during the previous week, resulting in $1,200 of work in order to remove the red paint.
The statue of Theodore Roosevelt at the Natural History Museum at New York is coming down, even though Roosevelt himself is not objectionable, but the two figures arranged beside his statue suggest inferiority to some observers, while other groups suggested keeping it and explaining the statues. In this instance, further explanation was not an acceptable option, even though Theodore Roosevelt had said, “I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.”
Perhaps only evidence of the statue remaining will be in the movie “A Night at the Museum”, unless the movie will be edited or removed all together.
A former resident of Venezuela commented on the removal of statues in North America. She said, “I have already lived through this thing when I was living in Venezuela (as a teenager). The statues came down... Chavez didn’t want all that history displayed and then he changed the street names, then came the school curriculum. Some movies couldn’t be shown on TV channels and so on and so forth. I mean anything can be attacked if you just let it happen. If you just let the first ones come down, then there are no limits to what’s next.”
Her observations definitely give us something to think about. Perhaps Woldridge’s suggestion to tell the truth in an effort to bring reconciliation would be a more beneficial alternative.