The head of a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald broke from its body when it was toppled from its pedestal in downtown Montreal in April 2020. (Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press)

The racialized uproar following the earth-shattering May 27, 2021, Kamloops Indian Band announcement that there had been "confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School" found near the school.

This "confirmation" was based on "a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths," stated the Band's Chief Rosanne Casimir. "Some were as young as three years old."

The instantaneous reaction to this declaration was angry vigils, public displays of grief and shame, solidarity speeches, and promises to revolutionize society as we know it. Flags on government buildings were lowered to half-mast on Canada Day — and remained so for almost six months — turning what was once a day of national celebration into one of national mourning and recrimination.

Statues of former Canadian heroes were defaced, destroyed or removed, alongside demands to rename streets and public schools to unpronounceable indigenous ones.

Some Catholics even claimed to have lost their faith over the announcement, as dozens of churches of many denominations were vandalized and burnt both on and off indigenous reserves.

Given the horrific nature of the Band's charges, the amount of immediate public moral panic and outrage is understandable. In retrospect, however, it looks more like a typical knee-jerk reaction to fake news, much like the Satanic Panic that began in British Columbia in 1980, spreading around the world over the next 10 years.

And like the Satanic Panic, there's now a growing movement to rethink the Kamloops hysteria by restoring some of what was destroyed, defaced, or taken down in the past five years.

This campaign, led by politicians past and present, historians, and members of the public, is focused on bringing back some of those monuments, in particular ones of Canada's first and greatest prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, most of whose commemorative statues have all but disappeared from public spaces.

In short, there are growing signs the pendulum is slowly swinging back because of this new advocacy, some led by important public figures.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, with support from both Progressive Conservative and Liberal MPPs, brought down the wooden hoarding that for years covered up Macdonald's statue on the grounds of the provincial legislature at Queen's Park.

"We're freeing John A.," Ford told reporters at the unveiling in June. "You have to support our first prime minister. You know, things have happened over a number of years, but we can't just box them up. We have to move on. Stop worrying about the past."

Children's shoes lie at the foot of a boxed-up statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, which stands on the grounds of the Ontario legislature at Queen's Park, in Toronto. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press)

O'Toole said his campaign isn't about sanitizing the past. "I think we can be proud of our past and commit to being better," he said.

"But the response is not to erase our heritage and patriotism today for the horrible acts of the past. It's about educating, it's about learning, it's reconciliation — and that means reconciling the past with today."

Still, many indigenous activists continue to focus only on the alleged “horrible acts,” claiming that Macdonald's tenure is simply not worth marking in any form.

Omeasoo Wahpasiw, a professor of indigenous studies at Carleton University, said restoring any tribute to Macdonald is "a terrible idea."

"We don't even know what kind of person he was besides an alcoholic," she said in an interview, referencing Macdonald's documented heavy drinking. (It is rarely mentioned that he was totally sober later in life.)

"We know that he got a bunch of other people together in a room and somehow convinced them to do something that at the time was a fiction and continues to be a fiction," Wahpasiw said, referring to the idea that the political borders of Canada are artificial constructs on the ancestral lands of indigenous peoples, a claim subverted by both the dozens of treaties ceding these land to the British Crown, on the one hand, and by the fact that the ancestral lands now being claimed were the ancestral lands of previous occupants, peoples whose territories were repeatedly seized for millennia via warfare, expulsion, or other means, on the other.

"He's a symbol of nation-building for Canadians, and he's a symbol for genocide to another group of people. Erecting a statue, it doesn't just rub me the wrong way, it sends the wrong message about who Canadians think they are and who they want to be," she said.

"Sir John A. represents genocide — so not cool."

Other scholars and legal experts have strongly challenged these claims using hard evidence to do so.

J.D.M. Stewart, an educator, historian and expert on Canada's prime ministers, said the push to remove references to Macdonald robs future generations of a chance to learn about him, warts and all.

Stewart said activists' demands to conceal Macdonald render him a bad guy of history, when, to him, the record is much more complicated and nuanced.

"History is a very complex subject. There's no black and white. There is a lot of gray. And I don't think the way that we've reacted to these stories over the last five or 10 years has demonstrated that kind of reasoned reflection," Stewart said.

"Some of those criticisms may be true, but it doesn't mean that the other parts of what some of these leaders did was not important and visionary for the country," he said, referencing Macdonald's push to build the transcontinental railway that successfully bound the country together from east to West to stop American annexation, among other accomplishments.

The Macdonald government sought to suppress or outright ban some Indigenous culture, but he was also made an honorary chief of the Six Nations of the Grand River. In a photo from the time, someone in the crowd holds a sign that reads: "Sir John, our great chief."

Macdonald is pictured with supporters at the Council House of the Six Nations of the Grand River on Sept. 7, 1886. (Library and Archives Canada)

Not only did Macdonald's government help orchestrate a massive smallpox vaccination campaign to inoculate Indigenous communities that were susceptible to that deadly European disease, but it also provided much famine relief on the Prairies when the bison herds began their precipitous decline due to overhunting by both indigenous and non-indigenous hunters.

As part of his campaign to integrate aboriginals into the dominant Euro-Canadian society, Macdonald also extended the franchise to some indigenous men in Central and Eastern Canada in 1885 — a right to vote that was later clawed back by a subsequent Liberal government.

"We're not trying to say that these historical figures are saints and that they did nothing wrong. I think quite the opposite. I think what we're saying is, 'Let's look at the period in which they lived, let's look at the measure of a person in the person's entirety, all of their legacy, not just part of it,'" Stewart said.

"If you start chipping away at your little pieces of identity, pretty soon you've got nothing left at all," he said.

"In a country like Canada that has not done a good job of preserving, promoting or teaching its history, every piece counts in terms of trying to tell your stories and preserve your heritage."

These sentiments are shared by Greg Piasetzki, whose careful research shows that:

• Macdonald was a strong defender and supporter of Canada's indigenous peoples in Parliament. He was a vigorous advocate for their fair treatment, and he backed his rhetoric with action and policies. And through the impassioned defense of his policies in Parliament (whose speeches were often reprinted in the newspapers of the day), he persuaded the Canadian people to support his vision.

• When the much predicted (for more than 30 years) collapse of the buffalo population finally arrived in the late 1870s, relief programs for Canadians at the time were largely privately funded. However, Macdonald immediately implemented a massive federal government-run famine relief program. A year later, more than 30,000 indigenous Canadians were supported by the program, which ran for another five years and was a great success, saving many native lives.

• The United States allowed settlement of the West before negotiating treaties with the indigenous inhabitants. The result was a series of "Indian Wars" fought over a period of 100 years that resulted in more than 60,000 native deaths and 20,000 settler deaths. Macdonald was determined to avoid a similar outcome in Canada by negotiating land settlement treaties with native Canadians before settlement began. He succeeded; Canada had no Indian Wars, saving countless indigenous lives.

• A key piece of Macdonald's plan to avoid conflict in the new territory was to create a police force to establish a Canadian government presence, deter formal or informal violent incursions from the United States and to protect the respective rights of the indigenous and settlers when settlement began. As Macdonald stated in Parliament, "the duty of the police is not only to protect the white man against the Indian but the Indian against the white man"). The NWMP (now the RCMP), which relied more on moral suasion than on firepower, was a great success.

• The various treaties Macdonald's government negotiated required the government to build schools upon the band leadership's request. This provision resulted in the construction of about 185 day and 20 residential schools. However, it was the policy of Macdonald's government that all school attendance for indigenous children, unlike the policy applied to other Canadian children, was voluntary, a policy that continued long after the prime minister's death.

Piasetzki also reminds us that:

"Canada is a young country. We don't have many towering figures to look to, political, military or otherwise. A fair-minded review of Macdonald's contributions to our country, as both a Father of Confederation and as a strong advocate for its Indigenous peoples, suggests that he is one that we need to keep."

Support Canada Free Press