To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
5
Aug
2018
Stanley Park in Vancouver may soon disappear. No, not because developers want to replace its towering Douglas firs with condo towers – though I’m sure the notion has them salivating like Pavlov’s dogs – but because the park’s name may be changed.
Not that Lord Stanley himself did anything wrong, other than donating a silver cup to the National Hockey League. He’s simply a representative of his time that saw the original inhabitants of North America as “sauvages,” savages with no rights.
So the Vancouver Parks Board has started a “colonial audit” to identity the ways in which earlier generations of later arrivals wronged the Indigenous peoples who once occupied the shores of Burrard Inlet.
All this is part of a movement to rewrite history the way it should have been. And in case there’s any doubt, I’m against it.
That probably puts me into a group that the Prince George Citizen’seditor Neil Godbout derided as “historically-illiterate, culturally-entitled white people.” So be it.
What we have is what we have. To deny it is to deny what makes us, us.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: history, Stanley Park, Cornwallis, Macdonald, Amherst, Voldemort