The Hidden Life of Monuments: Reflections from the Lost Stories Project

SINCE 2012 I HAVE BEEN WORKING WITH historians, educators, artists, and filmmakers to develop the Lost Stories Project, which seeks from the public little-known stories from the Canadian past, gives these stories to artists who transform them into inexpensive pieces of public art on appropriate sites, and documents the artists’ creative process through the production of short films.¹ When I came up with the concept for the project it was largely in the context of my own research over the past 15 years, which had explored the public representation of the past in both Quebec and Atlantic Canada with a particular emphasis upon the backstory that is usually impossible for the casual observer to perceive.

In the case of Quebec, I examined the public memory of Samuel de Champlain and Mgr. François de Laval, generally viewed as the founding fathers of French-speaking Quebec: one the secular father (responsible for the settlement at Quebec City) and the other the religious founder (the first Roman Catholic bishop of Quebec).² In regards to Atlantic Canada, I focused my attention on efforts in the early 21st century to commemorate both the founding moment for Acadians – the attempt to establish a permanent settlement on Île Ste-Croix in 1604 (so four years before Quebec City) – and their moment of trauma – the deportation of the Acadians between 1755 and 1763, or what they call “le grand dérangement.”³

I learned from these projects what others have also observed: namely, that public remembrance of the past – through such tools as the construction of monuments – is really as much – maybe more – about the people who had the power to erect them than they were about the individuals being honoured. This point was convincingly made by Kirk Savage in his Monument Wars, which explores the commemorative landscape on the National Mall in Washington. Savage paid particular attention to the Washington Monument, the huge obelisk completed in the 1880s that bears no iconography that would directly link it to the first president of the United States. From Savage’s perspective, however, there was nothing odd about this situation because “this was indeed a ‘modern monument’ that had nothing to do with George Washington and his agrarian world. It was a monument to technocratic wisdom and bureaucratic efficiency, seemingly accessible to a democratic people yet remote from their experience and understanding.”⁴

But while there is a large scholarly literature that tries to tease out why and how some individuals are commemorated in public space (and others are not), sometimes this is simply not possible due to a lack of sources. In my own research, for instance, I was unable to find the minutes of the committee responsible for creating Quebec City’s monument in honour of Champlain, which was unveiled in 1898 only metres from the Château Frontenac. One report indicated that those minutes had been sealed inside the monument’s pedestal.⁵ More broadly, Savage has pointed to the challenges of such research since the archives provide only “a scattered record. Sometimes monument committees are very proud of themselves, and they publish their proceedings and then there are more records and archives. Other times they’re just lost entirely.”⁶ In this context, I imagined that Lost Stories could provide a solution since I would be able to watch the entire process unfold.

What I could not have imagined in 2012, however, was that monuments were about to take centre stage in heated public debates across the globe, mostly prompted by demands for the removal of structures connected with now-disgraced individuals or deeds. By and large, these debates have only reinforced my sense of the pertinence of Lost Stories. As we will see in the following section of this short essay, the controversies surrounding such monuments as those dedicated to Confederate heroes in the American South have dealt only superficially with these structures and have largely ignored the context in which they were erected in the first place. Then, in the subsequent sections, I will return to Lost Stories to discuss...