I Wish It Were That Simple: Historical Perspectives on Commemoration and Memory

Heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys, the righteous and the evil. If we cast characters in such stark terms, our jobs as historians would be much simpler– and boring. But history is messy, and people live complicated and sometimes contradictory lives. A scholarly book or article allows far more space to explore this complexity than can a sculpture, a plaque, or the name of a street. But commemorators are more often in the business of boosterism, tourism, or nationalism than in that of complexity. The monuments that they erect create what can be lasting legacies for future generations, contributing to certain narratives–about the past, about what we should value in the present, about aspirations for the future–that may shape our societies. It is therefore not surprising that much attention has been paid in recent decades to issues of commemoration and memory.

With heated debates about monuments and renaming swirling in Canadian society and well beyond, the editors of the Canadian Historical Review invited scholars with different views and expertise about commemoration and memory to contribute to this Historical Perspectives section. Writing against an immediate backdrop of commemoration debates, including about John A. Macdonald and Edward Cornwallis in Canada, Confederate statues in the United States, and a multitude of others worldwide, they reflected on past and present practices and offered their thoughts about what the future might hold, both for commemoration as a subject of historical study and as an active practice.

Just as historical writing is often informed by events unfolding as historians put pens to paper or fingers to keyboards, monuments, as Alan Gordon observes, are reflections of the historiographical and methodological trends that were active in the discipline of history when they were created. Debates over the commemoration of Canada's first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, were heated as these authors wrote their pieces– and as this introduction was written. Gordon's piece begins with demonstrators tearing down the Macdonald statue in Montreal in the summer of 2020. Through case studies, he draws our attention to the fact that commemorative sites are venues not only for memory but also for contestation, often at the point of their creation. As he pointedly and astutely observes, disagreement is at the heart of commemoration.

Ascribing singular meanings to monuments (or other forms of commemoration) may obscure the complexities of the societies that created them as well as the intentions of their creators. As Gordon points out, monuments are rarely intended to provide a "warts and all" depiction of a historical figure. They aim not just to teach about the past but also to instruct about desired political behaviour, establish collective identity, and reinforce the legitimacy of a particular political and social order. As Jonathan Vance also notes in his contribution, these original aims often fade away with time, sometimes to the point of near-amnesia regarding the person being commemorated but, more often, as Gordon notes, to a phase where the finer points of why the person or event was considered historically significant are overshadowed by the remnant that they were historically significant. If the why has become lost, or is no longer considered appropriate to our contemporary values or needs, do we have an obligation to give pride of place to the historical decisions of our ancestors? Not necessarily, Gordon argues, but he observes that how we respond to these monuments says as much about us as the raising of them in the past said about those generations.

In their contribution, Cody Groat and Kim Anderson provide a crucial Indigenous perspective on commemorative practices. As they point out, the political and social order that Canadian commemorations have sought to reinforce has frequently been one that erased Indigenous peoples and often celebrated their oppressors. Their article considers how Indigenous people have not only contested and pushed back against exclusionary and subordinating Western commemorative practices but also sought to reframe understandings of commemoration. They draw attention to the radically different senses of time, space, being, and knowing that come from an appreciation...