Article content Over the past several years many of our country’s most significant past figures have been toppled from their statue bases, defaced with red paint, erased from city maps and struck from public records in a paroxysm of historical cleansing and virtue-signaling. Among the victims: Sir John A. Macdonald, Egerton Ryerson, Henry Dundas, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Samuel de Champlain, the list goes on.
Whatever good these dead white men may have done in their lives – particularly their significant roles in creating modern Canada – has today been “interred with their bones.” Any single act or statement at odds with the purported values of contemporary Canada is sufficient to warrant their public condemnation followed by swift obliteration from our recognized past. The crucial test for many is an association, however remote or tangential, with Canada’s fraught Indian Residential School system.
But there is a new favourite dead white man to vilify. Duncan Campbell Scott, who happened to have had a day job for over 50 years (1879-1932) in the Department of Indian Affairs and who oversaw Indian Residential Schools at the height of their abuse of Aboriginal Peoples, has become one of the most infamous Canadian villains of all time. Scott is commonly and wrongly attributed with uttering the goal to “Kill the Indian in the Child” (a phrase that belongs to an American military officer) but is rightly associated with the expansion of the Indian Residential School sys.