Calls renewed to change name of Calgary’s Sir John A. Macdonald School

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College students and advocates are calling for the renaming of a Calgary junior highschool named after Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister and a robust proponent of the nation’s residential college system.

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On Sunday, a handful of Sir John A. Macdonald junior highschool college students and supporters participated in an occasion exterior the college, imploring the Calgary Board of Training to vary the college’s identify. The northwest Calgary college is simply west of the Nostril Hill Siksikaitsitapi Drugs Wheel, a monument that sits on conventional Blackfoot territory and holds religious and historic significance for the Blackfoot Confederacy.

Related calls have been prevalent throughout the nation in recent times, particularly because the discovery of the graves of 215 children at a former residential college web site in Kamloops, B.C., in Might 2021 — later adopted by hundreds more potential unmarked graves discovered at residential faculties nationwide.

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Macdonald is taken into account one of the architects of Canada’s residential college system. He championed the implementation of the system in Parliament, saying in 1883 “… the Indian kids must be withdrawn as a lot as potential from the parental affect, and the one means to try this could be to place them in central coaching industrial faculties the place they may purchase the habits and modes of considered white males.” The Canadian residential college system would proceed for an additional 114 years, with the final establishment closing in 1997.

“No Indigenous, Black, Chinese language, or racialized college students ought to need to attend a college with a reputation that may be a fixed reminder of such violence and abuse,” mentioned 13-year-old Makena Halvorsen, a pupil who has been advocating for the identify change to the college’s pupil and guardian councils. “Colleges are alleged to be secure locations to be taught.”

The CBE mentioned it’s “dedicated to optimistic change” and continues to advance its collaboration with anti-racism and Indigenous teams. In mid-2021, college trustees modified the board’s college naming coverage to raised mirror pupil and group values and the CBE mentioned the brand new group of trustees intends to proceed that work.

“As a system, we’re working collectively daily to construct optimistic and inclusive studying and work environments for everybody,” mentioned the college board in an emailed assertion.

“Supporting and enhancing the achievement and well-being of Indigenous college students is in alignment with the CBE’s education plan and is a vital objective of the CBE. ”

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Halvorsen reached out to the Reconciliation Motion Group and related with the scholars who led the cost in a profitable bid to have Langevin Faculty renamed final summer season. Final June, the CBE modified the identify of that establishment to Riverside School, nixing its ties to a different Canadian politician who helped construct the residential college system, Hector-Louis Langevin.

Months later, the Calgary Catholic Faculty District additionally renamed a highschool named after Catholic Bishop Important-Justin Grandin, who lobbied for growing the scale of the nation’s residential college system within the late 1800s, to Our Lady of the Rockies High School.

“Names are so superficial within the greater image nevertheless it’s so symbolic as properly. That’s why these names have to vary — as a result of in the event that they’re representing the very folks that created the insurance policies of genocide that we proceed to stay upon, that’s the place the foundation of the issue of systemic racism is,” mentioned Michelle Robinson of the Reconciliation Motion Group, previously often known as the Change Langevin Committee.

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Robinson, herself the granddaughter of a residential college survivor, mentioned regardless of being seven years faraway from the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report and its 94 calls to motion, significant motion continues to be missing.

“We will’t have reconciliation with out fact, and dismantling systemic racism means not glorifying the very perpetrators of genocide,” she mentioned.

This isn’t the primary time Sir John A. Macdonald Faculty has been topic to rivalry surrounding its identify. The Metropolis of Calgary’s 2017 determination to vary the identify of Langevin Bridge to Reconciliation Bridge and different nationwide conversations across the time sparked comparable calls to vary the junior highschool’s identify, however the endeavour was finally unsuccessful.

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Prior to now decade, a number of effigies of Macdonald have been removed, both by metropolis determination or folks in protest of their presence.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has beforehand argued the response should be more nuanced than eradicating the statues of “cancelled” historic figures and erasing the names of their eponymous establishments.

“(Canada) is an imperfect nation however it’s nonetheless an awesome nation, simply as John Macdonald was an imperfect man, however was nonetheless an awesome chief,” mentioned Kenney in June 2021, shortly after the Kamloops graves have been discovered.

“If we need to get into cancelling each determine in our historical past who took positions on points on the time that we now choose harshly, and rightly, in historic retrospect, then I believe virtually your entire founding management of our nation will get cancelled.”

This week, a number of Canadian Indigenous leaders are in Vatican City for a gathering with Pope Francis, pushing for a proper apology from the Catholic church for its position within the nation’s residential college system.

mrodriguez@postmedia.com

Twitter: @michaelrdrguez