The issue is straight-forward: children, of all ethnicities, are attending or interacting with (via sports teams, for example) a school named in honour of a person who promoted racially based genocide. This is simply wrong. It’s wrong to subject Mi’kmaq children to this—-honouring the murderer of their forebears is necessarily an emotional and, yes, oppressive act; it undermines their self-worth and expectations that they can fairly and fully lead successful lives in a society dominated by Europeans. But it’s also unfair to subject children of European extraction to attending/visiting a school named in honour of a mass murderer; white kids implicitly learning to celebrate the genocide of natives will not likely be agents of fairness and democratic values—-and their own lives are lesser for it.
It was reasonable and right for the Mi’kmaq community to bring this issue forward. They are a large community, who have suffered a series of historic wrongs, arguably right into the present, and they asked for a small act, not of redress, but of simple acknowledgement of past wrongs done onto them. It really comes down to this: why not change the name? Are we willing to acknowledge that a community says with good cause it is negatively impacted and we can readily address their concern, or not? Are we kind, or not?
Unfortunately, “kindness” doesn’t characterize the response from many people. I don’t know how to characterize it other than a visceral reaction; a seemingly unlimited number of thoughtless objections are barfed up, assertions really, of unchallengeable fact, often said with a sort of wizened attitude of “this is how the world really works, you children.”
(Source: se-smith)
