DRD

here’s what I think: I think it’s our duty as a community that wants to reflect and grow and foster compassion to question Kingston’s legacy. Just because we honoured generals and prime ministers previously when the most honourable thing was securing survival for members of the British settler colonies, doesn’t mean we have to honour them now. Consider the more distant acts of atrocity, as in Europe, conquest and war and slaughter was common, but we do not see the names of the generals that slaughtered Carthage on street signs. Canada and America are new and do not have the pleasure of time to reconcile our part in the genocide of indigenous people, as well as the still existing impact on French Canadian citizens where war memorials still stand commemorating their cultural ancestors defeat. But because we don’t have time to forget we still have to act, we cannot pretend that it’s honourable to honour senseless war and murder, nor a man who specifically wanted to wipe indigenous people out of Canada. Every time I hear John A MacDonalds name I think about how plains indigenous people starved because settlers hunted their food to existinction and then settlers withheld food and let them starve to death until they cooperated in their own ultimate demise and assimilation. I don’t want to live in a Kingston that is shameless, I want to live in a Kingston that listens and wants to listen, that won’t let time do it’s dirty work of burying these stories, but acknowledging their is so much blood on these symbols entrenched in our society.