American historian Heather Cox Richardson recently published a reflection on Columbus Day in the United States. It was prompted by President Trump’s proclamation that “left-wing arsonists” were seeking to “dishonor [the] memory” of the Italian explorer in, “a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage.”

Cox Richardson carefully explained the institution of Columbus Day; it was a response to very specific events in the 1920s. She observes, “history is different from commemoration. History is about what happened in the past, while commemoration is about the present. We put up statues and celebrate holidays to honor figures from the past who embody some quality we admire.”

I would like to linger on this important distinction between History and Commemoration.

Did you know that most of the Confederate statues in the USA were erected not after the Civil War, but during the “Jim Crow” Era of racial segregation, the 1890s to the 1950s?  There was a peak of new monuments in the thirty years after 1900 — in parallel with the revival of the KKK.

The attempt to reclaim the losses of the South replaced history with celebration — or commemoration. In other words, the erection of Confederate statues was not about preserving history so much as speaking to the needs of the present. The timing of the surges in Confederate monuments illustrates Cox Richardson’s distinction. 

I would like to ask the same questions about a local monument.

Picton Main Street’s “Holding Forth,” the now controversial statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, was unveiled on Canada Day 2015, exactly one month after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had published the summary conclusion of a report that was seven years in the making. Seven years spent collecting the history of Indigenous residential-school survivors. It was accompanied with 94 calls to action.

How does the statue speak to that moment?

I don’t mean to say that “Holding Forth,” which was long prepared for this celebratory day, to mark both Canadian confederation as well as the year in which Sir John A. turned 200, was a specific response to the delivery of the 94 calls to action. 

I do mean to say that it was commissioned and approved while national attention to the complicated history of the treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada by the Canadian government was getting increasing attention, perhaps motivating another sector to protect its version of history with celebratory commemoration.

There are two reasons for statues. One has to do with art. We deserve to live in a beautiful world, and statuary has contributed to and elaborated our sense of beauty and value for generations.

The other is politics. Public statuary is never neutral. It is a statement of what matters and it is specific to its time and place. It says, “we as a society value this man” (yes, I chose “man” deliberately). It is a celebratory act.

There is no third reason. History does not come into it. The nature of public statuary can’t afford to tell a complicated story. History is a critical act requiring context and thought. Placing a statue in a square does not come with context, nor does it provoke thought. It asserts, “we as a society value this man.” It can’t even address who “we” might be, or what is valuable about the man. 

It asserts a consensus about something unstated.

Statue removal has been a 21st-century trend, which has been criticized, as Trump expresses it, as a campaign to erase history. But this is a misuse of the term “history.” In many ways, statue removal might be seen as an attempt to save history, to protect the complexities of context and the demand for thinking that history and – to acknowledge the politics of such a position – citizenship requires.

Public statuary cancels history. It replaces it with commemoration. It has been doing so as long as human cultures have had the technologies to create it. This makes it very difficult for us to perceive how it functions. It reminds me of a story told by David Foster Wallace, in which an older fish says to a young fish, “how’s the water?” and the young fish responds, “what the hell is water?”

We have all grown up in a culture that treats commemoration as if it were history.

A museum might be the place to offer some context for understanding a statue. A provocation to critical thinking, rather than blind celebration. Yes, this requires patience of an observer — and a willingness to enter into the museum itself, as opposed to just walking down the street: nobody stepping out for a sandwich wants to encounter a lecture that demands attention to detail. 

Museums offer context thorugh reading material, and showcasing differing points of view. For a while I thought it was a good idea to leave our Sir John A. statue in place, but also to keep the blood-red paint on his hands applied by a critical vandal. I thought this provocative to thought, but a casual viewer would have to bring some context to understand this critique.

Statues are to celebrate heroes. They are made of bronze and marble so they can outlast any witnesses to the lives of those they celebrate. 

A historian consults much more fragile documents and artifacts in order to assess the complex truth of a historical figure. By definition an archive of such testifying elements cannot be displayed on the street corner — not to mention comprehended by the casual pedestrian out for some window shopping.

History is hard. Statues are simple. “Cancel culture” is all about oversimplifying, all about a knee-jerk reaction to something—an act of radical simplification. 

Taking down a monument, however, is not a cancellation of history. It is a cancellation of unthinking celebration. It is a protection of complexity. 

It opens the way to history.