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The following is the edited transcript of an interview with Dr. Sinclair conducted by journalist and Carleton University professor Randy Boswell, guest editor of this volume.
Q. What are your thoughts about the contemporary debate happening around statues, place names and other commemorative landmarks in Canada?
A. No one would expect someone who's been abused to come into a space honouring their abuser. It's as simple as that. There's a long history in this country of recognizing and honouring individuals who perpetrated incredible harms against Indigenous Peoples and were celebrated for doing so by putting their names on buildings, by making large stone statues to honour them. And these must be changed in order for safe space to be created. Period.
If you expect Indigenous Peoples to come to tables to discuss sharing of land or resource extraction projects or whatever else Indigenous Peoples need to be involved in - which, constitutionally, involves everything in the country - it is inappropriate, offensive and, frankly, racist to expect them to be in a room with the very perpetrator of their genocide.
You mean, for example, having a statue of John A. Macdonald outside of Victoria City Hall, where Indigenous leaders were supposed to be coming for talks about reconciliation?
Yeah, it reminds me a lot of the Lakota-DakotaNakota peoples, who have to see - every day, in the most sacred of their sites in the Black Hills - the chiselling of presidential faces, all of whom have perpetrated one harm or another against Indigenous Peoples.
Ah, Mount Rushmore you're talking about... How do you see historians helping to resolve this conundrum that you're describing?
Well, continuing to ignore and deny genocide, which many historians do - particularly retired and so-called emeritus ones - is not the way to do it. It is ironic that people who have made their entire career based on studying, using, engaging Indigenous Peoples, then decide at the end of their careers to stop listening to them and to (deny) genocide... I've had many fights with historians over this, and lost friendships...
The first thing I would say to historians is step aside and stand beside Indigenous Peoples. This is not to be subjective or lose your so-called objectivity (as if that...