Re: Taking a closer look at ‘our’ history, Our View, Oct. 27.
After reading your newspaper’s passionate editorial advocating the excision of any part of our past we find distasteful by simply renaming it, I would like to suggest a few more changes.
Let’s start with the name of this newspaper. The New Westminster Record is a name clearly linked to colonialism, conquest and genocide.
New Westminster, after all, was the name for this city suggested by Queen Victoria, who ultimately was the head of state of the British Empire, an empire which conquered one-quarter of the planet. Shame on you for supporting the oppression of countless peoples from Ireland to the Indian subcontinent to the shores of British Columbia.
Speaking of Columbia, we really need to rename that street. The word originates from Christopher Columbus, the original colonizer.
The examples are countless of the wanton insensitivity of the City of New Westminster: Moody Park, after Col. Moody, the militarist and engineer who cut down the beautiful trees of this land to build the roads; Queen’s Park (mean old Queen Vic – see above); Sapperton, a tribute to the Sappers/henchmen of Col. Moody; Herbert Spencer Elementary, named after a passionate Social Darwinist and racist. The list goes on.
Just imagining all of the possible streets, schools and parks to rename is quite tiring.
Unfortunately, I’m too mentally exhausted now to explore any complexity in the stories of the human beings who make up “our” past and “our” heritage.
But heritage is not a word that we must use anymore, as it is a heritage of oppression.
I guess we don’t have to worry about protecting any of our heritage homes in New Westminster either then. Let’s tear them down and put up some condos or, better yet, a shopping mall.
I’m also too exhausted to come up with actual solutions to the horrifying problems that are the legacy of colonialism: poverty, addiction, missing and murdered women, lack of access to basic services in Indigenous communities.
I guess the writers of your editorial were feeling tired as well, since they also weren’t able to offer any solutions to real problems facing Indigenous communities, among all the others victimized by hundreds of years of oppression. Oh well, maybe we can all feel better about ourselves for coming up with some cool new names.
Then again, maybe we should hold off naming anything at all. Whatever we choose will no doubt be offensive in the future. Let’s save our descendants the trouble of having to rename everything with each generation. Perhaps we can use a numbering system or just point at things.
Ryan Unger is a New Westminster resident
