The reckoning
November 25th, 2024
Hailed in their time as celebrated politicians, the legacy of white supremacists in BC’s past is under scrutiny in When Heroes Become Villains: Helmcken, Trutch, Bowser, and the Streets, Lakes, and Towns Named After Them.
Review by Tom Hawthorn
When Heroes Become Villains: Helmcken, Trutch, Bowser, and the Streets, Lakes, and Towns Named After Them by Jon Bartlett and Brian Robertson (New Star Books $18)
Two years ago, several blue signs on a leafy street in Victoria’s Fairfield neighbourhood were replaced. Gone was Trutch Street. The new name would be Su’it (pronounced say-EET) Street from a Lekwungen word meaning “truth.”
About 200 people gathered for the unveiling at a ceremony attended by the mayor, elders, chiefs, a linguist, neighbourhood residents and some university students who launched the renaming campaign as a contribution to reconciliation and decolonization.
The renamed two-block street once served as the western border of a large estate of several acres held by Sir Joseph Trutch, who served as the first lieutenant governor of British Columbia after the colony joined Confederation. Trutch was a popular and celebrated politician in his time and, eventually, streets in the capital, Vancouver, Richmond, Chilliwack and Clearwater would all carry his name as did an island, a creek, a hamlet in the Peace district and a peak in the Rocky Mountains.
While contemporaries and successors honoured Trutch, his poisonous legacy can be felt in British Columbia to this day. As chief commissioner of lands and works, Trutch was responsible for handling First Nations reserves. A cruel white supremacist, he sought to reverse the paternalistic approach of Governor James Douglas, who felt Indigenous peoples “should in all respects be treated as rational beings, capable of acting and thinking for themselves.” Trutch forced nations onto tiny reserves, seeking to deny them title to land and to thwart their connection to the natural world. “The Indians really have no right to the lands they claim,” he wrote in a report, “nor are they of any actual value or utility to them.”
More than a century later, the first of a series of court cases determined that Aboriginal title over ancestral territories remained unextinguished, compelling the provincial government to negotiate treaties and agreements, a process continuing today.
“These days,” note the authors Jon Bartlett and Brian Robertson, “many of these ‘heroes’ now look more like racists and sociopaths.”
Bartlett and Robertson’s polemic, When Heroes Become Villains, which runs just 74 pages of text plus another 20 of notes and an index, confronts the commemoration of three British Columbians: Trutch, his colonial counterpart Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken, and premier William John Bowser. Trutch and Helmcken were two of three representatives sent to Ottawa to negotiate the colony’s entry into Confederation, while Bowser was a long-serving Conservative politician who broke miners’ strikes and forced immigrants from Austria-Hungary into internment camps during the First World War. A community of about 2,000 people north of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island carries his name.
The authors accuse Dr. Helmcken of failing to do his duty during an outbreak of smallpox by not immunizing the Indigenous residents living near Victoria, especially those in temporary encampments. Many were forced away from the city to their home villages, where they spread the disease, devastating the Indigenous population.
When Heroes Become Villains makes a case for renaming landmarks that commemorate those seen as villains today, such as Sir Joseph Trutch, the province’s first lieutenant governor. “Social justice movements have illuminated how questionable the complicated legacies of people like these are,” write Jon Bartlett and Brian Robertson, “and have resulted in a swell of calls for such place names to be replaced with ones that more reflect values we all can support.”
The authors make a forceful case for renaming features commemorating those clearly seen as villains today. “Social justice movements have illuminated how questionable the complicated legacies of people like these are,” they write, “and have resulted in a swell of calls for such place names to be replaced with ones that more reflect values we all can support.”
Trutch is so clearly villainous a figure that streets bearing his name have already been renamed in Vancouver (Musqueamview Street, or šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓) and Richmond (Point Avenue, after Steven Point, the lawyer who served as Grand Chief of the Stó:Lo Tribal Council before becoming the province’s first Indigenous lieutenant general).
The authors suggest features named for the coal baron father-son duo of Robert and James Dunsmuir, as well as Dr. Israel Powell, who banned potlatch ceremonies and after whom the city of Powell River is named, might be deserving of a change. (The regional district surrounding the Sunshine Coast city has already taken the name qathet Regional District.)
In Canada and around the world, the renaming of places and the knocking down of statues have in many cases been met by reaction, sometimes violently so. The authors do not engage with the arguments or anxieties in opposition to altering commemorations in this short book.
As well, the authors mostly limit their scope to British Columbia, though other Canadian jurisdictions have over the years wrestled with the meaning of names. In 1916, as Canadians fought on the Western Front during the First World War, residents of the Ontario city of Berlin voted to change the name in response to anti-German sentiment. They chose Kitchener after a British admiral only recently killed in action when his battleship struck a German mine.
The following year, the venerable House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha also surrendered to popular prejudice. We know them today as the House of Windsor.
A name change, whether by popular demand or royal proclamation, often simply needs time for acceptance.
9781554202126
Tom Hawthorn’s most recent book is The Year Canadians Lost Their Minds and Found Their Country: The Centennial of 1967 (D&M, 2017).
For the record: Field Marshall, not Admiral, Kitchener was Britain’s Secretary of State for War; he was on his way to meet with the Tsar of Russia when the ship on which he was travelling struck a mine, and he died (1916)