The (former) Samuel de Champlain memorial statue in OrilliaSome folks are keen on re-writing or re-interpreting history. A while ago, in the U.S., century-old statues erected in memory and reverence of past explorers, politicians, and soldiers, all widely renowned in the communities at their time, were "de-erected" and sent to local history-resting pounds.
Now, this craze has found "another enemy" with the name Samuel de Champlain. As Terry Pedwell writes on July 7, 2019, for The Canadian Press , "Samuel de Champlain monument: Hurtful or educational?" The specific bronze of controversy is a statue of the man, erected nearly a century ago, in the town of Orillia, Ontario.
Pedwell's post, inter alia, states
A city in central Ontario is calling for the return of an iconic monument to explorer Samuel de Champlain that has been a centrepiece in the city's laid-back waterfront landscape for nearly a century.Parks Canada, which owns the structure and the land it once sat on, has delayed its return for more than a year as a working group studied what to do in response to complaints about how it portrays Indigenous people.
Frankly, I wonder how asinine the world has to become before there is a revolution of sorts.
Let's look closer at Samuel de Champlain's (SdC's) life and accomplishments.
Samuel de Champlain
Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635), according to Wikipedia, was a "French colonist, navigator, cartographer, draftsman, soldier, explorer, geographer, ethnologist, diplomat, and chronicler. He made between 21 and 29 trips across the Atlantic Ocean, and founded New France and Quebec City."
Yes, that was about four centuries ago, when the eastern part of Canada was then property of the French Crown. That was long before the steam engine, or the internal combustion engine, or GPS systems, or smart phones were invented. It was a time when you required knowledge of the stars and time, as well as the mathematics to get your position on the earth's surface. The latitude was relatively easy to glean from the height of the sun at noon but figuring out your longitude was a different problem altogether.
When Champlain followed in the footsteps of Columbus and others, his interest was in exploring the land, the people, and the waterways connecting them on this continent. For example, Lake Champlain in upper New York State bears his name in reverence to work of exploring and mapping the northern areas of this continent.
As it so happens, I frequently pass by another monument to Champlain, much less conspicuous than the one that used to be in Orillia. It is located on Frying Pan Island on Lake Huron, consisting of a 10 ft. high cross of natural granite with a small plaque to commemorate his travel through that area 400 hundred years ago.
Of course, the explorer was neither traveling alone nor likely to use the freight canoe's paddles to move it along. Those birch-bark clad freight-canoes could take a surprisingly large load and typically required several people to propel them forward. That's where some of Canada's early settlers came in handy and, in fact, were indispensable. They were known at the time as "Coureur des Bois," French for "Runner of the Woods" (as per Google translation).
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The Coureur des Bois
The Coureur des Bois (CdB) were early settlers of French ancestry in this part of the New World, like the people who were already inhabitants of the land, the Algonquians, Iroquois, Mohawks, and other "First Nations" tribes. These tough new guys (who often married indigenous women) were indispensable for the exploration and mapping of the vast area.
Clearly, the newcomers like Champlain, did get occasional help and advice from the "locals" but by and large they were quite independent-minded, ready to hire on to hard work and wild adventures. Without the CdB's labor and skill, no early explorer would have got to where they did.
Renowned painters like Cornelius Krieghoff (1815-1872) and others painted numerous canvasses with their contemporaries in real life scenes. Rarely depicted in such scenes are the coureur's emblem of accomplishment and pride, the Ceinture fléchée.
The Ceinture fléchée
No Coureur des Bois worth his salt would ever have stood for a portrait without his colorful and finely woven/braided belt, known as a Ceinture fléchée is a special kind of finger-weave, usually with intricate zig-zag designs in a multitude of colors and design details. It's rare to find two antique belts of exactly the same design. The nearby picture shows a close-up of one end of an antique (approximately 200 year old) belt.
Part of an antique Ceinture fléchée; source: Textile Museum of Canada.
But let's go back to the modern version of the Bildersturm, also known as Iconoclastic Fury, a medieval period in the first half of the 16th century, when many works of art, paintings and statues were heavily damaged or entirely destroyed then by novel zealots with particular religious and moral convictions.
In historic hindsight, it was a great loss to humanity's record of art and history. The magnitude of its (willful) destruction of ancient works is probably similar to the fabled loss of unique scriptures that went up in flames when the Great Library of Alexandria (Egypt) burned to the ground, some 2,000 years ago.
I should like to think that mankind has learned from such historic events and the question now is about the path forward.
The Path Forward
Clearly, history is what has been and the modern view of these past events may differ from earlier ones. However, that's no reason to remove or even destroy historic monuments of any sort.
For example, there are highly talented artists among the First Nations who might want to take on the challenge of creating other bronze statutes that could present new, perhaps more enlightened, views of what happened centuries ago. Such new works could be displayed nearby the "old relics" for public review and comment. Between any discretionary/supplementary funding by community councils and, possibly, Canadian Heritage, it might just do wonders.
Artist's to the fore!
