Jamie Sarkonak: After doing its best to tear down John A. MacDonald, Parks Canada celebrates a settler scapler

Article content

The reason Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil (1702-65) wasn’t commemorated with a Parks Canada plaque until last week might have something to do with his history of raiding and scalping British colonists.

Beausoleil, an Acadian born into the dying days of Acadia, didn’t take too kindly to British rule. The Brits took much of the territory in 1713, snapping up New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in the resolution of the War of the Spanish Succession. So, in adult life, Beausoleil did what he could to terrorize the new owners of the land.

Article content

Parks Canada’s sanitized version paints a picture of a tragic fighter up against the English machine. Beausoleil, in the mid-18th century, “became a leader of the Acadian resistance and defiance against British rule.” He “conducted bold raids” against settlements and the British military. He commanded a privateering vessel for the French and “avidly defended his compatriots, helping them to escape deportation and inspiring them to resist.”

He was captured once and for all by the British in 1760 during the Seven Years’ War. When the war ended in 1763, he didn’t recognize British rule and left the place for Haiti, along with other Acadians, and later left for his final resting place of Louisiana.

It all sounds nice and good, only, there’s a dark side. Distilling the scholarly work of historians, Wikipedia’s contributors fill out the details of Beausoleil’s “resistance.” In 1749, he raided Dartmouth, Nova Scotia to dissuade British settlers from entering the territory; in that attack, five settlers were killed. Two years later, he returned with a Mi’kmaq-Acadian guerrilla and waged the “Dartmouth Massacre,” which saw the deaths of 20 townspeople.

Article content

Article content

In 1754, Beausoleil and his Mi’kmaq-Acadian force attacked Lawrencetown, during which he killed and scalped four villagers. And the next year, a pair of French ships captured by the British were found bearing scalping knives — reportedly 10,000 of them — for the Beausoleil fighters.

One imagines that had something to do with why Canadian authorities didn’t see it fit to plaque the guy for the nearly 100 years that Parks Canada has been handing out plaques. Maybe it also had something to do with how Beausoleil’s violence didn’t actually change the overall course of Canadian history. Independent Acadia never came to be — and the Acadian “resistance” ended in the redcoats making precautionary clampdowns on the community, prompting an exodus.

But suddenly, in 2023, Parks Canada decided now was the time to place Beausoleil, slaughterer of settlers, butcher of British, among the plaqueworthy people of our history.

It would be more defensible if Parks Canada hadn’t spent recent years attacking conventional figures of Canadian history for actions considered wrong by today’s standards in an attempt to undermine national pride. But that’s exactly what the parks agency has very well been doing — at least, to figures on the British colonial side of Canadian history.

Article content

John A. Macdonald is one such example: his Kingston, Ont. home, Bellevue House, opened last spring after several years of renovations with new programming for “unpacking” the first prime minister’s political decisions through a social justice lens. Planning documents later obtained by True North show that Parks staff viewed the home as “a symbol of the White Settlers’ way of life in the British North America colony in 1850” which was “constructed around deeply embedded colonial systems of class, power and privilege.”

Other documents contemplated Macdonald as a “super evil of all evils” in Canadian history.

Macdonald never scalped anyone or ambushed human dwellings at night. He was just a vector of colonialism, leading a new country divided along religious and linguistic lines, managing the prairies from afar, providing famine relief and police protection from marauding Americans. And no, between flawed attempts at providing education and other insufficient state supports, it didn’t always leave First Nations better off — but considering that the welfare state did not exist yet, Canada did a comparatively good job.

Article content

Parks Canada is currently reviewing a several old historic person designations for “colonial assumptions,” an initiative that kicked off in 2019. Per the government database, Macdonald’s designation is currently under review, but you can guess that Parks will be working to tarnish his legacy. You can look to the agency’s edit of another Father of Confederation, Sir Hector-Louis Langevin, for an idea of what that will look like.

Langevin, who also didn’t scalp people or attack their homes at night, was a member of Macdonald’s cabinet and was minister of public works. Originally, he was commemorated for  his work as a lawyer and journalist and his role in Confederation.

Parks Canada has since taken pains to denounce him for “the government’s aggressive assimilation policy for Indigenous children, in particular the destruction of their cultures and traditions, which was rooted in the 19th-century settler beliefs that Euro-Canadian culture and Christianity were superior to Indigenous cultures, traditions, and spiritual beliefs, and that these Euro-Canadian values should be imposed on Indigenous Peoples by means of assimilation and colonization.” The agency proceeded to scold the man for supporting residential schools — in 1883.

Article content

Unlike Beausoleil, Langevin will not be getting a plaque. Why? His dark history is too complicated to fit onto one little sheet of metal: “A new plaque will not be prepared as the limited text of a plaque does not allow for adequately communicating this complex history.”

That’s history at Parks Canada in a nutshell: anti-British “resistance” fighters are valourized as their bloody violence is downplayed, while establishment political leaders of democratic Canada are demonized as symbols of colonialism and evil, defined almost entirely by the flaws that later emerged from their policy positions.

We don’t need to erase the settler scalpers from Canadian history. But if Parks Canada is going to start celebrating them, they could at least let Canadians keep some pride in the Fathers of Confederation while they’re at it.

National Post

Article content