Ottawa: A Monumental Dilemma
As the capital of Canada, Ottawa is endowed with numerous statues and monuments. Most of them grace the public spaces that surround the city’s federal buildings, museums, and sites of national importance. One of the most prominently-situated of these statues depicts the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who traveled past the future site of Ottawa in 1613 — two centuries before a settlement of any significance was established. Champlain who is now immortalized at the crest of Nepean point, a limestone outcropping that overlooks the Ottawa River, Gatineau, and Parliament Hill. The statue has graced this strategic site since 1915 and depicts an ‘eroicly-posed Champlain grasping his astrolabe — a navigational device that he famously lost during a portage up-river near Renfrew — as if to say, “Aha! There it is!”
But the majestic presence of the statue overshadows the controversies that have surrounded it in recent years. Historians have quibbled over Champlain’s astrolabe technique, insisting that he is holding the device upside-down (although, as my imagination leads me to believe, if the statue depicts Champlain in the midst of a “eureka!” moment, having just recovered the lost object and appraising its condition, it wouldn’t matter which way he is holding it). However, the most controversial part about the statue does not concern Champlain himself, but a Native scout that used to adorn the monument’s pedestal.
As one can discover when examining the other great statues of Ottawa, the hero incarnate will often be surrounded by of one or more statues of minions or guides. The Champlain statue originally had a life-size Native scout at its base, a stoic-looking man in a kneeling position with a finger guiding the way northward to Québec. The premise behind this nugget of artisanship was not historically inaccurate; Champlain was indeed accompanied on his later expeditions by several Native guides. However, there was one big problem with the statue’s depiction: Champlain was ridiculously oversized compared to the scout, possessing possibly three times the stature of the Native man. Additionally, unlike the statue of Thomas D’Arcy McGee behing Parliament Hill, Champlain is elevated on his pedestal far above his kneeling aide.
In 1997, Native people, led by the then-Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Ovide Mercredi, finally convinced the National Capital Commission to remove the scout from his diminuitive position to a more respectable location in Major’s Hill Park. However, the choice of the scout’s new orientation is itself curious: he kneels looking to the west, and seems to directly address Victoria Island — an island in the middle of the Ottawa River that was at the time of the Champlain statue controversy the site of a standoff between the National Capital Commission and local Native groups. The island had in the previous decades been decommissioned as an industrial area, and Native groups assumed the terrain, declaring it a historical Algonquin meeting site and refusing the NCC to have it developed. Perhaps in the relocation of the statue of the scout, the AFN was sending a message to Ottawa and the NCC that the city’s Native heritage should not be glossed over by European symbols.
In the end, the Native/European schism caused by the statue may not have been entirely resolved. Indeed, the sign at the base of Champlain’s monument still insists that he was the “First Great Canadian”.
Tags: Ottawa
