Guest column: Amherstburg: what’s in a name?

Article content

Tourism promoters call Amherstburg “one of the prettiest and oldest communities in Southwest Ontario.”

Article content

Unfortunately, say historians, the picturesque little town south of Windsor bears the name of a British career soldier who called Indigenous peoples “an execrable race” whose “extirpation” he encouraged by the distribution among them of smallpox-infected blankets.

Amherst was dispatched home to Britain for fear his overt racism would throw a wrench into British plans to use a more diplomatic approach in seeking Indigenous support for plans to peacefully establish settlements in North America.

Now, 250 years later, the general’s name has reared its ugly head in a debate about the naming of a new $25-million high school to replace two older facilities — one of which since 1922 was called Gen. Amherst High School.

Article content

For Amherstburg’s 805 residents – and over 8,000 in the Windsor area — who identified as Indigenous in a 2020 survey, the opportunity offered the public by the Greater Essex County School Board must have seemed like a windfall: ending a century-old public insult that did not require them to protest, lobby or campaign.

But there is a hitch.

Some local residents are upset the school board is considering naming options for the new high school that would be a departure from a practice of referencing the host municipality in a school’s name — Kingsville District High School is a case in point.

On the face of it, that seems like a perfectly legitimate concern. The problem is that their town — Amherstburg — was named after a man who was in favour of using Indigenous genocide as a military tactic.

Article content

Board officials felt my role with the Indigenous Reconciliation Advisory Group of the Ontario Human Rights Commission might be helpful at a Sept. 14th meeting of the board’s Naming Committee. During the sometimes fractious discussion, a long-time board trustee said the the process seemed to be aimed at making Amherstburg residents feel “ashamed” of their town’s name.

Nobody shared concerns expressed by two Indigenous parents of the negative impacts their children experienced in attending a school bearing the name of a man who felt Indigenous peoples should be exterminated.

And apparently forgotten in all the fuss was the fact that board trustees have adopted a land acknowledgement that pledges them to “moving forward respectfully with all First Nations, Inuit, and Metis.”

Article content

Human nature being what it is, naming places – schools, rivers, mountains, streets – after people will always be a risky business.

Mobs in downtown Toronto overnight transformed the reputation of Egerton Ryerson from the “father of public education in Ontario” to “the architect of Indian residential schools.”

The names of people like Jeffrey Amherst should not be erased from history books, but neither should statues to them be placed on public pedestals or their names be given places of honour in civilized society.

Amherstburg’s residents need only look a couple of hundred kilometres up Highway 401 to learn a pertinent lesson in respectful naming practices.

In 1916, the citizens of the bustling little community of Berlin held a referendum and changed the town’s name to Kitchener, a drastic act by a population of which 70 per cent identified as ethnic German.

Article content

But as Canadian soldiers died daily on First World War battlefields, Berlin’s residents no longer thought it was appropriate to name their town after the capital of the European country whose hegemony was largely responsible for launching a global conflict that would eventually take the lives of 16 million people.

Just last week, the Ontario Human Rights Commission announced it is developing a policy statement on the display of derogatory names, words and images.

It said human rights law has found that images and words which degrade people because of their ancestry, race or ethnic group may create a poisoned environment and violate the province’s human rights code.

It’s good to hear that the naming committee has since suggested four other names it will consider.

The folks of Amherstburg have an opportunity to maintain their reputation of being “picturesque” in the true sense of the word.

Maurice Switzer is a citizen of the Mississaugas of Alderville First Nation. He serves on the Indigenous Reconciliation Advisory Group of the Ontario Human Rights Commission.