On the front lines of the statue wars: why some want to topple statues but others want to keep them up

In recent years, students have toppled and beheaded a statue of Egerton Ryerson, protestors have torn down likenesses of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II, and city officials have removed memorials of John A. Macdonald from public spaces. There's little doubt that we are living through a historic moment — one that is forcing us to re-evaluate how we remember our past.

With more than 20 statues and memorials across Canada being degraded, toppled or removed since 2020, Inside the Statue Wars delves into the battle over our public memorials. 

Some say it's a long overdue reckoning, arguing that certain statues are relics of a racist era and must be taken down before we can achieve reconciliation. Others insist statue-toppling is vandalism and based on a distortion of history. They fear that these actions will spark a backlash and divide the country. 

Some of the key players on the front lines of the statue wars are featured in the documentary and have their own thoughts on the issue. Their quotes have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Photography by Yuma Dean Hester of the Bawaadan Collective. 

Sadie-Phoenix Lavoie 

Sadie-Phoenix Lavoie (they/them) is two-spirit Anishinaabe from Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba. Lavoie has been organizing rallies and protests from a young age. They objected to the presence of the Queen Victoria statue at the Manitoba Legislative Building in Winnipeg and decided to act.

We're not here to celebrate colonialism and we're not here to celebrate the death of our ancestors. We're not here to celebrate residential schools. We're not here to celebrate our intergenerational trauma. There is nothing to celebrate. 

Residential school impacts passed on to my mom. Same with my grandma on to my dad. A lot of us had shame for who we are. 

I always saw the queen there, sitting on a throne. It was huge and it was big and obnoxious. I was just constantly getting angrier and angrier, and I would channel that rage. I've dreamt of that statue going down for years.

We all took a rope and we pulled together. I actually jumped on her face and stomped on it a bit, and then I got to the top and I gave her the finger with my fist up to say, "You didn't break us."

There was a mixture of emotions: relief, joy. I mean, I still don't even know how to explain it. It felt like the end of an era. 

I think that we need to take an honest look at our history, our shared history, from an Indigenous perspective. And part of that is removing objects that no longer should hold revered places — especially in a public setting like this.

I think something that needs to replace the statue is something that is decided amongst our people. I'd hope that it'd be a symbol of peace, a symbol of hope and a symbol of change.

Miguel Avila-Velarde 

Miguel Avila-Velarde is a Peruvian-born Indigenous activist and community organizer in Toronto who sees the statues of Egerton Ryerson and John A. Macdonald as symbols of oppression. The announcement of unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021 prompted Miguel and a group of protestors to decapitate the statue of Ryerson — a man often described as the architect of residential schools. Miguel delivered the severed statue head to members of Six Nations of the Grand River in Caledonia, Ont.

I'm hitting [the Ryerson head] with the sledgehammer — bam! [The] feeling I was getting is, "Uh oh … I'm gonna get my ass in trouble. Police are gonna come and knock on my door the next day."

Next day around 2 p.m., I got a call: "You have been chosen to take the head to Six Nations." And I said to myself, "Wow, this is historic. Epic." 

This is our victory. This is our trophy of war! I got the nickname of "Statue Slayer."

If the government is not willing to take action, then it's up to the people to exercise our rights. Because if they're not willing to do it, we'll do it for them. [There's] no other alternative.

My activism is based on my children who are Indigenous. And I want them to be included in a better world. And that's what we do every day as an activist: to help change society.

Kahsenniyo Kick 

Kahsenniyo Kick is an artist, poet and activist from the Mohawk Nation, Wolf Clan, at Six Nations. She uses her work to raise awareness and promote social change. Recently, she posed semi-nude with the decapitated Egerton Ryerson statue head in a series of provocative photographs.

To me, putting the Ryerson head on a pike was about asserting a boundary: saying colonization, colonialism, assimilation, all of these practices, all of these things that he represents, isn't welcome here. 

I decided, along with a few friends of mine, to do a photo shoot with the decapitated Ryerson head. 

If Ryerson is somebody that you hold in high esteem, I want you to be mad that the head is in my possession. I want you to be uncomfortable with me as an Indigenous woman holding so much power.

Because art's supposed to make you feel, supposed to make you think that the removal of the statue makes us question society as a whole.

Ron Stagg 

Ron Stagg has been a history professor at Toronto Metropolitan University (formally Ryerson University) for over 30 years. He sees the removal of statues as a troubling trend that represents an erasure of history, and in a National Post op-ed, argued that Egerton Ryerson has been misjudged.

When they tore [the Egerton Ryerson statue] down and smashed it up and flattened his head, and after they cut it off and so on, that really disturbed me because he didn't deserve that.

Egerton Ryerson became the symbol of what had happened in residential schools but, in fact, he was not the architect of residential schools. He created a plan for schools — for First Nations people — which were totally different from the ones that were created by the federal government later.

I would've been happy to stay out of this, but I can't because it's a distortion of history. 

Yes, we want reconciliation. Yes, we are concerned about the possible graves that have been found, but you're stuffing this down our throat. I firmly believe there will be a backlash. I'm not sure how long it will take, but it's already started on the right among conservatives.

If you get rid of statues, you get rid of the history they represent. Some people want to simply tear them down, bury them, melt them down. Some people want to take them and stick them in a warehouse somewhere and forget about them. Some people want to put them in museums where people can see them. 

My view is, keep the statues up, put a proper plaque on them that tells enough about what they did — good and bad — to make people understand.

Ta'Kaiya Blaney 

Ta'Kaiya Blaney (they/them) is an Indigenous land defender, singer and award-winning actor from Tla'amin First Nation, a territory on the northwest coast of British Columbia. Blaney has been raising awareness about Indigenous issues since they were eight.

Land is where we come from. It's where we return to and it's what we are responsible for. 

Those colonizers who are remembered as explorers left their mark on our land through statues, and they left their mark on our people through bringing in genocide.

Our ancestors have been buried in this land for countless generations. And I will be buried on my territory.

Šɛʔaystən … is one of the ancient villages of my people. We were forced to leave Šɛʔaystən due to the severity of the smallpox epidemics that was killing our people. [Now], there's been a lot of construction around … where we know our ancestors' remains to be. 

You wouldn't be able to go to a white Canadian cemetery and dig up their bodies. But somehow, when it's our bodies, it doesn't even trigger critical thinking — of, hey, maybe this is a bad idea. And I think that that just shows, for me, how dehumanized we are in this country as Indigenous people.

The destruction of our grave site — these are active examples of how colonialism is perpetuated. We're fighting that every day. And the removal of colonial statues that celebrate colonizers who brought about the genocide of our people — I think that is one way that our people stand up and try to make the world that we live in more livable for us.

I really do see the statue removal actions as acts of transformation: transformation of history and transformation of grief.

I think my message to settler Canadians that cling to colonial history is that your anger towards Indigenous people is misdirected. This country was built on genocide and that is an undeniable fact. 

Fergus Keyes

Fergus Keyes is the director of the Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation and a self-described history buff. He is a staunch supporter of John A. Macdonald and even has a miniature statue of Canada's first prime minister in his home. In a recent poll from Research Co., more than half of the Canadian respondents said they think any toppled statue should be repaired or replaced.

Mankind has been building statues for as long as anybody can remember. 

It's history, and I like history, and almost all statues have some historical context to them. 

Statues can sometimes build up an interest in people to explore more about that individual or the event that's being depicted. If I don't happen to like an individual or an event that's being depicted by a statue, that doesn't give me the right to take a sledgehammer to it. I mean, it makes no sense in Canada, you know, where we have law and order. Every single one of them was a criminal act of destroying public property. And nobody has the right to do that.

It's mob rule that seems to be perpetrated mainly by young people. Any act when people are causing vandalism, and especially when the police are on the scene, then they should be detained, charged. 'Cause I don't think they know what they're doing. I don't think that they really have the slightest understanding of the issue.

Was [John A. Macdonald] perfect? No. Is Canada perfect? No. But Canada, I would dare say, would not be a country without John A. Macdonald.