The colonial bias of Canadian statues
Photographer Jeffrey Thomas reflects on the depictions of Indigenous people in monuments and statues
When photographer Jeffrey Thomas first visited the statue of Samuel de Champlain in Ottawa, he remembers how a smaller statue of an Indigenous man, crouched at the bottom of Champlain's plinth, was missing something: context.
The unnamed "Anishinabe scout" was meant to symbolize how First Nations people helped the European explorer navigate the Ottawa River. "There were no markings or no plaques … to tell you what's going on here," says Thomas, whose photography work confronts stereotypes of Indigenous people in public spaces.
In the 1990s, Thomas's photographs of the Champlain monument helped kickstart a national conversation about the depiction of Indigenous peoples in public art.
Today the "Anishinabe scout" sits tucked away in Major's Hill Park in Ottawa, after having been removed from the Champlain monument in the 1990s. The Champlain monument itself was removed in 2017.
