Reconsidering the Summer Residence: The City-Text, Historial Commemoration and Banal Settler Geography

Abstract

Author Bryan Smith agrees that critiques of Sir John A. Macdonald, and Cornwallis as unworthy of public commemoration are warranted and necessary, particularly as each was instrumental in cementing settler-colonial projects of dominion and erasure of Indigenous populations. However, he observes that each figure is but one point (or multiple) in the web of articulations that comprise the city-texts of Canada. Drawing on the example of the city now known as Toronto, Smith shows how critically examining city-texts can provide a generative way to thwart the insidiousness of the colonial settler project. An appended street maps show a concentration of Indigenous toponyms concentrated at the corner of Yonge Street and Steeles Avenue (West and East). The cluster of Indigenous toponyms--Nipigon, Abitibi, Athabaska, Otonabee and Madawaska--is concentrated at the literal margins of the city's politically defined space. Further, there is a particular scalar advantage afforded to "Yonge" and "Steeles" (named for English people (Wise & Gould, 2011)) that, by virtue of their arterial nature, enjoy greater prominence in popular language of space. While this map is only one example, it draws attention to how space can serve to, in quite literal ways, marginalize histories that don't fit with the banality of European commemorative privilege.