B.C.’s first Indigenous lieutenant-governor, Steven Point, said he’s “honoured” a street bearing Joseph Trutch’s name in Richmond has now been renamed after him.
The street signs have been changed on Trutch Avenue in the Terra Nova neighbourhood, and now read “Point Avenue.”
“You don’t ever expect to get a street named after you… I think it’s a very nice gesture,” Point told the Richmond News. “I think (the city is) trying to acknowledge that Joseph Trutch was kind of a bad figure in history.”
Last year, Richmond city council followed in the footsteps of Vancouver to erase Trutch’s name from street signs, and this week those signs were changed.
But despite being pleased with the street name change, Point said he’s not into “revisionist history” and doesn’t agree with pulling down monuments of historical figures who might have been racist.
Many First Nations have been calling for monuments, school names and memorials that highlight racist historical figures to be removed, and the statue of Gassy Jack in Vancouver’s Gastown was pulled down in early February.
“A lot of people historically represented the times that they were in (and) were quite racist – you could say that about a lot of people back in those days,” Point said. “You can’t just burn history down because you don’t agree with it now. History is history. You just leave it there and put footnotes to history – ‘this was probably a bad thing.’”
Instead, he’d prefer to leave historical reminders in place, acknowledge human rights are “a thing of modern times” and focus on reconciliation that is happening now.
History needs to be remembered and used as a “measuring stick” to remind people how far society has come fighting racism.
“I don’t think people should forget about who Trutch was as lieutenant-governor, nor should they forget about the fact that he was a notorious bad guy in history,” Point said.
Point said, when he was lieutenant-governor, he didn’t mind having a statue of “good old John. A.,” the first prime minister of Canada, outside his office, even though he as well was known to have been a racist.
“He represents more than just himself, he represents the institution that he belonged to as prime minister,” Point said.
Trutch’s legacy reverberated long into B.C.’s history
An academic article from fifty years ago concluded that, while land issues in the rest of Canada have been “tied up in a neat European legal package called a treaty,” in B.C. in 1867, “largely thanks to the influence of Trutch, it was still in the category of unfinished business.”
Robin Fisher, in a 1971 BC Studies article, outlines how Trutch set up policies, first as the Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works and later as the first Lieutenant-Governor of B.C., that depleted the land reserved for Indigenous people.
Not only did he actively reduce the amount of land Indigenous people got to the benefit of European settlers, Trutch showed contempt for First Nations people and used disparaging language to describe them in his correspondence.
Trutch’s policies and racist attitude was a complete reversal, according to Fisher, from the previous governor, James Douglas, who fought for the fair treatment of First Nations and for their land rights.
Even when B.C. joined confederation and First Nations affairs fell to the federal government, Trutch continued to push for his racist policies, convincing Prime Minister John A. Macdonald that he was actually working for the Indigenous population.
While Europeans settlers were being given large tracts of land, Trutch decided 10 acres was enough for a First Nations family to live on. Some land parcels were as small as two acres per family.
Trutch dismissed First Nations ability to use the land, scoffing that all they grew were potatoes.
And when there were breaches of land rights, First Nations didn’t seem to get reprieve in the courts, according to Fisher.
“Areas cultivated by Indians, however, were not always similarly protected, either in the courts or from white encroachment,” Fisher wrote. “Indians who brought cases of their cultivated areas being trampled by Europeans’ cattle before the courts failed to secure convictions, whereas Indian defendants in similar cases were found guilty.”
Over the years, First Nations people became increasingly frustrated with Trutch’s policies and Fisher recounts that many rebellions were brewing, although they never came to fruition in any widespread way.
Point called Douglas, who was a person of colour and married to a Cree woman, a “Renaissance man.”
Trutch, on the other hand, embodied the worst of colonial racist policies and destroyed much of the work done by Douglas.
“He’s a renown bad guy,” Point said.
