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Jerry Amernic: Canada's two-tier historical memory: Egerton Ryerson and Joseph Brant

Indigenous leader and slaveowner still honoured with statues and place names while white education pioneer is toppled and erased — despite no direct link to residential schools

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Canada has a two-tier approach to how some historical figures are interpreted. On one hand, we have Indigenous figures, and on the other, white or colonial ones. How these figures fare might depend on which side of that ledger they’re on. Let’s examine how two were treated.

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Joseph Brant was a renowned Mohawk leader and statesman who lived from 1742 to 1807. During the American Revolutionary War, he was a British ally fighting for the Crown in North America. The British commissioned him as a captain and he met with King George III in England to argue for Mohawk interests. After the war, he led Mohawk Loyalists and other Indigenous people to a tract of land on the Grand River in southwest Ontario. This was land granted to the Six Nations as compensation for their losses in the war.

Jerry Amernic: Canada's two-tier historical memory: Egerton Ryerson and Joseph Brant Back to video

Today, a magnificent statue of Brant stands in Brantford. Three metres high and weighing 2,000 kilograms, the Joseph Brant Memorial Statue serves as a commanding presence honouring the man the city is named after. The statue — its bronze melted down from cannons used in the Battle of Waterloo and Crimean War — was unveiled in an elaborate ceremony in 1886 with the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario John Beverley Robinson presiding.

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Another statue of Brant is in Ottawa. Also in the nation’s capital is a distinguished portrait of Brant in the National Gallery of Canada. What’s more, schools are named after him, not to mention Joseph Brant Hospital and Joseph Brant Museum, both in Burlington, Ontario. To my knowledge, no one has ever defaced or toppled a statue of Brant.

Egerton Ryerson, another man with a statue honouring him, had his name attached to a Toronto university for 74 years. Ryerson, who lived from 1803 to 1882, has been referred to as the “father of public education” in Ontario. His statue, funded by donations, was unveiled in 1889.

But after the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation’s announcement on May 27, 2021, of 215 potential unmarked graves detected by ground-penetrating radar outside the former Indian Residential School in Kamloops, BC — findings that remain unconfirmed as no human remains have been exhumed or identified — his statue was vandalized and decapitated with a torch, pry bar, hammers, and an angle grinder.

This garnered extensive media coverage, with CBC suggesting Ryerson was “one of the main architects of Canada’s residential school system.”

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Ryerson, an acknowledged expert on education, was asked in 1847 for his thoughts on setting up training schools to educate Indian youth. The focus of these schools was to be on agriculture. Ryerson provided a letter about voluntary schools for Indigenous people to learn how to use tools and equipment for farming. That letter has been taken out of context by activists determined to sully his name and accuse him of being the creator of Indian Residential Schools.

In August 2021, the Standing Strong Task Force, at Ryerson University, as it was then called, issued a report making claims against Ryerson which the media — and not only the CBC — appeared to take as fact.

The report stated that his 1847 report was “his most explicit contribution to Indigenous educational programs,” that it “buttressed efforts to use schooling to Christianize and assimilate Indigenous People,” that “the substance and rationale for Ryerson’s recommended model … continued to be influential in the later development of Canada’s residential school system,” and that it was later cited by the Department of Indian Affairs in 1898.

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However, the Task Force itself included major qualifiers: the residential school model “long predated Ryerson,” had “multiple roots,” “cannot be traced to a ‘single root’,” “most of Ryerson’s recommendations were neither unique nor particularly original,” and “no direct line can be drawn” between his 1847 report and the later federal system. Ryerson died in 1882, a year before expansion of the national system began.

Despite this, it was suggested by some that Ryerson was one of the main architects.

But not everyone was convinced.

Patrice Dutil, a distinguished historian and professor at the university who still teaches there, co-authored an article with Ron Stagg, former head of the school’s history department, saying, “The movement against Ryerson belongs to a wider trend to indulge in rage against “white men” who dominated Canada’s history. But this case is special because Egerton Ryerson is patently innocent of the charges.”

It’s no surprise that a little over a week following the announcement, 215 pairs of children’s shoes were placed around the base of the statue as a memorial for the 215 soil disturbances (initially reported as unmarked graves) discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Indigenous protesters, including those waving the Mohawk Warrior Society flag, were prominent in the toppling and desecration of the statue, which included its decapitation. The statue’s head was later placed on top of a spike at 1492 Land Back Lane, a Haudenosaunee (including Mohawk) land defense camp in Caledonia, Ontario.

Less than a year later, the name of Ryerson University was changed to Toronto Metropolitan University.

Ryerson became officially disgraced and remains so to this day, even though the Task Force qualifiers show no direct causation or singular responsibility, and he is not properly described as ‘one of the main architects’ of residential schools.

Alas, we have the Friends of Egerton Ryerson trying to clear his name. The group was founded by Ron Stagg, former head of the history department at Ryerson/TMU, and Lynn McDonald, former MP, professor emerita at the University of Guelph, and fellow of the Royal Historical Society in the United Kingdom.

The group has 300 members, including living members of the Ryerson family, journalists, scholars, and according to McDonald, people still affiliated with TMU but who won’t say publicly what they know is true. She personally pored through everything ever written about Ryerson, and says he was “pro-Indigenous” and “squeaky clean.”

But he still got cancelled, while Brant did not.

To rub salt into the wound, the historical record also reveals that the highly acclaimed Brant was a slaveowner with up to 40 slaves.

In 1856, a book — The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada — was published. The author, Benjamin Drew, an American educator and abolitionist, collected more than 100 testimonies of slaves who had escaped from the United States to what was then Canada West. One testimony offered by Sophia Burthen Pooley, 90 years old at the time, related how she and her sister were kidnapped from their home in Fishkill, New York and their kidnapper later sold them to Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant, then living in New York State. When the war was over and lost, as far as the British were concerned, Brant moved north and brought his slaves with him.

In 2022, a book came out by Hamilton historian Andrew Hunter. It Was Dark There All the Time: Sophia Burthen and the Legacy of Slavery in Canada expanded on the initial testimony given to Drew more than a century-and-a-half earlier. Hunter visited every location Pooley was known to have lived in or been to. His book hinted at possible sexual abuse in the Brant household.

History doesn’t lie. McDonald points out that slavery was alive and well in Indigenous societies. Losers of wars could be killed, mutilated, enslaved and sold as slaves. What’s more, no Indigenous society is known to have actually abolished slavery. Indeed, Indigenous slaves were among those freed by the abolition laws of Britain and Upper Canada.

But we’re talking about Brant here.

It doesn’t matter. In the context of historical revisionism as practiced in Canada, a slaveowner is glorified, while a progressive man like Ryerson, who contributed so much to this country, is vilified. And it’s all right as long as the race card is filled out properly.

Jerry Amernic is the author of SLEEPWOKING, a book about historical revisionism in Canada and all the fallout associated with it. 

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