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Albert Dumont feels a chilly slap within the face, or worse, each time he sees one of many indicators figuring out the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway, markers that he feels stand as an affront to his personal existence.

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“It’s a slap within the kisser, or a kick within the groin,” he says. “It’s like any person is rubbing your nostril in it, all the time saying they’re superior: ‘This dude right here, he did a lot of nasty issues to you, and we’re honouring him and you may’t do a rattling factor about it.’”

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At 72, the Algonquin non secular information and human rights activist nonetheless vividly recollects a number of the emasculating results of the Indian Act below which he was raised, together with the move system that required his father to ask for permission from the white Indian agent each time he wished to go away the reserve.

So on Sept. 30 — the Nationwide Day for Reality and Reconciliation — Dumont is hoping to do one thing about it. He’ll be holding a protest march alongside the parkway, from the primary garden of the Canadian Warfare Museum to Parkdale Avenue and again, calling on the Nationwide Capital Fee to alter the road’s title. Alongside the way in which, he’ll symbolically rename the roadway for the day, overlaying one of many giant SJAM indicators with one declaring it Each Youngster Issues Parkway.

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“We’re going to do that each Sept. 30 till the title John A. Macdonald is off the parkway,” he says. “There are literally thousands of youngsters that died that might have lived if John A. Macdonald had by no means come to this nation.”

Macdonald’s function within the Indian Residential Colleges system and the compelled assimilation of Indigenous folks in Canada has been effectively documented, and lately statues of him have been faraway from public areas and his title scrubbed from different websites that when honoured him. These acts bristle many Canadians who view such measures as a rewriting or erasure of historical past. Macdonald was, in any case, Canada’s first prime minister and among the many nation’s important architects, even when, as historian and scholar James Daschuk famous, his Nationwide Dream was realized at a crippling price to Indigenous peoples.

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To these offended about such so-called canceling measures, Dumont merely asks that they struggle spending 10 minutes in his footwear.

“Think about that this oppression was towards THEM, that this was the land the place THEY had been residing for a lot of hundreds of years.

“The ‘Indian downside,’” Dumont provides, “was that the so-called Fathers of Confederation knew that the First Nations’ lands have been wealthy with assets. It was like a giant, large financial institution vault full of swimming pools of cash. However between the financial institution vault and them was the First Nations, so the issue was, ‘How will we do away with them?’ So that they did all the things they probably may, even sinking to genocide.

“There are not any parkways named after John A. Macdonald within the spirit world, the place he’s now,” he provides. “There are not any statues of him. The one roadway that ought to be named after him is the freeway to hell.”

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In the meantime, the ink on the parkway’s present title is, traditionally, barely dry. The scenic route west from downtown had lengthy been generally known as the Ottawa River Parkway till 2012, when then-International Affairs minister John Baird introduced the title change, a part of a spate of comparable renamings led to by then-PM Stephen Harper’s authorities’s need to honour previous Conservatives.

The parkway’s 2012 rechristening adopted a marketing campaign led by Ottawa author/historian Bob Plamondon and present mayoral candidate Mark Sutcliffe to suffuse Ottawa with extra Canadian historical past. Final yr, Sutcliffe notably wrote in these pages that, following the following publication of the Reality and Reconciliation Fee’s report and the invention of quite a few unmarked graves at residential faculty websites, he felt the boulevard’s title ought to once more be modified.

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“Historical past shouldn’t be modified by the naming or un-naming of a highway, airport or constructing,” he wrote. “Such honours are subjective to start with; there are a lot of different Canadians after whom the parkway may have been named. Nobody’s rights are trampled upon in the event that they don’t have a highway named after them or a statue erected of their honour.

“A brand new title for the parkway is just one small step amongst many which can be obligatory,” he added. “However it might be an essential transfer in the precise path.”

Dumont says he’s towards naming something after an individual and needs to see the parkway named Kichi Zibi, which interprets to “nice river.”

“That’s how the Anishinaabe Algonquins say it. ‘Nice river.’ That’s what the individuals who grew to become generally known as the Algonquins have been calling it on the time of Champlain.”

The SJAM parkway occasion will get underway at 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 30 in entrance of the Canadian Warfare Museum and can function speeches, songs and a smudging ceremony. The stroll will start at 9 a.m. and is predicted to final till about 11:30 a.m. Go to https://www.healingbeginsnow.ca/september-30-walk for extra info.

bdeachman@postmedia.com