The Church-Wellesley Business Improvement Area (BIA) has written a letter to the city of Toronto asking that they assist in removing a statue of Alexander Wood at corner of Alexander and Church streets which the same BIA erected in 2005. The statue was put up to honour Wood as one of the founder of the neighbourhood. Now, the BIA wants it gone because it might be offensive to the "2-Spirit" community.
According to the Canadian Press, the BIA believes that leaving the statue up would send a message that racism is iconized in Toronto. Wood was on the board of two organizations now deemed problematic. Wood was a founding board member, and for many years the treasurer, of "The Society for Converting and Civilizing the Indians and Propagating the Gospel among Destitute Settlers in Upper Canada" according to the BIA.
"They funded the first school that went into one at Sault Sainte Marie. The Shingwauk Residential School came out of that original mission school that was put there, and we don't feel these kinds of symbols are necessary to pay homage to some man who treated the Indigenous people like this," Christopher Hudspeth, chair of the Church-Wellesley Village BIA told CP24 on Wednesday.
The neighbourhood, now known as the gay village, felt the need to particularly cater to the needs of the "2-Spirit" community. "2-Spirit" is a term used by the LGBTQ community meant as a tip-of-the-hat to Indigenous communities and was created by activists in the 90's.
"We want to make an apology to the Indigenous community and especially the 2-Spirit community because what was done by settlers completely erased the 2-Spirit community out of the Indigenous First Nations," Hudspeth said.
Toronto mayor John Tory said the council meetings over the next few weeks will be used to deal with some of the issues around statues and street names. "What you can't have, obviously, is just this kind of thing where names pop up and statutes and street names and then we deal with those on a one-by-one basis. We have to have some way of trying to deal with this and decide sort of what the general approach is going to be."
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