OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to a letter regarding the Champlain Monument, published Jan. 25.
I am not a resident of Orillia, so I don’t have the emotional attachment that many of your residents do to the monument. However, I do share the emotional grief of the Indigenous peoples for their treatment.
One could argue, I guess, that Saint-Marie among the Hurons in Midland was the first residential school in Canada. But I’m not going down that path, either. This story I am telling is about respect, which for everyone should be a guiding principle no matter what side of the talking stick you are on.
I attended a very interesting talk today about storytelling at St. Paul’s church. It was part of a series of lectures on the importance and relevance of storytelling given by Lakehead University’s series of lectures. The teller, Dr. Kim Fedderson, talked generally about how the stories we tell are shaped and how we are informed by them.
The teller talked also about specific stories that specific groups have to embrace. His general talk was turned into a specific example of “story.” At that point, “the story” became relevant and also immediate to the crowd as there were a number of different viewpoints.
This was incredibly interesting to me as I was a fly on the wall, virtually impartial, on how Champlain’s plight on the plinth was playing out.
To me the solution is fairly straightforward. Everyone “get over it and get on with it” and turn the plinth into a speakers’ corner, like they have in London. Those that can’t live without the statue can talk publicly on a Saturday afternoon and vent their emotions and those who can’t live with it can do the same. Those that are indifferent can ignore the whole thing and perhaps listen to another speaker who might want to talk about their love of poetry, fractal theoretical physics or why Guns N’ Roses actually were OK. The plinth would become a focal point of discussions, which shouldn’t hurt anyone.
This lecture series is going to be quite cool.
Paul Rollinson
Waubaushene
