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On visiting my home city of Winnipeg for the first time since before the pandemic, I noticed that a major road, Bishop Grandin Boulevard, no longer exists. Or rather it exists but has a different name: Abinojii Mikanah, which is Anishinaabemowin for “the children’s way.” The boulevard, along with a couple of smaller thoroughfares, was renamed by the city council in 2024 after consultation with Indigenous groups. The grounds for renaming are that Vital-Justin Grandin, who died in 1902, was a proponent of residential schools and has joined others, previously celebrated, in posthumous infamy.

I have no special affection for Grandin’s memory nor even an informed opinion on the justness of his demotion. Growing up in the anglophone half of Winnipeg, I’d never heard of the prelate, and his eponymous boulevard only came into existence after I left the city for good in the mid-1970s. But the change occasioned for me some further reflection on the politics of historical naming, unnaming, and renaming, about which there has been much heat in Canada and internationally for well over a decade. There’s a good deal of academic literature on the subject of honorific place names, as well as monuments and memorials: who gets one, who should lose theirs, and so on. These are questions that I think about frequently as a scholar who mainly writes about attitudes to and perceptions of the past; for several years, I have taught graduate and undergraduate courses in which I ask students to wrestle with this topic and other matters of historically related controversy.

In When Heroes Become Villains, one of the final titles to be published by New Star Books, Jon Bartlett and Brian Robertson devote successive chapters to three British Columbians: Joseph William Trutch, John Sebastian Helmcken, and William Bowser. Bartlett and Robertson leave their readers in little doubt of their view that the sins of these West Coast politicians, respectively a chief commissioner of lands and works (and eventually lieutenant-governor), a pre-Confederation physician (and speaker of the House of Assembly), and an attorney general (and briefly premier), merit their dissociation from various landmarks and streets. Helmcken scores highest on the villainy scale, having, in the authors’ view, responsibility for a smallpox epidemic that ravaged Indigenous communities, “the worst single act of genocide in the history of the Americas.” (Those are powerful words: the decimation of several other Indigenous populations might lay equal claim to that awful trophy.)

While I am glad to be enlightened on the mixed record of the book’s three subjects, I remain, as with Grandin, agnostic on these individual cases. To the authors’ credit, they include a concluding discussion of factors to be considered in unnamings, suggesting that agency in such matters belongs to the jurisdiction, usually municipal, in which the controversial landmarks exist; and they concede that tactics such as mounting educational plaques can offer an acceptable substitute for the outright removal of names or illegal destruction of property.

Universities, as much as cities, are cauldrons of such controversy, places in which ideas and debates flourish (or should) and where passions run high. Compared with American campuses, Canadian schools have allowed for greater representation from faculty and student groups in adjudicating name changes, and this approach has occasioned the championing of more inclusive policies that better reflect both the diversity of contemporary academic communities and the complexity of the past. Here we have the notable example of Egerton Ryerson, his identity now severed from Toronto Metropolitan University. On a smaller scale, my own institution, Queen’s University, has reckoned with the name of its law school building, formerly Sir John A. Macdonald Hall. The current crisis in the Middle East has spurred other efforts at renaming, including unofficial ones initiated by students at, for instance, McGill University, though in this case the intent is to bring attention to the Palestinian cause rather than to remove a controversial individual’s name.

“Must a name mean something?” Humpty Dumpty is asked in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Lewis Carroll had great fun with names, recognizing the degree to which they bestow identity, differentiate the self from others, and denote objects. Namings, whether of babies, buildings, or dogs (cats, as T. S. Eliot advised, need three names), are no light matter. Unnamings, however, raise the stakes considerably since they are less about conferring a fresh honour than about removing an existing one. Currently unnamings are also wrapped up with other issues: with the recent pendulum swing (especially in the United States) against “wokery” and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in all their manifestations; with social justice and reconciliation; and with growing political polarization in many democracies, including a disturbing resurgence of far-right parties in countries that, given their histories, ought to know better. There are implacable hard-liners and absolutists on both sides. At one extreme, we find those who would advocate public oblivion for any figure found wanting by today’s moral standards; their urgent pleas sometimes lack perspective, a nuanced understanding of past events, or the capacity to weigh the positive and the negative. (This does not necessarily mean that they are wrong.) At the other extreme, firm opponents of unnaming insist that modern morality and politics should play no part in historical commemoration, that the past can’t be changed, and that “one can’t erase history.” Statues, say they, should remain where they are, and buildings should stay named as they are for as long as they stand.

At the risk of offending all sides, I see problems with both categorical positions, each of which misunderstands how history (as a form of human inquiry) actually works. Things aren’t that simple. We certainly can’t change the past, but we absolutely can and should feel free to change our choices about what to celebrate or denounce. Historians routinely rethink, revise, and rewrite on the basis of new evidence and questions generated by present knowledge. Those concerned with issues of commemoration need not be bound by the same canons and interests that guide those of us employed in academic or public history, but one hopes they might consider at least the following moral questions: Does the past demand of us more than the present? What debt do we owe to long-dead idols, especially those whose feet now appear to be clay? Does the commemoration of former notables outweigh our obligation to the living and, if so, under what circumstances? There are more practical questions to be addressed as well: What is the icon to be renamed, why was it erected, and by whom? Where is it located? Who will see it? Who is asking for a change and why? What is the material cost? (Replacing a few plaques and maps for a single building is one thing; renaming an entire street or even a city, such as the former town of Dundas, Ontario, now part of Hamilton, is another.) An argument can be made that cost should not enter into such discussions, but a counter-argument can just as easily be made that the money spent on loads of new street signs could be better spent addressing contemporary social problems, including those afflicting the very groups that demand the renaming.

We are rightly concerned that documents, archives, and historical evidence be preserved (understanding that no archive preserves everything from the past and that not everything from the past is preserved anywhere). And we should not, by accident or design, consign inconvenient facts to an Orwellian memory hole. The recent removal of certain names from U.S. government websites and the purging of exhibits (and staff) in national museums are deeply worrying. Fortunately, the past itself shows that, on the whole, its tracks can rarely if ever be wiped away permanently; sources do tend to persist, though they may themselves be selective, often biased, and sometimes outright deceptive. Even totalitarian regimes have not succeeded in eradicating history, as the opening of archives in the former Soviet Union and East Germany demonstrates. This has been so since nearly the dawn of record keeping. The first Qin emperor of China went so far as to burn books and bury scholars alive in the third century BCE, but we still know a whole lot about pre-Qin history. Many other bonfires of knowledge have occurred from antiquity to the present, but the past always seems to endure. Our knowledge of it is imperfect but substantial, and it is never fixed in one state.

Removing a name from a building, relocating a statue, or rechristening a street does not accomplish what the ancient Greeks and Romans wished on evildoers: the consignment of their memory to oblivion, or damnatio memoriae. We collectively remember the vicious as much as the virtuous, Cleon as much as Pericles, Nero alongside Seneca, with due skepticism toward the often biased portraits of them written by their enemies. We also make valiant efforts not to bestow posthumous fame on mass murderers and haters by endlessly repeating their names, though we are inconsistent in doing so and one can google the identity of such wretched creatures in two seconds. Where names have lived on in memory, in written records, oral tradition, or archeology, they are more likely than not to survive till we, and the world, are done.

Unlike the material and written evidence that informs our understanding of the past and keeps historians in business, and that is for the most part out of sight, public historical commemoration is only secondarily about the past and its preservation. It is primarily about us, our values, what we choose to make prominent, and what lessons we hope will be gleaned. Indeed, some monuments are created precisely to remind us of past crimes (though not their malefactors) rather than of meritorious achievements. Up against the many streets in Berlin named for the Goethes, Hegels, Kants, and Beethovens of the world, there are memorials to the Holocaust, not merely the iconic Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe near the Brandenburg Gate but also the Stolpersteine or “stumbling stones” that dot pavements in multiple German cities, marking the homes and offices of murdered victims of the Nazis.

“The life of the dead,” said the Roman orator Cicero, “is placed in the memory of the living.” But the values of the living change, sometimes very quickly. The dead, as the historian Thomas Laqueur has written, do valuable work among us, but (at least in Western cultures) they have no permanent entitlement to prominent and continuous commemoration: it is we the living who choose when and how to remember them. We have an obligation to evaluate the reasons for continuing to commemorate them fairly and with open minds. As Voltaire remarked, “We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.” This debt implies a duty to protect the record of their time on earth in its fullness and is related to professional historians’ ethical imperative to be cautious, truthful, and balanced in basing stories upon that record.

Removing our first prime minister’s name from a pub or a highway may upset some people, but it will not make the next generation of schoolchildren ask, “Sir John who?” It may, however, serve a contemporary social goal such as reconciliation. Contrarily, decapitating a statue or tossing it in the river, as happened in 2020 to the Bristol worthy and slave trader Edward Colston, neither eradicates a figure’s memory nor brings solace to the immediate victims of his transactions.

Any argument for an unnaming must turn on multiple considerations, and only one of these is really “historical”— related to the subject as a past living being. It’s the notional score sheet of merits and demerits in a person’s life: in John A. Macdonald’s case, for example, weighing up the Canadian Pacific Railway and Confederation versus the execution of Louis Riel and the existence of residential schools. Issues of the present must be one factor in these deliberations, though not necessarily the deciding element. Does the harm of removing a controversial person’s name from a building or moving his statue into an enclosed location (where it might be safe from vandalism) really outweigh the good in removing the hurt felt by those who have no choice but to visit or work in that building? And where do we draw the line between the forgivable and unforgivable? The answer will vary with each examination and even then won’t necessarily remain fixed. There isn’t a single line to be drawn, and very few cases are so clear-cut that they require no discussion. There are outliers: no one outside the fringe far right would lobby for an Adolf Hitler Museum to provide a “balanced” assessment of the führer’s “achievements.” Germany itself has on the whole reckoned honestly with its skeletons (and, as Germans are wont to do, they have even created a long compound word for such “work of coping with the past”: Vergangenheitsbewältigung).

But even here, the fullness of time can bestow partial amnesty on the worst of villains, a collective forgetting of pain and dulling of a once sharp sense of horror. We can’t predict what ensuing centuries will say about Hitler, and, as the historian Gavriel Rosenfeld and others have shown, barely eighty years after the end of the Second World War, the last century’s greatest monster has become again, as he was briefly in the ’60s, a figure of light fiction and black humour as the Nazi record is “normalized” by comparison with other atrocities. We can see similar shifts even in less egregious cases involving killers and alleged killers. As the conservative legal theorist F. H. Buckley noted in 2004, with reference to the D.C. sniper attacks two years earlier, “I feel less angry about the snipers than I did a year ago, much less upset about O. J. Simpson than I did ten years ago. And I feel positively benign about Bluebeard the Pirate.” There’s always a fresh atrocity on the horizon that will challenge those of the past for top marks in the grim “worst things ever done” competition of human history — more “never agains” to be marked.

“Let’s not judge the past, lest the future judge us.” It’s a pleasant thought but one misplaced. The future will inevitably judge us — as well it should. We (my own boomer generation, in particular) have a lot to answer for on the environment alone, though it would be good if our positive contributions were also set on the scales. The twenty-second century’s obligation to celebrate our achievements won’t outweigh whatever social justice needs our descendants feel must be satisfied — or their sense of grievance. The best we can expect is the best we can ourselves offer: an unprejudiced hearing that accounts for both successes (or at least those still deemed successes) and failures.

If I have a worry about the future’s judgment of our present, it isn’t that such evaluations may be critical but rather that the evidence informing them will be considerably scanter than is necessary to understand us fully. Much of what we leave behind for future generations will be electronic, self-censored, and ephemeral, in contrast to the paper and parchment documents generated over previous centuries. In an age of growing authoritarianism, fake news, and suppression of history, it is the preservation of these sources (and of access to them), rather than the permanence of honorific commemorations, that should concern us most.

Failure to preserve the records of today in whatever form they take? Now that would be a genuine erasure of history.