Introduction 

The city of Kingston, Ontario is renowned for many things – from band The Tragically Hip, to its Olympic Sailing Harbour, and as the first capital city of Canada. Depending on who you are, the most important thing about Kingston is that it was considered home to Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. As someone who spent 22 years growing up in Kingston, the stories of Macdonald and Kingston’s colonial foundations were the only histories of my city that I knew. Field trips to local museums and independent research projects taught me of Kingston’s importance as a trading port, military hub, and existence in a post-European contact world.

 

The most important facilitator in perpetuating these histories, however, was the abundance of historic sites, monuments and commemorative plaques that line the city’s downtown core. Through years of visiting downtown Kingston, I have become increasingly familiar with the ways in which the city commemorates its history, especially the narratives evolving from the mid-late nineteenth century. It was not until pursuing an undergraduate degree, however, that I started to really question how and why these colonial histories are perpetuated, despite multitude of diverse histories present in Kingston. It wasn’t until my graduate degree when I also started to question the implications of silencing these histories, and consider the different ways commemorative, colonial sites can perhaps tell histories from broader perspectives.

 

This digital essay focuses on the ways in which settler colonial memory is preserved in public spaces throughout Kingston. Taking a closer look at monuments, markers, and place names such as Confederation Park, Macdonald Park, Cartwright House, Sir John A Macdonald Blvd, and Kingston City Hall will demonstrate the permanence of settler identity and narrative as present throughout the city’s physical landscape. The literary works of Derek Alderman, Kirk Savage and Rick Crownshaw on naming and commemoration support ideas that commemorative sites and place-naming privilege colonial histories above others, which impacts the way history is told and received to and by public audiences.