The debate over the renaming or removal of statues celebrating an offensive past has raised many tensions in English-speaking countries. With Black Lives Matter, or the increasing focus on indigenous history one may question the balance between national history and how communities react to this discourse.

ICollective memory

1 Building a national narrative

History books are filled with dates, figures, maps that appear at first as objective data. This collective data is the basis of a nation that tries to unite its people around the same core values.

However, a national narrative is biased and the way history is told always promotes a dominant mainstream vision. When history is told by the dominant white male society, accuracy and diversity are lost. Minorities have fought long and hard to have their perspective included.

Textbooks across the US for instance cover the same themes (slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, etc.) but with blatant differences in the way they are presented or annotated. History is thus a political process.

2 A contested official memory

No wonder then that minorities have contested the official history of the different English-speaking countries as it eclipses experiences of the dominated communities, the official collective memory becomes a source of contention.

Recently, around the world, minorities are reclaiming their past and their visibility in history. In the wake of the international Black Lives Matter movement that erupted after too many cases of police brutality, the election of Trump and the rise in white supremacy, this question has resurfaced.

As a consequence, many authors, including children’s books’ authors, have started to show more diversity in stories and history. Multicultural education has been topical and widely researched because it contributes to giving a voice and visibility to minorities. Children from minorities should be able to identify with the protagonists of their stories.

IIDe-whitewashing the past

1 The statue wars

Columbus Day (traditionally celebrated on the second Monday of October) commemorates Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the US. However, since the 1980s, many states on the West coast have started a movement to rename the day Indigenous People’s Day to celebrate the indigenous tribes massacred.

The statue wars around the world emerged around 2015. In the UK, the US and Australia, minorities led symbolic actions against monuments that were seen as white supremacy celebration. Some statues were vandalised, others unsealed as a protest sign.

2 At peace with the past

In 2021, Canada had to face again the cruel history of boarding schools where indigenous children were whitewashed, stripped off of their cultural heritage. Canada and Australia have engaged in a process of apologies and recognition of that dark history. In the USA, the BLM movement urged people to see how offensive statues of confederate generals are.

How do we narrate history with an unbiased, neutral perspective? These movements have led to a re-thinking on how we tell history. The purpose is not to erase some historical figures or events, but to build a narrative that englobes all experiences without omitting the sufferings of minorities.