In June an unknown artist splattered Red Paint on a Statue of Queen Victoria in Victoria Park. This happened in downtown Kitchener, Ontario-- Ward 9. It created a statement about the colonization of Canada. It was not simply an act of vandalism.

The City,  and or the Region of Waterloo,  spent money removing the red paint out of disrespect for the statue itself. Then our of disrespect for the message that the adaptation of the statue was amplifying. The municipal government staff created an intervention to whitewash the statue without adequate community consult and without achieving consent.  These actions have actually reduced the statue to rust and whitewashed history. 

It also happened around the same time that the recovery of the unmarked graves of children in residential school properties all over the country are being revealed.  Since the time of the first paint splatter on Victoria, the numbers of graves continue to grow. We are now collectively becoming aware of over 5,000 children who died and were buried on these properties.  Often in secrecy,  with no notice or respect toward the parents and families who grieve these cold- cases, across generations and time, in this country. 

The last official residential school was only closed down in 1997. There are still programs and schools that require Indigenous children to leave their communities for education today in violation of treaty. Also, the current child welfare system has more children in care than at the height of the residential school system. The 60's scoop has never really ended and both the residential school system and the child welfare system in Canada are recognized as apparatuses of ongoing genocidal practices. Programs where the children of Indigenous families and communities are often forcibly removed from one racial group to another.

The addition of red paint on this statue of Queen Victoria at the height of her colonial reign when she entitled herself the Empress of Indian, although she had never set foot in that country, is a social intervention upon the glorification of sanitized history, in the service of the Canadian colonial project. This was/is an exercise in genocide. As it is described in both the current United Nations convention on genocide, as well as the original draft of the convention by Raphael Lemkin, which also included the cultural aspects of genocide.

These cultural aspects were integral to the removal of Indigenous children and their whitewashing exemplified in the statement "Kill the Indian Save the Child." Queen Victoria reigned over the empire that supported Sir John A MacDonald as the first prime minister of Canada where he stated officially that Canada was intended to be an Aryan country. Moreover, re-education may seem a kinder gentler way of wiping out original nations. It is actually one of the most potent apparatuses of control toward people targeted for genocide.

It is the Canadian education system, with the compliance of various churches,  that actually targeted Indigenous children for actual death and not simply mind control. Although I think we can all agree that the wiping of identity is a form of actual mind control and not just the hyperbole of conspiracy theorists. This kind of mind control predates and likely incorporated experiments,  such as the documented MK ultra experiments which were documented within Canada through many programs including Indian Hospitals and other institutions. 

Similar medical, food, and education experiments intruded upon Indigenous communities and exported their children and their most vulnerable members in need of health services and treaty rights into the hands of perpetrators, psychopaths, and child molesters.  The most famous being those of McGill University. While the McGill experiments were perpetrated against people with mental health concerns from many different groups. The residential school system propagated,  as a Victorian intervention on Indigenous peoples,  targetted Indigenous peoples for termination as distinct and original nations. 

This petition is intended to send a message to both the Corporation of the Municipality of the City of Kitchener, as well as the Region of Waterloo that many residents of Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract do not desire to see this paint removed this time and would rather see it remain along with actions that help educate as to the actual history and context as to why red paint would be splashed upon this public statue in the first place.  We also wish to have a complete report made public about how the decision was made to wash the statue the way it was done after the first paint splash. After a young male resident of Kitchener tried to warn the many police, as well as other mental health workers, that cleaning the statue the way they intended would actually damage it more than the paint. The cleaning of the statue seems to have been ideologically motivated rather than realistic, practical, enlightened or intelligent engagement with an artistic intervention upon colonial propaganda.