Chapter 1: This chapter details the life of a monument to an unnamed Indigenous guide that, from 1924-1996 knelt at the base of a monument to French explorer Samuel de Champlain. Throughout the monument''s life, from 1924 to the present, it has been stolen, relocated, protested, defaced, and featured in photographic series by Indigenous photographer Jeff Thomas. These interactions all demonstrate and contribute to the monument''s ability to inspire different affects: affection for the logic of settler colonialism through expressions of colonial nostalgia, and anger and playfulness expressed through protest and artistic interventions. Chapter 2: This chapter is led by a guide: the upside-down astrolabe that was taken from the grips of the monument to Samuel de Champlain. The upside-down astrolabe guides readers to the many ways in which Indigeneity is represented as spectacle, and the ways in which the Ottawa''s built environment is haunted by spectres of colonial violence. This chapter proceeds in four parts. In the first offers an analysis of the spatialization of Nepean Point: the long-time home of the Champlain and unnamed Indigenous guide monuments. In part two, the astrolabe illuminates the complexities embedded within the many spectacles of Indigeneity in the capital, specifically monuments to Indigenous soldiers and totem poles.
In the third part the astrolabe scours the city searching for representations to Métis leader Louis Riel, finding instead commemorations to politicians that created the Indian Act and fought against Riel and Cree leader Poundmaker during the Riel Resistance. In the final section of this chapter, the astrolabe brings us to the Ottawa River and Chaudière Falls, a site of ongoing cultural and spiritual significance to Algonquin people. Here the chapter concludes by paying attention to how this space has been co-opted by settler colonial industrial uses, and used as a site of local and pan-Indigenous forms of spatial and political resistance. Chapter 3: This chapter offers a historical and spatial reading of one of Ottawa''s central public spaces and the current home of the National War Memorial: Confederation Square. This chapter argues that while Confederation Square presents a clear spatial narrative, that war commemoration is central to national belonging, this narrative was never inevitable or uncontested. The first section of this chapter focuses on the present configuration of Confederation Square as a very clear place image of war commemoration central to Ottawa''s spatialization. The second section, on the histories of the square, details which histories--labour histories, histories of everyday life in Confederation-era Ottawa-- have been buried in the creation of the current spatialization. The final section discusses several aborted proposals for the square and the two possible alternative spatializations of the square these proposals reveal: a more imperial vision for the square, and a multi-vocal square with more spatial flexibility.
Chapter 4: This chapter has as its guide a war remembrance poppy. The poppy takes us through the early history and establishment of remembrance rituals at Canada''s National War Memorial detailing how its material, virtual, and discursive components allow visitors to understand war as both a cultural trauma and as a national birth moment. Like the poppy--a memorial symbol that is poignant, evocative of blood, and has been established a type of commemorative orthodoxy-- the National War Memorial is both dynamic, open to contestations, yet seemingly fixed into a type of ritual rigidity. Certain design elements create a monument with broad opportunities for identification--through the twenty-two figures of citizen soldiers and military nurses-- yet, its design and early ritual practices create a site where memories of war-time racism within the Canadian military, war-time internment of Canadians by the Canadian state, histories of pacifist movements, the activism of war-time mothers are ignored. Chapter 5: In this chapter a fleck of mica from the granite arch of the National War Memorial draws us through the contemporary life of the National War Memorial. This chapter is framed around the contrast between "learning about" and "learning from" and suggests that various interactions at the monument--both deliberate, staged, sincere interventions like an illumination vigil project in 2008, and a number of acts of defacement-- produce the monument as a site through which people are compelled to learn from the monument about war, trauma, and the memories of others. In contrast, the 2006 addition of the Valiants Memorial--a series of nine busts and five statues of Canadian military figures-- offers opportunities to learn about Canadian military history. This chapter concludes with the mica of the monument bearing witness to baffling interactions with the monument by participants in the so-called Convoy that occupied downtown Ottawa in February, 2022.
Chapter 6: A life-size statue of Laura Secord is mobilized to become the tour guide of this chapter. Secord crosses Wellington Street and spends the chapter visiting the monuments on Parliament Hill. Secord encounters a limited range of womanhood in Ottawa''s most celebrated ceremonial space. Here women are represented either as angels--allegorical female figures in chitons standing in for ''memory'' or ''Confederation''-- or as versions of "Mrs. Slipshod" - first wave feminists that were largely mocked in their time, and are interpreted as alternatively "racist feminists" or "imperfect heroines" today. Yet, what Secord and readers realize on this tour is that, despite being unnamed, allegorical female figures offer their own threat to dominant, patriarchal assumptions about belonging in this nationally-significant space. Chapter 7: A protest placard draws our attention to two monuments: the Canadian Tribute to Human Rights, and Enclave: The Women''s Monument, both located on Ottawa''s central Elgin Street. In this chapter, the Canadian Tribute to Human Rights is read as a site that is highly accessible and broadly used by activists in Ottawa, usages that offer a clear shift from the proscribed set of uses allowed at the National War Memorial.
This monument is ambivalent in its design: it is possible to read the monument as part of a nationalist narrative; a central path is suggestive of a path for the nation, human rights positioned as central to Canada and Canadians. At the same time, the openness of the monument allows it to be a site to challenge dominant logic about Canada, settler colonialism, and liberalism. Down the street, Enclave: the Women''s Monument commemorates local victims of misogynist violence. The granite "markers" that surround a larger boulder name women murdered by men in Ottawa between 1992-2000. While women continue to be murdered by men in Ottawa, no markers have been placed since 2000, limiting the effectiveness of this monument. This monument is significantly limited by the city and broader society''s indifference towards violence against women. Despite these limitations, rituals, and everyday engagements with Enclave create a productive space where locals and activists remember and resist violence against women, and the symbolic ignoring of misogynist violence elsewhere in Ottawa''s symbolic landscape.