Edmonton city council votes to rename Grandin LRT station, cover mural of bishop
Council unanimously vote to remove all city references to Grandin, citing residential schools legacy
Edmonton city council voted unanimously Monday to remove all city references to a bishop considered an architect of Canada's residential schools, including renaming the downtown LRT station that bears his name and covering a controversial mural of him there.
Vital Grandin, the first Roman Catholic bishop of St. Albert, was a proponent of residential schools who lobbied the government in the late 1800s to fund them.
More than 6,000 children died while forced to attend these government-sanctioned schools, which were designed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children as part of a cultural genocide. Many students were beaten, starved, tortured, and faced other forms of physical and sexual abuse.
Mayor Don Iveson, who introduced the motion, cited the recent discovery of the remains of 215 children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
"Obviously it has been a heart-wrenching time in our city for many people for the last week and a bit, since hearing the news of the find in Kamloops.
"But for others, there have been years of pain and years of questions about this particular historical figure who played a leading role as an architect of the residential school system," he said.
By Tuesday morning, the mural of Vital Grandin, located inside the Grandin LRT Station, was hidden under orange panels. The colour is a nod to Orange Shirt Day, which is observed every Sept. 30 to educate people about residential schools in Canada.
The city will ask its naming committee to work with a Grandin working circle, which includes Indigenous and francophone community leaders, to come forward with recommendations for a new name for the station that contributes to reconciliation.
The working circle will also provide input on what happens to a mural of Grandin that hangs in the station. In the meantime, it will be covered with orange. The name will also be removed from audio LRT announcements as soon as possible.
In a passionate speech, Coun. Aaron Paquette, who is Cree and Mėtis, said "this is a time when we decide who we are as a people and as a family and as a society.
"We decide who we elevate in the eyes of our children."
Paquette said he has heard community leaders talk about renaming movements as an attack on family values or a symptom of "cancel culture."
"But when you elevate people who are the architects of terror, of murder, of illness, of abuse, of genocide and all manner of monstrosity, you clearly say what your values are," he said.
The controversial mural in the LRT station, created in 1989 by artist Sylvie Nadeau, shows Grandin with a nun who is holding an Indigenous child. Nadeau said she was unaware of the painful legacy of residential schools at that time.
In 2014, she worked with Paquette to bookend the original piece with new paintings featuring strong Indigenous youth.
Jaimy Miller is the director of the city's Indigenous relations office and is a facilitator for the Grandin working circle.
"Rather than erasing history, we are actually learning history," she said. "We are actually learning about it together.
"And we are sharing the truth of the things that happened in this place to our communities."
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