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The statue of Queen Victoria was covered in red paint and its base marked with tiny red hand prints. It was then toppled to the ground by a rope around its neck as crowds chanted “bring her down”. The head was later cut off and thrown in the Winnipeg river.
The adjacent statue of Queen Elizabeth was toppled to the ground face down and left there.
The head of a statue of Queen Victoria is fished from a river in Winnipeg after it was cut off during demonstrations. Credit:The Canadian Press
Arlen Dumas, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, was at a separate event at the time but said he was shocked at what happened.
``I personally wouldn’t have participated in that,” he said, though he added, “Mind you, it has been a very triggering time over the past few weeks.”
``It’s unfortunate that they chose to express themselves the way that they did. But it’s actually a symbol of the fact that there is a lot of hurt and that there’s a lot of frustration and anger with just how things have happened,” Dumas said.
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Premier Brian Pallister called the vandalism “a major setback for those who are working toward real reconciliation”.
“Those who commit acts of violence will be pursued actively in the courts. All leaders in Manitoba must strongly condemn acts of violence and vandalism, and at the same time, we must come together to meaningfully advance reconciliation,” he said in a statement.
In other incidents on Canada Day, a statue of Queen Victoria in Kitchener, Ontario, was doused in red paint.
In Victoria, British Columbia, a statue of Captain James Cook was dismantled and thrown into the harbour. The statue was replaced with a wooden cutout of a red dress — a symbol representing murdered and missing Indigenous women — and its base was smeared with red hand-prints.
A statue of Captain Cook was removed from its base and replaced with a red dress to symbolise the murder of indigenous women. Credit:AP
In Newfoundland and Labrador, two prominent buildings and a statue dedicated to the local police force were vandalised with bright red paint.
Earlier this week, a First Nations group in British Columbia said it had used ground-penetrating radar to find 182 human remains in unmarked graves at a site close to a former residential near Cranbrook, 845 kilometres east of Vancouver.
A sign is taped to a street lamp in front of a memorial to the victims of Canada’s residential school system. Credit:The Canadian Press
That followed reports of similar massive findings at two other such church-run schools, one of more than 600 unmarked graves in southern Saskatchewan and another of 215 bodies in British Columbia.
AP
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