{"id":363599,"date":"2018-06-01T00:00:41","date_gmt":"2018-05-31T23:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/historians-erase-sir-john-a-macdonalds-name-from-book-prize\/"},"modified":"2018-06-01T00:00:41","modified_gmt":"2018-05-31T23:00:41","slug":"historians-erase-sir-john-a-macdonalds-name-from-book-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/historians-erase-sir-john-a-macdonalds-name-from-book-prize\/","title":{"rendered":"Historians Erase Sir John A. Macdonald&#8217;s Name from Book Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"\">\n<p>The main association of Canadian history scholars has voted to remove Sir John A. Macdonald\u2019s name from a prestigious prize, joining a movement to stop celebrating the country\u2019s first prime minister as a hero.<\/p>\n<p>The decision to rename the 40-year-old prize the \u201cCHA prize for Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History\u201d came Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association in Regina. Members voted overwhelmingly in favour of the change.<\/p>\n<p>James Daschuk, a University of Regina historian and winner of the Sir John A. Macdonald prize in 2014, said the name change is a small gesture for the country\u2019s professional historians to make at a time of reconciliation with Indigenous people.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s often the argument that Macdonald did a lot of good things,\u201d Daschuk said in an interview. \u201cHe built the country. But he built the country on the backs of the Indigenous people.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Daschuk called Macdonald \u201ca polarizing figure,\u201d and in the months since association president Adele Perry of the University of Manitoba announced the proposed change, there has been animated debate. Writing in the latest issue of the association journal Intersections, Perry quoted some of the responses the association has received from members, whom she did not identify.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI don\u2019t think it is appropriate to name such an important historical prize after a person who has, at best, a mixed historical legacy, and at worst, was a key player in Indigenous cultural genocide in&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/redice.tv\/news\/historians-erase-sir-john-a-macdonalds-name-from-book-prize\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The main association of Canadian history scholars has voted to remove Sir John A. Macdonald\u2019s name from a prestigious prize, joining a movement to stop celebrating the country\u2019s first prime minister as a hero. The decision to rename the 40-year-old prize the \u201cCHA prize for Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History\u201d came Tuesday at the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2520,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-363599","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2520"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}