Quote:

On Sunday morning, Montrealers jogging or walking their dogs through Wilfrid Laurier Park found a startling surprise: The Queen Isabella memorial, a local landmark since the late 1950s, had been bloodied, paper-crowned, and re-branded. "Guilty of crimes against humanity," read a tag on her back.

Nearby, a makeshift plaque outlined these crimes, in French:
"Genocide of 80 million Latin American Indigenous people; annihilation of 1 million Taïnos; generalization of slavery in Spanish America and the systematic destruction of pre-colombian cultures; expulsion of 200,000 Spanish Jews along with forced conversion, rapes, and systematic massacres; ethnic cleansing of Grenada and the expulsion of its 300,000 Muslims; and, finally, the creation and application of the Spanish Inquisition."

Quick history lesson: Queen Isabella of Spain—a.k.a. Isabella I of Castile—is the woman who funded Christopher Columbus's exploration of the Americas. She was also a devout Catholic famous for her occasionally murderous intolerance of Jews and Moors.

The person behind the Carrie-ing of the statue (who wished to remain anonymous) spoke to VICE to explain their actions. Here's what they had to say.

VICE: Why this statue?
Artist: It's a very shocking statue to me.
In today's world, she's a criminal against humanity. She's known to be one of the most harsh and cruel rulers of Europe. She created, with her husband, the Spanish Inquisition, which was a very violent way of oppressing everyone who disagreed with the monarchs and the Church. She is known to have killed and expelled all the Jews of Spain in a very very very violent manner, and is also the one who sponsored Christopher Columbus to do his famous discoveries.

After that, everything that was done by Christopher Columbus was done in her name.
She had all the power and drove everything she did through her vision of her faith and was not a kind ruler. She has a violent history and a ton of blood on her hands and I find it extremely shocking in North America that in we would honor such a woman, especially given the values we're trying to promote as Canadians. When we see Justin Trudeau get his relationship with First Nations to better grounds, you have the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we have all these things that we're trying to do, understanding there's a very painful past, and then at the same time we have a bust of this bitch? Makes no sense to me.

It's adding insult to injury. We can't undo what is done, history is what it is, but we don't need to have this statue here—there are better women to honor. She's not a woman to honor, she's not one to represent women, she's not one to speak for our values.

One of my friends said something funny, he said it's almost like having a statue of Hitler in Israel. If I was native I would be so shocked to see her in this park.

I'd personally never even heard of this statue. Who put it up?
It was offered in 1958 by the Embassy of Spain to the City of Montreal. But honestly, thank you but no thank you Spain, this is not what we want to keep from you. It's like if history went a different way and Germany went to Poland and offered them a bust of Hitler.

Most people don't know who she is. People know Christopher Columbus a little bit but she's the one who sent [him], who paid for this whole thing. And she created the Spanish Inquisition.

That's why I did something big, because I wanted the attention to be, like, "Someone is really angry."

So what you do to the statue, exactly?
We added a bloody crown, covered it with blood. The plaque is a list of what I blame her for.

Because history is what it is, we can't change it, it is what it is, and it's not about discussing that.

But why do this, instead of say, talking about it?
Because nobody wants to hear this, they don't want to hear about those history things—it bothers them. Only now are people starting to understand that Christopher Columbus was not just a discoverer and adventurer, there was more than that and he had a huge responsibility when it comes to how [Indigenous peoples] were treated.

But I think we need to understand the whole system that was behind him, and that was her. And in order to create a proper society with proper values, we have to debunk certain ghosts, certain skeletons, and make sure that we don't honor them. Again, we can't change them, but we should honor another woman, not her.

http://www.vice.com/read/we-spoke-to-the-artist-who-doused-a-montreal-statue-in-blood

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Statement or defacement?

ReposadoXochipilli said:

if we forget history we are bound to repeat it.


nothing wrong with the truth.

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qman said:

ReposadoXochipilli said:

if we forget history we are bound to repeat it.


nothing wrong with the truth.

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There's nothing wrong with studying history, but that's not what's happening today, they are trying to demonize people.

People need to grow up and recognize we live in a different world today, stop whining about the past and learn from it.

There isn't one group of people that haven't suffered horrible atrocities in the past, some just keep using it as an excuse for their present day condition.

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qman said:

ReposadoXochipilli said:

if we forget history we are bound to repeat it.


nothing wrong with the truth.

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There's nothing wrong with studying history, but that's not what's happening today, they are trying to demonize people.

People need to grow up and recognize we live in a different world today, stop whining about the past and learn from it.

There isn't one group of people that haven't suffered horrible atrocities in the past, some just keep using it as an excuse for their present day condition.

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i feel it is more a balance to the revisionist versions of history being taught to the younger generations. i know in japan they are dealing with a lot of ww2 stuff being left out, in texas they want to skip over a lot of civil war stuff and teach creationism in public schools

i think it was in Haiti where they cut off the foot of christopher columbus's statue because he did that to everyone who didn't convert while raping, enslaving, and flat of committing genocide. 

i think we all know that was just a jab at black people and their calls for reparations (which i don't support) from you though.

qman said:

Again, there's nothing wrong with studying history, but turning it into a demonizing circus for present day political gain is pathetic.

Social progress has been made, constantly placing moral judgment on the past accomplishes very little in the present day.

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WScott said:

It is a difficult pill to swallow, that of the awareness of past conquest and exploration being driven by greed and carried out with inhumanity. The accounts (perhaps idealized) are generally of conquistadors being greeted by welcoming indigenous people. These qualities were not perceived as virtue but rather as weakness and were thus brutally exploited and destroyed. I am curious to know what world would have been possible if the tyrannical, disillusioned, self-exalted bigots of the European ruling class weren't in power. What conditions created the inception of the Christian-monarchy power trip that we are still feeling today?

Do dominating cultures like the one that ran through native cultures have a justification in the philosophy of natural selection and basic cultural survival or is that a weak argument that goes against basic humanity?

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lowbrow said:

Why does Canada have a statue of a a Spanish queen?

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