Late WAG director’s Order of the Buffalo Hunt revoked

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Premier Wab Kinew on Wednesday revoked one of the province’s highest honours, bestowed in 1982 to a prominent Manitoban whose support for the Nazis came to light in the past year.

Kinew struck the name of Ferdinand Eckhardt from the Order of the Buffalo Hunt but said he wants “the stain to remain” on the record.

“This is a person who, to speak very frankly, pledged an oath of allegiance to Hitler, and he has no place being honoured in the public sphere here in Manitoba,” Kinew said after an unrelated news conference. “Once our team here realized that he had been in receipt of this honour from the province of Manitoba, we took immediate action to revoke it.”

Eckhardt, a former Winnipeg Art Gallery director who died in 1995, is alleged to have been a Nazi supporter while living in Germany in the 1930s.

The Order of the Buffalo Hunt was the highest honour the province could bestow on a person until 1999, when the Order of Manitoba was established. Eckhardt was named to the honour for “outstanding service in the field of the arts.”

A leather-bound book kept in the legislative building catalogues all the people who’ve received the Order of the Buffalo Hunt. Eckhardt was named a provost of the order, one of the five levels of appointment. Kinew drew lines through Eckhardt’s name and signature and noted that he revoked the order and the date.

Kinew said he chose to cross out Eckhardt’s and leave a note instead of removing the entry entirely.

“It’s my hope that future generations of Manitobans will know that this person was not deserving of being honoured in public here in Manitoba,” Kinew said. “I hope they will also learn the history that, yes, there was a time where this person was allowed to come to Canada and was celebrated in the past, and then there was a time where a reckoning took place and that injustice was corrected.”

WAG-Qaumajuq has begun the process of removing Eckhardt’s name from its main entrance hall, website and other gallery materials because of the allegations.

The gallery said in a statement posted on its website last month that it is continuing to research the source of donations made by Eckhardt and the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation, and if any Nazi-confiscated art is discovered in the collection, “all efforts would be made to return it to the rightful owners or their heirs.”

Several spaces at Manitoba post-secondary institutions are named for Eckhardt’s late wife, the composer and musician Sophie Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté, whose music career flourished during her time in the province.

The University of Manitoba’s music library and Brandon University’s conservatory of music are named for her, as is a lecture hall and a library collection at the University of Winnipeg.

“UM is conducting a full review into the naming of the space and all other associations with the name to determine next steps,” a U of M spokesperson said in an emailed statement Tuesday. “In the meantime, any painting or plaque that bears the name will be covered until after the review.”

A spokesperson for the U of W said in an emailed statement Tuesday that although no campus facilities or programs are named after Eckhardt himself, the university takes “the recent information regarding Ferdinand Eckhardt very seriously” and is “reviewing” all names associated with the family.

“The lecture hall will soon be undergoing renovations, and its name will be reviewed as part of that process,” the spokesperson wrote.

Brandon University had no updates about the name of the conservatory of music, but a spokesperson told the Free Press in November that “this is concerning information to learn about Eckhardt’s background, and it will start some difficult conversations here.”

Both Eckhardt and Eckhardt-Gramatté received honorary doctorates from Brandon University, in 1990 and 1970, respectively.

“For Eckhardt’s honorary degree in particular, BU’s honorary degrees, including revocation processes, are governed by senate policy,” a Brandon University spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

“However, any reviews of past honorary degree recipients or deliberations about possible honorary revocation would not be public unless and until a decision to revoke were made.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca