Time for more diversity in Citizens Hall of Fame: rabbi

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This article was published 22/06/2020 (1933 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Kliel Rose had a lot on his mind when he noticed something amiss with the Citizens Hall of Fame at Assiniboine Park earlier this month.

Rose is the rabbi at Congregation Etz Chayim, a synagogue in Winnipeg’s North End, and was strolling through the park mulling the topic of his next Shabbat service while his kids were at an orthodontist appointment. He stumbled upon the monument celebrating exceptional Winnipeggers and immediately noticed the faces of inductees had more in common than just being sculpted in bronze.

“I didn’t see one person of colour, I didn’t see anyone who I thought was Aboriginal… there were no names that seemed obviously Muslim either,” Rose says, adding that very few inductees were women. “I had to walk up and down that area three times to make sure.”

The Citizens Hall of Fame is located in the southeast corner of Assiniboine Park, near the future site of Canada’s Diversity Gardens. The installation includes the bronze busts of individuals who have “made outstanding contributions to the quality of life and development of the city,” according to the Winnipeg Realtors Association (WRA), which started the hall of fame in 1986. Of the 46 people who have been inducted to date, nine are women and only one person appears to be a member of a visible minority.

“If this represents some of the finest people who have been a part of our city, surely there has to be folks who come from minority communities that have really done some important things,” Rose says of the lack of diversity.

The rabbi says he’s become more aware of his own privilege as a white-appearing person since the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May and the global movement that followed, including the Justice 4 Black Lives rally at the Manitoba Legislature on June 5.

“I started to feel a sense of greater accountability for that as a community leader,” he says.

Rose shared his experience at the Citizens Hall of Fame with his congregation and is speaking publicly about his concerns in hopes of starting a conversation about who gets public recognition in Winnipeg and who does not.

“I’m not looking to be critical of the organization that deals with this,” he says. “It’s imperative for all people to recognize how in our societies we privilege certain people over others and if we really want to create this sense of equality and equanimity, how do we go about doing that?”

The Citizens Hall of Fame inducts one new member each year. Public nominations can be made by anyone and are forwarded to a selection committee assembled by the WRA, which then selects its top three choices with a winner determined by ballot voting.

“It’s really up to who nominates who, we don’t go out and specifically say it’s going to be one category or one type (of) person or one background,” says Peter Squire, vice-president, external relations and market intelligence of the WRA.

The nomination period is currently publicized in the Winnipeg Real Estate News and on social media.

“It’s not simply enough to wait for applications to come in,” says Ry Moran, director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. “It’s actually very important to intentionally reach out to build relationships with different communities to make sure… that all different communities are encouraged to submit names within these mechanisms of social memory.”

Moran says the lack of diversity isn’t unique to the Citizens Hall of Fame.

“You can walk into many of our public institutions and see a terrible underrepresentation of women, a significant underrepresentation or no representation of people of colour or Indigneous people,” he says. “Our society has a great deal of work to do, not only in overcoming historic discrimination, but present manifestations of that as well.”

Angela Failler — a professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Winnipeg and the Canada Research Chair in Culture and Public Memory — agrees the WRA should reflect on how it gathers nominations and who makes decisions about inductees.

“If you don’t create a different kind of invitation to the public you’re going to keep receiving the same kinds of nominations,” she says. “Given that it is on people’s radar it might be an opportunity for this group to revisit their process and probably most importantly, who is on their committee.”

How public figures are remembered is just as important as who is remembered, says Failler, pointing to James Ashdown’s biography in the Citizens Hall of Fame as an example. While Ashdown is credited for helping build the Greater Winnipeg Water District Aqueduct, the effect its construction has had on the community of Shoal Lake 40, which has been without clean drinking water for decades, is left out of his legacy.

“Commemorating isn’t such a simple or innocent act of looking back… in fact, it’s a really complex practice and it’s shaped by personal and political investments in telling a certain history of this place,” she says.

While Squire believes the hall of fame represents a diversity of contributions to the city, he says the association is open to changing its process.

“We’re in a world now where there’s a lot of questioning about a lot of things, including our past and what’s happened and how we can be more inclusive,” he says. “We’re certainly open to other participants on our selection committee as well as suggestions on what we can do.”

eva.wasney@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @evawasney