Saskatoon woman says McPherson Avenue should be renamed

A Saskatoon woman wants the name of a city street changed.

Stephanie Danyluk says McPherson Avenue is named after a man who is responsible for colonial policy decisions that negatively impacted local Métis people.

Sir David MacPherson served as the federal minister of interior during the 1880s. He retired from that post in 1885, charged with incapacity in dealing with the Northwest Rebellion, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The street is called McPherson while the person it's named after is called MacPherson, but city councillors say they're confident it's the same person and the street name was misspelled.

Danyluk, a historical researcher and co-host of the whYXE podcast, said MacPherson's policy decisions also included ignoring Métis claims to lands in the area in favour of granting lands to the Temperance Colonization Society.

She said MacPherson's story initially came to her attention in the context of the local area plan for the Exhibition neighbourhood. The street runs between Saskatchewan Crescent and Ruth Street. 

"It talked about how he basically made space for the colonial settlers in the area, but it didn't mention some of the lesser known history ... in relation to the Métis land rights," Danyluk told CBC's Saskatoon Morning.

She said MacPherson's legacy is not "reflective of our current city values," and that public commemorative spaces should be more inclusive "and make space for other histories that maybe haven't been recognized."

Councillors 'very receptive' to discussion

Danyluk wrote Saskatoon city council a letter, which was transferred to the naming committee. She said the committee was "very receptive" to the conversation. 

Councillor Mairin Loewen said she expects the city will receive more of these requests and that the discussion about McPherson Avenue is a positive step.

"I think we should have conversations about whether or not the street names, asset names that have been given in the past are still reflective of the values that we uphold as a community," Loewen said.

Loewen said there is no process for navigating these types of requests, so she made a motion at the naming committee to find out how other cities are handling these requests and to devise some options for managing them.

'Replacing a … street name isn't erasing history'

Danyluk said she has received a couple of emails in support of changing the street name, including one from a person who lives on McPherson Avenue.

She said she hasn't been following the public debate about McPherson Avenue closely, but is aware of the global movement of recommemorating spaces and concerns about "cancel culture and ... erasing history," she said.

"Replacing a place name, a street name, isn't erasing history," she said. "The history is there. But what it does is it makes some space for including additional histories, histories that have been overwritten or erased."

She's not currently advocating for changing the names of other streets in the city. She said she was interested in MacPherson's story because it's a lesser known history.

"We're all pretty aware of, like, John A. MacDonald's legacy by this point," she said.