- by Phil Henderson

The inner harbour of "Victoria" was beautified a little bit last night with the removal of a (apparently very cheaply made) statue of James Cook.

Similar community leadership was shown in Winnipeg, where statues glorifying the British monarchy were also removed. In response to the removal of statues in Winnipeg I've seen social media posts from prominent public figures asserting that such actions "set back the chance of moving the dialogue on changing the bad relationship we have, forward."

I suspect this is a take we'll be hearing a lot. But it needs to be asked, ?ℎ??ℎ relationships are posts like these actually pointing towards and are those relationships really worth being of central concern to communities struggling for liberatory, decolonized, and anti-imperialist futures?

Taking the case of the statue removal in "Victoria," I think we should consider the real legacy of James Cook--after all, this is what reactionaries claim is being erased when we remove statues. Cook's life-works extended white, and specifically British, imperialism throughout the Pacific world. Truly, his work in the name of scientific 'discovery' charted the precise lines along which empire would slither throughout the world. Cook's voyages link the Indigenous peoples of what is presently known as the Pacific Northwest with the peoples of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Hawai'i, Indonesia, Malayasia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, and South Africa in what the anti-imperialist scholar Lisa Lowe calls the "intimacy of four continents."

In many ways, struggle against imperialism in the guise of 'scientific discovery' remains as alive in the Pacific world today as it was in 1779, as the Kanaka Maoli continue to render an enormous service to the world by combating the ongoing legacy of Cook in their struggle to Protect Mauna Kea.

While Cook's voyages are a material and metaphorical "transit of empire" (see Jodi Byrd's book of the same name), the profound internationalism of anti-imperialist struggle is also on full display in this moment. From Victoria to Winnipeg yesterday, from Black Lives Matter - Toronto's painting of colonial statues and the people of Bristol sending the slaver-trader Edward Colston to a watery grave last summer, to the recent topplings of Egerton Ryerson and of Christopher Columbus in Barranquilla days ago, the upsurge of anti-colonial eruptions evidences the continued global transits of resistance and of extensive communities of care grounded in common cause.

And so, far from a move that is likely to "set back" any kind of dialogue, in the toppling of Cook and other statues that glorify the perpetrators of genocide, empire, and apartheid what I see is the honouring, sustaining, and (re)building of internationalist struggle for liberation of the masses of humanity and of the earth itself. Rather than put the anxieties of those who defend the symbols and institutions of empire at the center of this conversation, we ought to recognize both that those anxieties emerge as the result of having achieved at least a relative degree of comfort within the imperial world and--more importantly--that such voices are at present more interested in preserving that comfort than in collaborating in the project of building something far better than what we have.

Clearly, though, a much vaster world of other, deeper relationships already exists and is far more deserving of our time and attention. Because it's through those relationships that we'll build the collective strength to topple the bigger edifices of imperialism, white supremacism, cisheteropatriarchy, ableism, and capitalism.

In the words of radical historian Robin DG Kelley: "Decolonization is not an event, it's a process and it's not complete anywhere... We have imagined a new world, the point is to change it. And that means the end of America and Canada." There are far more friends in this struggle than some would like us to believe.