Canada’s bizarre LGBT monument designed to ‘glow like a disco ball’

The new $24 million monument in Ottawa cleverly attempts to link the LGBT movement's roots with Indigenous history.  Surrounding the new Thunderhead monument at the centre of the Canadian capital is an interpretive wall offering visitors and passersby the official history “of 2SLGBTQ+ people in Canada.” 

As the Globe and Mail solemnly put it: “Every night, on the banks of the Ottawa River, a thundercloud will glow like a disco ball.” The 30-foot-tall monument is a cylinder with a cloud-shaped carveout, the interior of which is covered with thousands of mirrored tiles. The disco-ball effect, of course, is a nod to gay nightclubs.

The cloud inside the cylinder, one activist said, symbolises the LGBT movement’s triumph. “We didn’t stay in the mould,” Martine Roy said. “We blew it up.” The monument and surrounding park were constructed with $24 million allocated to the LGBT Purge Fund after a class action lawsuit against the Canadian government launched by LGBT-identifying Canadians.

According to architect Liz Wreford, the monument’s thundercloud concept symbolized renewal and destruction. “It’s the perfect element that can hold two things at once,” she said. “So in the end it wasn’t a cloud — it was the absence of a cloud that is part of the monument.”

The monument itself represents a bizarre fusion of Indigenous spirituality and LGBT ideology. The park was designed by Public City, a Winnipeg architecture firm, and features a stage, a medicinal plant garden, and “a healing circle with a firepit for ceremony, surrounded by seating made of Manitoban Tyndall Stone, a mottled limestone full of fossilized life,” with the firepit being “ringed with 13 decorative stones, collected from each province and territory by Indigenous elders, Indigiqueer and Two-Spirit people.”

As I noted previously, the phrase “Two-Spirit” is not a historical one; it was first used in 1990 after it was adopted at the Third Annual Inter-Tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference held near Winnipeg after a Cree elder allegedly proposed it after it came to her in a dream. It is now used retroactively as a term embedded deep within Canada’s pre-colonial past despite being just 25 years old.

The term “Indigiqueer” surfaced even more recently. Plains Cree artist TJ Cuthand coined it in 2004 as the title of a program at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Cuthand, who identifies as transgender, explained that the new term was necessary “because some LGBTQ Indigenous people don’t feel as comfortable with the two-spirit title because it implies some dual gender stuff, which some people just don’t feel describes their identity.”

But the LGBT movement — which pushes an agenda of cultural colonialism in developing countries around the world — utilises these terms to give their political agenda the appearance of “anti-colonialism,” borrowing from the near-sacred status granted to Indigenous history, mythology, and spirituality to give their own movement the appearance of ancient origins. It is a clever strategy, and now this version of events is a permanent fixture in Canada’s capital.

As the Globe and Mail noted, “A winding path leads to an interpretive wall detailing that history, including the persecution of two-spirit people at the hands of the government.” 

The wall, according to the LGBT Purge Fund, tells the story of “the colonial roots of homophobia, biphobia and transphobia and the cruelty of the Canadian government during the LGBT Purge” and emphasises “discrimination against gender and sexual minorities on this unceded land.”

The monument is “guided by principles of inclusion, indigeneity, visibility and timelessness.” In other words, the LGBT movement says: We were here first.