Historical Plaques in the Inner Suburbs of Toronto: Commemorating Settler-Colonial Histories in a Multicultural Landscape

This paper examines how historical plaques in Toronto’s inner suburb of Scarborough contribute to the construction of a settler-colonial narrative, disavow and obscure ongoing colonial violence. Through an intertextual analysis of these plaques, I explore how they frame belonging and identity in a diverse, immigrant-rich suburban landscape. Plaques function as symbolic texts that invite global migrants into a color-blind settlerhood, offering a celebration of white settler perseverance and success while erasing the violent processes of Indigenous displacement and contemporary dynamics of racial marginalization. Drawing on anti-colonial cartographic methods and Black critical geographies, I analyze the physical locations of plaques, their texts, and their interactions with the built environment to uncover two dynamics: 1) how they perpetuate racialized narratives of differential inclusion; and 2) how they gesture to white settler anxieties.

My analysis highlights the ways in which plaques sanitize colonial histories, downplaying or ignoring the conquest and displacement of Indigenous peoples, and glossing over the labor exploitation and resistance of racialized communities. These commemorative markers serve to maintain a settler-colonial logic, embedding power structures into the landscape while offering a frail invitation to racialized newcomers, contingent on their assimilation into a white-centric national narrative of neoliberal multiculturalism. In doing so, these plaques reflect the underlying anxieties of the liberal settler state, which seeks to control the narratives of space, race, and history.

This research contributes to broader discussions about the role of public history in shaping collective memory and the politics of belonging in suburban spaces. By re-reading the plaques of Scarborough, I argue for a critical engagement with the ways public commemorations erase resistance, perpetuate colonial mythologies, and manage racial inclusion in contemporary multicultural cities.