Is Scotland ready for truth and reconciliation on empire and slavery?

But this is not some tourist gig. The Indigenous Legacy Gathering is more than that. It feels like a statement of survival.

Many of those working the stalls and sitting outside the wigwams are wearing bright orange sweats with a simple slogan “every child matters”. That is because this event – the kind of get-together the showman Buffalo Bill appropriated as a “pow-wow” a century ago – is timed to coincide with Canada’s Day of Truth and Reconciliation.

This September 30 event – now a holiday of sorts – honours the native peoples of Canada: the first nations; the Inuit; and the Métis. It also remembers the horrors which European settlers visited on them. One crime feels freshest: residential schooling. Tens of thousands of children over more than a century were seized from their parents and put in to a boarding system designed to erase their culture and language. Mass graves have been found.

There is a reason the shirts worn for the day are orange. It tells the story of one girl, Phyllis Webstad, who in the early 1970s was taken to a mission school age six wearing a bright orange top her granny gave her. Staff stripped her. She never saw her shirt again.

The residential school system was first authorised by a Victorian imperialist named John A Macdonald. This man is at the heart of Canada’s story. But also ours. MacDonald was born here, in some now demolished rooms above what was to become Glasgow’s Mitre bar. He became his adopted country’s first prime minister, one, at least, of its very inventors.

Canada is rethinking Macdonald. So should we. But is Scotland ready for truth over our role in empire, never mind reconciliation? I am not sure.

Let us take slavery. A block north of the wigwams outside Toronto’s city hall runs Dundas Street. It is, for now, named after one of our rogues, Henry Dundas, the first Viscount Melville, the guy historians blame for delaying the abolition of Britain’s slave trade with the Americas.

The Canadian street – Torontonians put the stress on the first syllable rather than the last – is probably better known than the man and his crimes.

It is ridiculously long, 21km inside city limits, including chunks of prime retail drag and the city’s Chinatown. And it gives its name to Dundas-Yonge, the intersection lit up with giant flashing advertising screens which guide books claim is Canada’s answer to Times Square.

Toronto knew the connection to the Scot was a problem. City leaders during Black Lives Matter commissioned gold-standard peer-reviewed research which established Dundas’s role in kiboshing the slave trade ban. (Our hero said he favoured gradual abolition but, as separate Scottish peer-reviewed paper by Stephen Mullen of Glasgow University has confirmed, he also dragooned enslaved Africans in to the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars. So, well, he was not much of an abolitionist.)

Armed with hard history, Toronto decided Dundas was to lose his street. That was last year. It has not happened yet. This was no minor decision. Rebranding and resigning alone will cost about £4m. Then there are all the businesses who will need new stationary, and even names.

There are maybe another 60 streets in Toronto linked to dodgy white guys with a role in slavery or imperialism. Renaming them will cost millions more. Is this controversial? Somewhat.

A suburb has baulked at taking Dundas’s name off their stretch of the street. But, as Canada’s McLean’s magazine said last year, Toronto’s scrupulous decision-making has “been less of a controversy than a city-wide history lesson”.

Scotland went another way. Toronto, of course, has nothing to do with Dundas – he never even visited British North America. No, Melville is ours. And his name, and monument in central Edinburgh stays, but with controversial new signage. History has not gone down so easily here.

Peer-reviewed research, I fear, from Mr Mullen and Toronto has been drowned out in a barrage of op-eds and a sometimes weirdly covert campaign, including an editing war fought on the online crowd-sourced Wikipedia. Even some news stories present the case against Dundas as somehow more controversial than it actually is among specialist historians. It has been a strange little episode in our public life. Will we reflect on that? Nah, we never do.

Is Scotland ready for something like Canada’s – or South Africa’s – truth and reconciliation? We are still profiting from the crimes. Our victims are still suffering inter-generational trauma.

Canada’s indigenous people still have stories to tell. This week Canada’s national broadcaster CBC covered the news of how newborns were disproportionately taken away from native women. Not 200 years ago. Not 100. This century.

I guess we do not have anything quite as immediate as that to talk about in Scotland. But how we discuss our role in the Canadian genocide will matter. There are pointers from the other side of the Atlantic.

Eva Jewell, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, said it was time for all Canadians to reflect on the fact their country was born out of genocide. "I don't think it's sustainable for indigenous peoples to have to trot out our trauma year after year,” she told CBC. “And I don't think that it's OK for Canadians to just sit back and consume our hardships.”

The professor is first nation herself. Her university was named after residential school pioneer Egerton Ryerson till earlier this year.

See, Toronto keeps re-inventing itself. Hey, it even changed its name from York back in the day. Its ever-transforming skyline sometimes suggests a place ready to smash the old for the new. That is not usually our way. Our streets look set to keep their names. But we are not being asked to change our history; we are being asked to understand it.