A Town Called Swastika: Canadian Hindus Continue Defend Their Dharmik Identity Against a Hateful Nazi Symbol

“To hell with Hitler; we had the Swastika first.”

This was the unflinching response from the citizens of a small mining town of Canada named Swastika, In 1935, against the backdrop of a world war, when the provincial government, in a gesture of wartime patriotism, tried to rename the town to “Winston,” after Winston Churchill. 

The people of Swastika, however, rejected the change. In a profound act of defiance, they tore down the imposed sign and reinstated their own. They added a second for good measure, ensuring their message was unmistakable: “To hell with Hitler, we came up with our name first.”

Today we see in their fight to protect their town’s identity, the affirmation of a deeper truth: that a sacred symbol of peace, used for millennia by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Indigenous peoples, should not and cannot be surrendered to a mistranslation. 

Today, the fight for the Swastika continues in legislatures and schools, on social media feeds and in the quiet anxieties of Canadian families. This national confusion was starkly illustrated in Puslinch, Ontario, where a private road named Swastika Trail became a microcosm of the larger debate. The name, dating from a time before the war, became the center of a years-long controversy that pitted neighbors against each other. After exhaustive litigation, the Ontario Divisional Court in 2019 upheld the township’s decision to keep the name. 

The case exposed a deep and painful wound in our public understanding: the persistent, harmful failure to distinguish between the Swastika and the Nazi Hakenkreuz. 

Collective Amnesia 

The West forgets that our own cityscapes and archives hold the antidote to this ignorance. The Swastika was once a common and positive motif woven into the very fabric of Canadian life, from brickwork on Montreal apartment buildings to the facade of the historic Traveller’s Hotel in Ladysmith, B.C., a reflection of a global vocabulary of peace and goodwill. 

In 1940, under the immense pressures of global war and the overwhelming weight of colonial power dynamics, several Indigenous nations in North America, including the Navajo, Apache, Hopi, and Pueblo, formally signed a resolution agreeing to discontinue the Swastika in their art and cultural expressions. A power imbalance meant that Indigenous communities bore the cost for a trauma they had not created or supported.

Today, movements like Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation are encouraging Indigenous peoples to reclaim what was lost, reviving languages, ceremonies, and sacred symbols once suppressed or abandoned under duress. This process rightly honors the resilience of communities whose traditions were nearly erased. For some Indigenous artists and cultural leaders, reintroducing the whirling log is a powerful act of decolonization and an assertion of cultural sovereignty. However, this reclamation is fraught with challenges and  criticism, even when displaying the swastika in traditional art and jewelry.

For Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, the situation is different. Despite centuries of colonization, invasions, and systemic pressures to conform to the “master’s taste,” the Swastika has remained woven into our prayers, festivals, temple walls, and even the names we give our children. It is a living, unbroken part of Dharmik identity.

By learning to distinguish the Hakenkreuz from the Swastika, we do not diminish the memory of the Holocaust. Instead, we sharpen our focus on the true source of evil.

The Cost of Confusion

This conflict spills into the daily lives of nearly a million Hindu Canadians, for whom this is not a theoretical debate but a source of constant anxiety. For them, the Swastika is a living, breathing symbol of well-being, prosperity, and divinity. Seeing it misunderstood creates a chilling effect, forcing a sacred part of their identity into the shadows. The examples form a painful pattern: in Quebec, public outrage erupts over a swastika-marked anchor misread as a Nazi relic; in Orillia, police are called for what turns out to be Hindu worship markers; in Richmond, B.C., toy pandas are pulled from shelves over innocent motifs. 

This confusion continues to cause harm. A woman named Swastika was banned from Uber in Australia, while a UK caretaker was dismissed over a Swastika tattoo. A Jewish  student in Washington, D.C. was suspended for displaying a Swastika he brought from a trip to India. In that single act of zero-tolerance ignorance, a symbol of peace was branded an emblem of hate, and a descendant of Holocaust victims was punished as if he was influenced by its perpetrators! The stigma is real, pervasive, and is quietly endured. 

International Precedents 

Canada need not invent a solution from scratch. A clear and compassionate roadmap has already been laid out in Australian states like Victoria and New South Wales, which have successfully banned Nazi symbols while explicitly protecting the Swastika for religious and cultural use. Their laws name the hate accurately: the Hakenkreuz. Closer home, Jewish entities such as B’nai Brith Canada and the Israeli Embassy, have publicly affirmed this vital distinction, proving that precision strengthens, not weakens, the fight against antisemitism. Jewish intellectuals like Steven Heller who once authored books deeming the Swastika as an “irredeemable symbol of evil” have evolved their position to advocate for distinguishing between Swastika and Hakenkreuz.

As Parliament pushes Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, many rightly see it as a well-intentioned measure to protect minority communities from rising hate. However, as the Alberta Council for Constitutional and Legal Advocacy (ALCCA) pointed out, the bill’s vague language and critical failure to distinguish between the Nazi Hakenkreuz and the sacred Swastika, poses a significant risk to free speech and freedom of religion.

Test for Inclusivity

True solidarity requires holding two truths simultaneously First, we must stand in unwavering solidarity with the Jewish community, acknowledging that the Nazi Hakenkreuz symbolizes the unparalleled trauma of the Holocaust. The pain it represents is non-negotiable, and the world’s commitment to “Never Again” must be absolute.

At the same time, solidarity also means standing with Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Indigenous communities to prevent the legacy of Nazism from co-opting and erasing their sacred histories. By learning to distinguish the Hakenkreuz from the Swastika, we do not diminish the memory of the Holocaust. Instead, we sharpen our focus on the true source of evil, refusing to grant Nazism the posthumous victory of defining and destroying a global symbol of peace and life. 

The choice before us is one between historical amnesia and moral clarity. New legislative measures must lead the future with accurate and nuanced language, versus cementing the mistakes of the past. We must stand for truth now, with the same conviction as the people of Swastika, Ontario, did then.

To hell with Hitler. The Swastika is Sacred. Ban the Hakenkreuz.

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Rishabh Sarswat is an Environmental Scientist and the President of CoHNA Canada, a grassroots-level advocacy organization representing the Hindu community of Canada.