Peter Shawn Taylor talks to Nigel Biggar, author of the recent book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning:
C2C Journal: Explain what you mean by a “moral reckoning” for colonialism – and how does that differ from the now-standard historians’ view that it was a shameful era characterized by exploitation, racism and violence?
Nigel Biggar: My first degree from Oxford is in history but professionally I am a theologian and ethicist. An ethicist is in the business of thinking about rights and wrongs and complicated moral issues. As I have previously written about the morality of war, I wanted to bring that ethical expertise to the very complicated historical phenomenon of empire.
And while my critics claim I am not an historian, they are not ethicists. My book is not a chronology. Each chapter deals with a different moral issue: motives, violence, racism, slavery, et cetera. Then I try to bring it to a conclusion with an overall view of the record of British imperialism, morally speaking. There are the evils of the British Empire, and there are its benefits as well.
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C2C: One of your chapters takes a close look at Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. Take us through an ethicist’s view of a topic that has come to be considered this country’s greatest sin.
NB: The motivation for establishing residential schools was basically humanitarian. That is, they were meant to enable pupils to survive in a world that was changing radically. Notwithstanding any abuses and deficiencies that may have come later, we have to deal with the fact that native Canadians were asking for these schools in the beginning. They lobbied for them in treaties. And this was because they recognized that for their people to survive, they needed to adapt. They wanted their young people to learn English or French and how to farm. They recognized that the old ways could not be sustained any longer.
A lot of people today have a hard time coming to grips with the fact that the past was a very different place. For most people, the 19th century was pretty damn brutal. When we consider the conditions in residential schools today, we are horrified. But what is horrifying are the conditions in which most people of that time had to live. It is true mortality among native kids in these schools was generally higher and conditions were poorer. Sexual abuse was also a problem, but mostly by fellow pupils. I don’t want to sweep any of that under the table. Maybe the Canadian government should have spent more money on residential schools. But to make that case you need to identify what the government of the day should have spent less on. And I haven’t seen that argument made anywhere.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has many lurid tales about kids being seized from their parents. No doubt that, after education became compulsory in the 1920s, some children were distressed at being taken away. But this too has to be understood in light of the fact that the idea all children must have a certain level of education was gaining tremendous traction in Canada, Britain and throughout Europe at this time. So compulsory education for native children must be considered in that regard. And what might people say today if the Government of Canada had refused to educate Indigenous children?
Again, I don’t want to downplay the defects of residential schools. But we need to provide context in order to understand these things in proportion. It must also be considered significant that since the early 1990s, Canadian media have declined to give voice to many natives who want to offer positive expressions of residential schools, as J.R. Miller points out in his authoritative history of the residential school system, Shingwauk’s Vision. According to Miller, the verdict for the schools must be given in “muted and equivocal terms”. The wholesale damnation of residential schools is overwrought and unfair.
