Column: Reconciliation - Ancestors, Elders, First Nations and European Colonialists
By Charles Jeanes
“I know how the Greek and Romans viewed the Celtic people they absorbed into an empire, and how the English viewed the Irish, Scots, and Welsh Celts later in history, –“civilizers” do not intend to let the weaker folks exercise cultural freedom. The subjugated do what they must to have peace. Always, the imperial folk demand change from the subjugated people. …I have no patience with an assumption of guilt and shame by modern Canadians of European extraction, like my family, who accept that their ancestors were ‘moral cretins’ for their racialist and colonial attitudes. Further, I reject any suggestion that other cultures/ peoples/ civilizations would have conducted themselves with much higher moral standards if they had been in the historic role of Europeans after Columbus. It is entirely hypothetical.” — Charles Jeanes, in Arc of the Cognizant 230, July, 2026
Settlers have ancestors, and history: understand them.
It is a standard assertion, and unobjectionable, that the indigenous peoples of Canada have a deep cultural respect for their Elders, probably more than settlers show for our Elders, and natives possess more attachment to their history than colonists show for their historic roots.
[Note: I use the words “settlers” and “colonists” as certain people do; it refers to all Canadians who are descended from European stock, who were born in Canada because of colonialism /colonization from European lands after the 15th century. Immigrants from non-European lands, post-19th century, are not usually termed “settlers”. The word settler is meant neutrally. It is often heard with an element of judgment: settlers have shame imputed to them due to their origin. As is clear from my epigraph, I reject the imputation of shame to us. I am a settler.]
We settler folk also need to remind ourselves of our people’s history, and have some respect for elders among us who have stories to tell. We need to have positive regard for our own traditions, not only shame for what happened in the past to the indigenes of Canada. And we can exercise our empathy not only for natives but for our ancestors, who need to be understood, not condemned.
If Europeans were unable to accept that the natives were their equals, and if settlers were not educated in 21st century human-rights morality, that needs to be discussed, not taken as a given, not taken as proof of European moral defects.
Canada’s official attempts at settler/native reconciliation
The conversation in Canada about reconciliation between indigenous people living in Canada now, and the colonists who dispossessed the natives, is in a dismal state. To my eyes, it is a conversation between native leaderships and colonialist governments and churches, not between the peoples themselves.
But I am not pursuing the reasons for that. Many people are aware that it is a serious public issue and needs a lot of work. I urge readers to do some digging on this issue. [see for example https://aaronpete.substack.com/p/is-reconciliation-turning-canadians and https://www.firstpeopleslaw.com/public-education/indigenous-rights-in-one-minute/what-is-reconciliation The official publications of governments, churches, and indigenous leaderships, are less helpful than pieces by private individuals in my opinion. [This Arc is, I am sure readers know, not official.]
History isn’t just story: it’s knowledge demanding empathy
I feel a curiosity I intend to proselytize among Canadians of all origins: an interest in why colonization was “not fair” by today’s standards. Also I ask why settlers were able to justify colonialism’s injustices in their consciences.
The very large numbers of Europeans immigrating to Canada after the American Revolution, and after the wars with Napoleonic France, arrived here as uneducated people in any formal sense; they had not attended schools and what they knew of the indigenous peoples of Canada was far less than what they knew of their own countries of origin.
Were settlers racists? Maybe. If one is certain they were, one still should seek the cause of a culture steeped in such ideas, and how anyone could resist it.
One must know some basics about European culture and society during the century or more of massive settler immigration if one has the intent to bring empathetic understanding to what mind-set a colonist brought to relationships with the natives. If you don’t intend empathetic understanding, then I have nothing to say to you. Your mind is closed. Judge all you want, in ignorance.
I will keep the question of popular culture among settlers on a very generalized level, for even at that shallow level, it is clear European settlers were predisposed not to accept the natives as equals. They did not see them as inhuman either. They saw them as child-like, primitive, needing to “catch up.”
The many settlers of the Americas were not a monolith, but it is fair to say many of them were from the bottom half of European society, emigrating from hard lives in Europe – oppressed by their rulers and religions – to make a new life in the “new world.” It is not sufficient to sum them up as invaders “with no right to be here.” Right is not the measure of historical events. We must have as much empathy for the peasantry of Europe who needed to come as we are now discovering for the indigenous. History should instruct us in empathy.
Three ingredients of European mind: hierarchy; landownership; religion
Equality was absolutely missing from the normal order of European society; the Revolutions in the US and in France were a rupture in the norms of millennia of Europe’s history when the revolutionaries spoke about Equality [egalite ]. As everyone seems to know today, the American revolutionaries really did not mean to accept the equality of humans: white males, particularly those who owned property, were the humans for whom the Revolution was made.
1.) Europe was built on the principle of hierarchy, and this order originated far back in the earliest civilizations from which Europe evolved – Sumeria, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome, all accepted as truth that humans are not born equal, that some are better in quality at birth, and a pyramidal, layered structure of society was the normal order, sanctioned by gods and nature too.
2.) The better people of higher quality, believed implicitly and explicitly in their superiority; a general word for that “better blood” was Nobility. Subordinate layers believed in the system. Inequality seemed natural once humans were ordered by invented institutions of The State, Law, and aristocratic Property. The notion of landed property and private possession of land dates from the earliest agrarian era, totally infused with the idea of better people being landowners. And once there was property, there was The State to rule.
3.) Institutional religion was, from ancient time, an essential ingredient in the shape of an old-world “civilized” mind, and in fusion with the right of the noble person to be higher than the masses (who were “common” and owned no landed property).
The divine order was a hierarchy, with humans lower than gods; the deities desired humans to live in a parallel order, with power over all humans the natural right of gods, and humans being divided on a social ladder as well.
Power to rule was absolute authority, at the top of the human social ladder. Social prestige, political power, economic wealth – all were distributed among humans according to one’s rung on the ladder. Slaves were the bottom rung, owned, bought, sold, and killed, at the owner’s behest.
Privilege accrued to nobles, in law and culture. Nobles owned land, and were specialists in violence, law, and religion. Wealth was acquired by war, and only lords were warriors. Seizing land, plunder, and slaves, a warrior rose upward.
European Ruling Class and Ruled
I have neglected an obvious question: are the ideas, values, morals, beliefs, religion, law, and political ideas of Europeans the common inheritance of Europeans in all classes and do all Europeans share equally in making them?
No. The people at the top of society in the hierarchy of European civilization, bear much more responsibility for what common people take into their minds, for the broad culture of Europeans, than common people low on the ladder.
This is a basic truth. Rulers rule culture. Their ideas are dominant. The rulers bear more responsibility for past colonial racism than the mass of settlers do.
Pre-Columbian indigenes: more moral and just better than Europeans?
‘Contemporary accounts from both European and Indigenous sources reveal that the pre-Columbian world was a place where slavery, trafficking, sexual exploitation, oppression, and even genocide was commonplace prior to any European contact. …In the most famous work of “bottom up” history, A People’s History of the United States, author Howard Zinn unilaterally claims that the indigenous people held a higher moral standard than the European nations at the time. He declares that Columbus did not stumble into an “empty wilderness,” but rather a remarkably “more egalitarian” society where the relationship between men and women were “more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.”4 By all “bottom up” accounts, the New World was a paradise destroyed by Christopher Columbus and those that followed.’
Canadians who want truth about history are in a difficult spot, for history is part of culture war today. One must fear to tread where emotion runs so high.
European History: stories worth study alongside the colonial narrative
I described basic, general, propositions of what is real, natural, and morally right that were the shapers of the European mind. The Revolutions in the USA and France expressed challenges to these ideas, and did not swiftly succeed in overthrowing the dominance of the ancient concept of inequality’s divine origin.
The revolutionary ideas of rights, of equality and liberty, and cultural institutions of democracy, were inarguably at work corroding and eroding the ancient ideas of Europe’s social orders, and by the mid-20th century these new notions had triumphed in the West, which began to label itself both the Free, and the Developed, World (and later, the First World.)
Europe is also the culture that challenged its own racialist pseudo-science.
It is precisely at that point – in the mid-20th century, that the West discovered the moral wrongness of colonialism and colonization. The judgment upon our Past undermined historical narratives where Europeans celebrated their civilization and its achievements. Everyone except Europeans had permission to boast. By 1970, colonialism was cast out from the moral order; empires fell.
A personal agenda for the Settler and her/his knowledge of History
I am going to be developing some of the following themes in future Arcs.
1.) Our historians need to become more thoughtful about what to teach our culture beyond the colonial narrative, which at present is quite salient in our public school systems’ educational curriculum. Reconciliation in Canada does require, demand even, that settlers know more native history. But in the learning of indigenous stories, we cannot, and must not, lose other pasts.
2.) Indigenous educators need to meet settler educators half-way: the depiction of native cultures before European contact has got to confront the defects as well as the beauties of indigenous ways. Native societies were not utopias, nor was everything Europe brought to the western hemisphere a deficit. Indigenous folks had inequality and noble classes too. Subsistence living was not an Eden.
[ https://www.oerproject.com/OER-Materials/OER-Media/HTML-Articles/AP-World-History/Unit1/Aztec-and-Inca and https://www.cram.com/essay/Compare-And-Contrast-Aztec-And-Inca-Civilization/PC4YHSEHXDV ]
3.) The racism of Europeans is now superseded, outmoded, and condemned. But our 21st-century judgment is not in any way constructive in understanding the past. “Race” was an invented category, and the soi-disant scientists and intellectuals of Europe quite believed in their own nonsense for a century – making their nonsense the cultural norm of masses of uneducated folks and providing the rationale of government policy toward natives.
An exemplary story from Europe’s Past: Rome sets an enduring pattern
In future Arcs, when I take up questions of European colonialism, the Roman heritage of the settlers will have to be explained. Here let me just note in passing that the Roman empire was eventually erased from the west of Europe – it continued in the east – by barbarians, among whom were some Celtic folk like Picts, Scots, and Irish. But in a very important and subtle way, the Empire never died, because the Popes became the new emperors, and popes were key figures in the early colonization of the Americas by Spain.
Before closing today, I will offer up one brief piece of history from Europe’s past, using indigenous story-teller’s methods as a model. Here is a bit of the native story, with BC’s Haida as exemplars:
Haida society is divided into two moieties, Eagle and Raven. For a people living in the borderlands, yet also in the center, this division makes perfect sense. Eagle represents the center, regular, human society, the right-hand path. Raven represents the liminal, non-human society, the left-hand path. It is with Eagle that food is gathered, judgements are passed down, marriages happen. Raven is the realm of the myth in its constantly changing form, that step away from the human world that must happen for art and story to exist. It is because they are a people at the edge of the world that the Haida hold Raven in such high respect. They understand the need for that entry to the liminal spaces. Gods and humans alike are divided into Eagle and Raven sides; “it is part of the intrinsic structure of the world.”
It is an interesting coincidence – if anything is ‘coincidence’ in human minds, which Carl Jung doubted – that among the Celts, the Raven was totemic, and for Romans, the Eagle was an imperial symbol as seen on the Army’s many legionary standards. [https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/eagle-and-the-raven/]
The Haida see Raven as a trickster, and in European history, the trickster god par excellence was Loki, a deity of the far north. Roman rationality had no use for such a god and Roman mythology lacked such a divinity. [The complicated Greeks had Hermes, and his antithesis was Apollo, the rational god. https://autistocrates.substack.com/p/apollo-dionysus-hermes ]
A certain kind of mind: laying model foundations for European empire
Roman military advance against the Celtic peoples of north and west Europe was relentless from the third century onward, with Julius Caesar and the consul Marius foremost in Roman history as conquerors over the Celts.
https://www.historyhit.com/how-gaius-marius-saved-rome-from-the-cimbri/
https://www.historyhit.com/a-superman-makes-a-superpower-julius-caesars-conquest-of-gaul/ Rome was practical, using war methodically to annex Celtic land and assimilate Celtic culture to rational imperial needs. Notoriously, the Romans forcibly eradicated Gauls’ and Britons’ faith and druidic personnel.
If, as the citation above notes concerning Raven and Eagle symbolism among the Haida of BC, the raven is the realm of myth, and the eagle of solid daily life, then the equivalence of Celt/raven with Roman/eagle, is remarkable.
Rome is more than a city or empire for European consciousness; Rome became the paradigm case of success by war – defining success as dominance, victory, expansion, and enduring institutions of rule [law, engineering, politics]. This kind of mind never lost its power among Europeans.
But pre-Columbian indigenous peoples of North America — in the land north of the Aztec empire — were not imperial. Because they objected to empire or war on moral grounds? No. They would make empires when they were able.
Conclusions: historians’ work, settlers’ feelings, indigenes’ attitudes
This Arc has been intended to provoke some questions for Canadians, both indigenous and European-descended citizens. These questions are an historian’s attempt to advance truth and reconciliation of past with present.
I remain convinced that historians in Canada have a job to do among settler-Europeans to explain their history to themselves — without imputing guilt or shame. I am not encountering sufficient clarity on this from historians. Indigenous historians have their own job to do. I will not presume to lecture them on that, but trust they understand a responsibility to empathize.
It’s my purpose to say some things I wish more prominent voices were saying in our country about the very difficult situation of reconciling our past with our present. The past is gone and cannot be changed, and I insist on my point, that to judge our forefathers and foremothers by what we think is right and moral – and we might even say, “self-evidently true” — is wrong and totally unhelpful.
If a thing is self-evidently true, then judging someone for not understanding it is a charge of mental incompetence, willful incomprehension, and/or moral turpitude. I do not believe any of those negative judgments about our ancestors is true. European injustice to indigenous people demands better understanding than a blanket label of racist immorality or religious bigotry, which seems to be the current state of opinion on both sides.
Some readers might want to hear me declare that The Doctrine of Discovery was, and is, wrong — and must be denounced. OK. I denounce it. It is false. That doctrine is insupportable in reason. We need that Truth.
[https://www.oktlaw.com/ditching-doctrine-discovery-means-canadian-law/ ]
And I denounce Nazi racial ideas too, for good measure. But what does that do in practice to advance reconciliation? If the past is a weapon to brand settlers with guilt and shame in every generation, it is harmful.
To all who have an opinion on our past, whether one is indigenous or not, I say – “Stop trying to guilt settlers. Cease expecting shame from today’s settlers.”
We need to be very clear that settlers are not going to be motivated to reconcile with natives, to make restitution for injustice, from a misplaced motive of “racial guilt.”
I am not my forefathers. I am not guilty “for” them. I am genetically related to them but their acts are their own. For that reason, I am not ashamed of them, and I must judge their acts by the standards they had.
Ultimately, I have to believe they were just doing the best they knew how.
