Column:
By Charles Jeanes
Introduction: we are in history, history is in us
“you and your history won’t rule me.” – The Who, Slip Kid
History cannot be ignored… but then again, it is easy enough never to ask about the Past, and to remain ignorant of it.
No person alive now, or ever, was without roots. The mind they call their own can only have been formed by virtue of the person living in a culture – a culture whose past is long, deep, and breathed in from the moment of birth. History.
Yes, regardless of what you know, you are shaped by what has gone before no matter your ignorance of the ingredients in your formula.
I am not going so far as Pete Townsend in the pop song I quote above. But I do grasp one point a lot of people without interest in the past do not seem to take in – it matters to know some history. It will not rule you if you know about it, but the less you know, the more it is pulling your strings unbeknownst to you.
Canada’s natives and the people who dispossessed them
I am developing a theme I began in the most-recent Arc, on relations between indigenous and Euro-Canadian peoples in this land we call home. It is of high significance, to me as an historian, that my people – colonial settlers whose ancestry lies in Europe – know some history of the encounter between their ancestors and the natives. We need a history that is not politically-motivated for a particular perspective. Reconciliation in Canada is tainted by politics.
Indigenous peoples have valid reasons to understand that great injustice was done when this land was appropriated by European states. Settler descendants have good reason to reject guilt and shame for that injustice; we should know that our role now is to make amends or offer atonement, to correct manifest catastrophic consequences for natives of the injustice perpetrated by European rule here.
But – an important qualifier – we who are descendants of settlers can still hold our own history in some regard. As natives are proud of their past and their cultural achievements, so too can we – whose ancestors settled here before our birth – feel cultural pride in historic European accomplishments unconnected to colonization. It is no mean past. It is not inferior to indigenous history either.
(In particular, Canadians can justifiably feel Canada exhibits virtues the US lacks; we’ve built society differently. Future Arcs will develop this argument.)
Before narrowing my focus to Canada, I will present my observations about the general historical trajectory – the arc of history – in the Old World’s long past.
The Deep Past of European commoners: hierarchy
To begin my argument: a great amount of harm was done to natives in the past; its perpetrators were the ruling class of Europe and its powers.
The same ruling classes perpetrated injustice and harm on their own ruled peoples – disempowered, impoverished Europeans who settled here. A ruling class has for long bent European society.
From the earliest records in a written script, from Egypt and Sumeria in the fourth millennium BCE, history informs us that humans have ordered society in stratified hierarchy. “People aren’t equal,” our Rulers say; they are better.
The shape of society is triangular, and the top is where the very few live, the ruling sovereigns and noble lords. Descending layers increase in population, each lower layer owning less of the material goods of life for their disposal. Slaves, bought-and-sold humans, are the lowest, and not the most numerous; the layer just above slaves, the peasantry, is largest, and the peasant must obey the lords, priests, and any other authority placed over them. Equality has been superseded by classes. Class society is predicated on unequal wealth.
Ancient, classical, and medieval Europe never reversed its habits of social stratification. Human freedom was severely limited at the bottom. This was observed by New World indigenous critics of Europe, and they articulated their critique. Natives enjoyed liberties that the bottom 80% of Europeans did not.
https://www.journal18.org/meta/the-indigenous-critique-by-robbie-richardson/
Class society: layered, stratified, unequal
Primitive, pre-historic peoples, those who did not record history with scripts, have often been much more egalitarian. Neolithic folk in Europe were slow to develop inequality; the key factor is hypothesized to be landed property.
[see https://research.wsu.edu/news/new-study-reveals-wealth-inequalitys-deep-roots-in-human-prehistory
and https://blog.mynl.com/posts/notes/2025-08-21-The-Agrarian-Revolution-and-Roots-of-Inequality/ ]
Indigenous folks of the New World north of the Azteca in Mexico, were – in the main – people without private property in land. Pre-agrarian society retained an egalitarian ethos, not a class of noble lords; this is a “non-State social order”.
Europeans were living in social hierarchies in all parts of the continent late in prehistory – by the time conquering Romans encountered them and “history” began. Class society, law, landed property, and agriculture, are intertwined. Lords monopolized owning land, being priests, and making law. When Roman armies subjugated these prehistoric peoples, annexed states with long history like Greeks and Egyptians, the Roman State – termed the res publica by elite Romans, ‘the public thing’ – the result was an empire ruling all Mediterranean lands, plus northern areas like Gaul and Britannia , Germania and Dacia. An imperial State lasting centuries. An empire shaping future Western minds.
The take-away point is, hierarchy and inequality are hallmarks of historical European societies and the State was a feature in a majority of cultures long before Europeans encountered the New World indigenous. For the cultural consciousness of Europe, the Roman Empire was an enduring paradigm for politics, for the State — for measuring glory, success and high achievement.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/arts-and-culture/why-rome-continues-to-underpin-western-culture-and-politics-an-extract-from-mary-beards-book-spqr/#:~:text=Rome%20still%20helps%20to%20define,low%20comedy.%20After%20two%20thousand
Indigenes and Settlers at the mercy of Identical Rulers
This point is straightforward and, I hope, inarguable. Europe’s class society was transplanted to the New World. Rulers in Europe set themselves up to rule both their own people from the peasant and working classes, and rule natives.
To divide and rule the settlers and natives was simplicity itself – keep the lower classes of European colonists in the same state of subjection as they lived in Europe, and immerse them in a culture that denigrated aboriginal ways.
It is not fair to hold the lower-class settler accountable for manifold bad ideas, perverse morality, ignorant chauvinism, they believed. The ruling class taught them.
But please know this: in the New World among agrarian people, inequality was known too. [e.g. “…some people were more powerful than others, having fancier grave goods and the power of life and death over commoners. Human sacrifice has happened throughout time all over the world. Cahokia shows us that human sacrifice is complicated. ]
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/cahokia-pre-columbian-american-city
I want to emphasize again that natives understood just how awful European social class stratification was, as noted in the previous section on hierarchy.
https://lithub.com/the-european-myth-of-indigenous-savages/
End part one. Watch this space for part two in about two weeks.
