I watched The Secret Path yesterday, (1) a Canadian film on the violation of human rights at church-controlled schools in Canada. It was beyond sad.
It occurred to me that it might be useful to describe the sociocultural environment immediately prior to the founding of the residential schools, to place events there in a broader context.
It wasn’t only native Indians who were severely mistreated in the days before – and, as the residential schools illustrate, after – the Second World War. Others were also the target of racial discrimination.
I began my career as a Cultural Historian at the National Museum of Man in Ottawa. There I wrote a number of papers on Anglo-Saxon theories of racial superiority. (2) The residential schools were a late result of Anglo-Saxon racial-superiority doctrines that had been around for at least a century.
Narrow-minded, power-hungry people, after Darwin, took his theories and applied them to what they came to call “eugenics.” To them, that meant theories of, and methods of ensuring, racial dominance.
I imagine all people around the world interpreted the matter self-servingly. I only know the “Anglo-Saxon” version of the theory.
“Anglo-Saxons” deemed themselves superior because – in their case; each group has a different mythos – they were a rugged, Northern people. They came from “the true North strong and free,” as the Canadian anthem says to this day.
We Canadians were, like Scandinavians, the northernmost of the Northerners. We were surely strong.
Historians of my day called this the climatic theory of race development. In its broader political context, it’s called social Darwinism. It justifies snobbishness, superiority, state suppression, control, slavery, etc.
Northerners, the theory continued, had to survive a rugged winter, find food for their families, and take care of the demands of communal life in a difficult setting.
That was supposed to make them strong. Northerners were deemed to be straightforward, sometimes brutally honest, and fierce in competition, controversy, and conflict (think Vikings). And we today are allegedly the inheritors of that genetic make-up.
Southerners were seen as having only to pick a mango off a tree and go back to reclining. Therefore, they’d become weak and enervated. They were fit to be ruled but not to rule. Imperialism/colonialism was the result, which gave all of us in the West who benefitted from it much to be apologetic for.
Social Darwinism influenced relationships among nations. Only the strongest nations were expected to survive. This way of seeing things lent a veneer of respectability to the almost-incessant warfare Europe had been embroiled in for centuries.
But now European countries were grabbing as much non-European territory as they could, justified as bringing the white man’s enlightenment to lesser people. Elevating the “savages” was seen as “the white man’s burden.”
Social-Darwinist theory rippled down inside a society as well. It held that only the strongest people within a nation – the wealthiest and most influential – would survive. The weakest would go to the wall.
They were, as Henry Kissinger would later say, “useless eaters,” inferior. The kindest act was to let them die. They had no future in the superior race, which group in our days is now the 1%, the elite, and their deep state.
(Concluded in. Part 2, below.)
Footnotes
(1) Kathleen Mary Willis, “The Secret Path,” Nov. 26, 2017, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2017/11/26/the-secret-path/
(2) For example, S.M. Beckow, “Keeping British Columbia White”: Anti-Orientalism in the West, 1858-1949. Canada’s Visual History; series 1, v. 14. Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada with the National Museum of Man (National Museums of Canada), 1974 and “From the Watchtowers of Patriotism: Theories of Literary Growth in English Canada, 1864-1914,” Journal of Canadian Studies, IX, August 1974. The latter explores climatic theories of race development.