The Pleasure of the Crown. Dara Culhane
The initial conditions for theorizing and reflecting on property rights in America are of a European people who arrive on a continent of roughly five hundred established Aboriginal nations and systems of property…and who do not wish to become citizens of the existing Aboriginal nations, but wish to establish their own nations and systems of property in accordance with their European institutions and traditions.
—Philosopher James Tully, 1993, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts.
Before the arrival of Europeans, approximately 500 Aboriginal nations existed in North America. These nations were diverse in modes of living, language, religion, social organization and relationships to land and resources. Therefore, the first rational option available to early European explorers and settlers was to behave as guests or immigrants, to recognize the sovereignty of already existing Indigenous nations, to live by their laws and to seek acceptance by their people.
But many deeply ingrained assumptions and widely held beliefs limit and constrain the possibility of contemporary people immersed in the dominant western culture imagining this as a practical or viable choice. European theories arising from psychoanalytic traditions have argued that fear and hostility are instinctive human responses to encounters with cultural “others.” However, the weight of contemporary knowledge belies the proposition that such a reaction is either universal or natural. Oral historians and linguists have investigated the diverse ways in which non-Europeans have identified people other than themselves, including Europeans, at first contact. They found a variety of impressions and responses varying from adoration to repulsion, fear to amusement, hospitality to hostility and curiosity to indifference. Europeans have been represented in Indigenous thought by analogies as diverse as Gods, Devils, clowns and monkeys.11
European images of Indigenous peoples have varied across time and space as well. Early visitors to “new” worlds, like explorers and traders, frequently expressed both interest in and admiration for the peoples they met on their travels. Later visitors wishing to claim these lands as their own, such as colonial governors and settlers, portrayed Indigenous peoples as wild savages. Most influential in western thinking, however, have been various theories about social and cultural evolution that postulate a hierarchical series of stages through which it is claimed all human societies must proceed. “Primitive” societies, in which people live from hunting, fishing and gathering, represent the “first stage” in this scheme; while “civilized” industrial societies exemplify the “highest stage” of human development. In the field of jurisprudence, Sir Henry S. Maine’s 1861 volume, Ancient Law, sets out a conjectural history of the evolution of law from “primitive custom” that “mingled up religious, civil, and merely moral ordinances without any regard to differences in their essential character;” to “civilized law,” which “severs law from morality, and religion from law.” The purported independence of law from the social conditions of its emergence, and law’s professed autonomy from the society in which it is practiced, were evidence, for Maine, that western law “belongs very distinctly to the later stages of mental progress.”12
Another common idea that arises from the same social evolutionary premises is the analogy drawn between the stages of individual psychological development hypothesized by western developmental psychology, and the social organization of non-western societies. In this framework, adults are to children as Europeans are to Aboriginals. Within historical analyses, contemporary Indigenous societies, imagined as being “frozen” at “stages of development” believed to be “antecedent” to the present, are seen as resembling historical European ones. Dutch anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls this notion that “they” are now, as “we” were then, a “denial of coevalness” that he identifies as the most enduring obstacle to achieving mutually respectful dialogue between Europeans and “others.”13 Fabian uses the term “coeval” to describe how colonized and colonizer share both geographic space (land); and temporal space (time). Social inequality between peoples of different cultures, Fabian argues, is shaped by the historically-specific political and economic relationships between them. It does not emerge because they live at different hypothesized stages of evolutionary development. Power, not time, separates people of different cultures.
These social evolutionary premises support the common belief that, during the eighteenth century, when they came into substantial and sustained contact with each other, Europeans and members of British Columbia First Nations were so radically different from each other in terms of material living conditions, social organization, political structures, religion, intellectual development and individual freedom, that for British settlers to have integrated into the Aboriginal societies would have necessitated them stepping “backwards,” both in historical time and in human psychological development. These beliefs are buttressed by images in paintings like those that decorate the Rotunda in the British Columbia Parliament buildings: luxuriously dressed and elaborately wigged British ship’s captains benevolently bestowing gifts on scantily-clad and bewildered-looking Aboriginals.
But, consider what we know of the real conditions of life for the majority of people in eighteenth-century Britain: feudalism—dominated by the nobility, and the clergy living off the avails of peasant labour through tithing and maintaining power by force and threats of eternal spiritual damnation—was being replaced by industrial capitalism as the real source of power in the nation state. Peasants, driven from the land, began to flock to the newly-emerging urban centres in search of subsistence from industry, rather than from hunting, gathering and agriculture. Accounts of factory conditions during early industrialization, and of the everyday life of ordinary citizens in cities like London, Manchester and Birmingham describe desperate urban poverty, squalor, alcoholism, prostitution and deprivation. It would be at least two centuries before women would be recognized as persons in British, and later Canadian, law, and we have yet to achieve mass literacy.
Compare this to what we now know of life during the same historical epoch among, for example, the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en peoples. Their eighteenth-century societies were characterized by a hierarchical social structure dominated by chiefs and shamans; divisions of labour based in clan, gender and generation; an economy dependent on the accumulation and unequal redistribution of wealth derived from abundant natural resources among different categories of persons; spiritual beliefs linking ancestors, the living and the land that prescribed reciprocal obligations; social life, including marriage, divorce and inheritance controlled by elders. An oral, rather than written, tradition of recording history and administering law prevailed. That European and Indigenous cultures differed significantly is obvious. But was one “more advanced” or “less developed” than the other? This is not at all obvious. Answers are complicated first by the problem of criteria. As we know, technological complexity is not necessarily correlated with spiritual satisfaction or emotional well-being. Second, different categories of persons in both societies would likely evaluate their own cultures differently, depending on their position within it. Establishing universal criteria upon which to base such evaluations is an extraordinarily complex process, if it is to represent any authentic consensus. And, the question may be asked if universal criteria of what constitutes a “good society” are possible, or desirable.
What challenges the vision of unbridgeable cultural difference that has been codified in western law and in the popular imagination most fundamentally, however, are the actions of ordinary individuals in the everyday life of early colonial societies throughout history and around the world. Soldiers and sailors, who were often young unemployed men, were either pressed into service on trading and naval ships involuntarily (“shanghaied”), or signed on out of desperation in the absence of alternatives. Conditions at sea and in the armies were brutal, and troops frequently deserted their masters and escaped to live with the Aboriginal people they encountered on their voyages. Mutinies were common.14 Historical accounts, and popular culture, often ignore the fact that, for Britain and other colonial powers, there were two problematic populations that had to be managed and controlled in order for imperial designs to be realized: Indigenous peoples, and colonial troops and settlers. Most telling, perhaps, are the histories of fragments of non-European populations, like Hawaiians,15 and former African slaves who were fleeing the United States of America.16 Members of these groups, having no access to the protection of imperial power, frequently