An attempt to erase collective guilt

By your own account in “Stolen land, ignored history,” (Citizen editorial, June 21), it’s not just Matthew Begbie whose accomplishments need “revisiting,” as the academic postcolonialists might put it. It’s also Charles Dickens because of his falsified portrayal of the savages encountered by Franklin’s sailors.

Obviously, Dickens’ books should be eliminated from libraries, bookstores and school curriculums in Canada just as Begbie’s statue was removed from the Vancouver headquarters of the BC Law Society.

Your title should be “Stolen land, stolen history.” The removal of Begbie’s statue, like that of Sir John A.’s statue from the campus of Wilfrid Laurier University last year, is an attempt at erasure. It’s not an attempt to rewrite history; it’s an attempt to erase collective guilt.

Canadians are not stupid, and one thing they know about history is that Sir John A. was neither more nor less genocidal and racist than the average Canadian then and now, just slightly drunker. He got a statue because politicians traditionally get them and because he was successful. Begbie too was doing his job, rather well in most cases, as you show.

The Law Society has to face the fact that they are still doing what Begbie did, applying the law rather than their own sense of justice to a people who were resisting and are still resisting colonization.

It wasn’t Begbie’s job to weigh politics into his judgment, just as it’s not a judge’s job today when considering, say, an act of sabotage on a pipeline site. And obviously Begbie was thinking about the injustice of it all, working for change. The statue should remain there to honour him.

Nelson Mandella, despite the torture he endured and the loss of so many years in prison, realized that there has to be a statute of limitations for – and a legislated plan about – how to proceed with reparation and justice.

It can’t be left to supercilious postcolonialists, politicians coopting convenient causes and people who like to get attention by showing off their refined moral superiority.

We have a way of sorting out the stolen land: treaties.

As for the collective guilt, remembering history is a way of turning it to good, rather a sort of Biblical curse, passed on from generation to generation, justifying no end of reprisals and counter-reprisals.

Perhaps that’s what the “Eurocentric” historians were thinking.

John Harris Prince George