There’s no case for the UK to pay reparations

Large cheques aren’t going to alter the past, which is always more contentious than activists like to think

Prince Charles has flown into a storm in Canada on his royal tour, amid a row about the past treatment of the country’s indigenous inhabitants. It is not simply a question of colonial conquest by the French and the British. Much more recent abuses of indigenous children within residential schools, many of them Catholic, have attracted apologies from Pope Francis downwards. Within hours of the Prince’s arrival, there were demands that reparations be paid.

Many Canadians will feel ashamed of what happened in these schools. It can hardly be denied that the motive for setting them up in Canada, as in Australia and New Zealand, was to “civilise” the children, weaning them away from tribal customs, including their religious rituals, native language and ancient crafts. Insofar as these have been preserved, it has been as tourist attractions, stripped of the meaning they possessed for past generations.

The most shocking allegation is that the deaths of children were covered up. Patches of land adjacent to the schools have been scanned. Human remains have been identified. On one site, 751 burials have been mapped out. Activists described them as “mass graves”.

Here, however, the controversy takes on a new character. Further study of that site has shown that there seem to be plenty of adults buried there; the area was used as a general cemetery. Next to another of the schools, the identification of a bumpy field as a child cemetery depended not on excavation but on a visual survey of the surface, identifying depressions as graves. Archaeologists can do much better than this, even if there are reservations about exhuming people who died in recent decades.

The point is not to downplay the horrors of the past. It is that we have become too trusting of activists who demand that we always accept the worst possible interpretation of our history. If apologies are to be offered, it should be on the basis of historical fact rather than supposition – especially when there are calls for financial compensation as well.

In any case, are reparations really an appropriate apology? Consider how Germany attempted to make amends for the Holocaust. Families whose property was seized or bought at a laughable price by the Nazi regime fully deserved compensation. But that still leaves unease about the word used to describe the process: Wiedergutmachung, “making good again”. One cannot use money to “make good again” – what will ever make good the annihilation of families or the systematic and sadistic cruelty of the concentration camps? The real value of what the German government offered was its willingness to face the sheer awfulness of what its leaders had done between 1933 and 1945.

German atrocities were indisputable. Witnesses are still alive; the documentation is enormous. Pushing further back in time, all this becomes far more complex. If there are doubts about the Canadian residential schools, how many more are there over other events in previous centuries?

It is one thing to blame Portugal, Great Britain and other European countries for their involvement in the slave trade, but the role of African rulers in capturing and selling the slaves cannot be ignored. Looking at the Irish Potato Famine, we find arguments that the British government acted callously and arguments that it tried to alleviate the problem.

The facts also get mixed up. In Florida, the Seminole people have blocked a building project after the 2,000-year-old bones of native Americans were found there. Yet their own ancestors only arrived in the area around 1800, while the Tequesta, whose bones these may be, were expelled or enslaved, and died out. Similar cases have arisen in Australia, where the movement of tribes around the continent has been ignored when bones have surfaced.

Underlying all this is the question of Western guilt, which for critical race theorists is passed ineradicably from generation to generation of white Europeans and Americans. It ignores the bloodthirsty history of the Aztecs and Incas, the ghastly history of the mass castration of enslaved boys in Eurasia, not to mention children sent down British mines, mass burnings by the Inquisition – the catalogue of horrors goes on and on. Historians should continue to expound all this as accurately as possible; but paying out large cheques will not alter the past.