As far as the colonial project went, the major practical result of the philosophical struggles between science and religion during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries was the partial replacement of theological dicta with a pseudoscientific justification of Eurocentric might and right that allowed Europeans to falsely biologise cultural, historical and economic differences. In the 19th-century European mind, most of the links of the medieval Christian ‘great chain of being’ were still very much intact. God and the angels might have been lopped off the top, but peoples of colour were left where they had always been, in an intermediate position between Europeans and the animal world.
In the settler states that emerged from European colonisation, governing powers attempted to create a sense of national security by positioning the emerging nation state – whether it was New Zealand, Australia, Canada or the US – as a single, unified people. The traditional motto that appears on the Great Seal of the United States, E pluribus unum (‘Out of many, one’), reflects the settler dream of a unified country. In the case of the US, this unification threatened to come apart during the Civil War in the early 1860s but was consolidated through the fantasy of ‘Manifest Destiny’ (the belief among settlers that, having reached the ‘promised land’, it was their duty to settle the continent from coast to coast). In reality, what ‘manifested’ was a long and bloody war with Indigenous populations for territory.
Following the physical slaughter, dispossession and subjugation of Indigenous populations around the world, survivors were to be assimilated. Education became the prime mover in these assimilative efforts with ‘school as the battlefield and teachers as frontline soldiers’, in the words of the Norwegian historian Einar Niemi. For Europeans in the late 1800s, notions of genetic determinism (stemming from Social Darwinism) began to be understood differently. A new idea was growing: though the ‘inferiority’ of Indigenous populations was probably ‘in the blood’, as scholars at the time believed, patterns of ‘savagery’ might be unlearned. Re-education was seen as the way to give younger generations their ‘best’ chance of living in the new society. You can almost hear the ‘progressive’ 19th-century Christian saying: Who knows, they might even become as good, civilised and enlightened – almost – as we white people.
Residential ‘schools’, like the one in Kamloops, relied on more than the informing ideas of Eurocentrism or Social Darwinism. They were also built on mechanisms of assimilative reform developed when new institutions – workhouses, reformatories and industrial schools – emerged in England (and other European nations) from the 1700s following the criminalisation of poverty and nomadism through the Poor Laws. The Canadian-born sociologist Erving Goffman considered them to be ‘total institutions’:
[A] social hybrid, part residential community, part formal organisation; therein lies its special sociological interest … In our society, they are the forcing houses for changing persons; each is a natural experiment on what can be done to the self.