“Yet but scantily peopled”: Teaching decolonising histories by re-reading children’s textbooks in imperial peripheries and in the metropole

This post is by Pia Russell, who was was awarded the ‘Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellowship’ by the Research Institute for Collections in 2023.

This scholarship occurs in the homelands of the WSÁNEĆ and LƏK̓ʷƏŊƏN peoples on whose lands the University of Victoria now stands and whose relationships with this land remain today.

Constructing settler colonial origin stories

In 2020 a petition signed by more than 268,000 people, asked the United Kingdom (UK) government to make the teaching of Britain’s colonial past more prevalent in the compulsory primary and secondary curriculum.  In doing so, signatories hoped that children in UK schools would learn how: “Colonial powers must own up to their pasts…and how this contributes to the unfair systems of power at the foundation of our modern society.”[1]  The following year, the UK’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities released a report which included among its 24 recommendations the teaching of an inclusive curriculum regarding the making of modern Britain.[2]  While these initiatives are not without challenges, they do demonstrate two important aspects.  First, that so often schools are ground-zero for debates about collective historical consciousness.  And second, that the UK is beginning a process of self-reflection about their colonial legacies which can feel overdue to many in former colonies.  While there is much public and scholarly discussion of our so-called postcolonial world, those living today in the peripheries of former empires continue to experience imperial realities as very much a part of our present.

In British Columbia (BC), Canada’s most western province, the Ministry of Education implemented an entirely revised elementary and secondary (K-12) curriculum in 2016.  A leading influence of this redesign was a response to calls for increased Indigenisation and decolonisation, largely influenced by the 2015 findings of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) Commission of Canada.  The TRC was a federal government inquiry which sought to document the painful histories of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system and provide survivors of this system with opportunities to share their experiences.  Among the TRC’s 94 Calls to Action, many relate specifically to education.  For example, Call 62.i asks governments at all levels to: “Make age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students.”[3]  Today, BC’s K-12 curriculum policy includes Indigenous ways of knowing and being at every grade level and in every subject.[4]  While considerable work still remains ahead, it is nonetheless a start towards decolonising the often fractured relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples living within the context of the Canadian state.  Whether it is controversy about curriculum, statues, the commonwealth, or museum collections, the process of how decolonisation is discussed in the heart of former empires—the imperial metropole—feels rather different than how it is increasingly discussed in its former colonies.

One powerful way for learners and educators to think about colonial legacy, is to understand how the narratives of our past often inform our present.  Reflecting on our historical consciousness asks that we think critically about how it is we came to know our past.[5]  By critically re-reading settler colonial origin stories we might begin to trace a line of how power was, and continues to be, expressed in the lives of people on the colonised ground.  In Canada, for most non-Indigenous people, a leading source of such stories has been school textbooks.  As the Education Librarian in Special Collections at the University of Victoria (UVic) Libraries, I curate BC’s historical textbooks (BCHT) collection.  It is a growing print and digital archive of our province’s textbook history.  In Canada, education is structured provincially so over the past 153 years of BC’s existence, a defined corpus of textbooks has been required reading for hundreds of thousands of public school pupils.  What stories might these textbooks have told children over time about the place they called home?  To be clear, we cannot always assume that just because children read a textbook that somehow meant they adhered to its ideology—what book historians often refer to as the receptivity fallacy[6]—but we can imagine that their interactions with the book’s narratives introduced them to commonly held attitudes portrayed in the textbooks.  So, what were the early textbook stories that British Columbian’s told their future citizenry about colonization and empire?  And, how might these compare to the textbook stories told in the heart of empire, the British metropole?

Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellowship

In July 2023, I had the remarkable opportunity to ask these internationally comparative scholarly questions about colonisation and empire in children’s school books when I was the 2023 Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellow at the Research Institute for Collections (RIC) at University College London’s Faculty of Education and Society.  Here I had the opportunity to review dozens of UK textbooks that were contemporaneous to the ones I curate in BC.  Currently my focus is on the first fifty years of BC’s textbook history.  During the fellowship, I also developed wonderful professional collaborations with counterpart colleagues such as the exceptional Dr. Nazlin Bhimani, Research Support and Special Collections Librarian.  Together, we were able to share best practices for the unique technical aspects of the rare books we curate, and also comparatively discuss the social contexts our collections exist within.  Serving as a Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellow initiated a completely new and innovative line of inquiry within my existing program of scholarship.  My long-term scholarship has focused on decolonising, anti-racist, and feminist analyses of these unique historical sources.  Most often I partner with and take guidance from Indigenous colleagues who work locally.  This is essential, truth-telling work that seeks to establish more respectful cross-cultural research partnerships and personal connections.  Through a Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellowship, I was able to include a dynamic international dimension to my historical textbook scholarship and this provided a beautiful complement to my already established local relationships closer to home.  When engaging in decolonising work in such deeply colonised lands as British Columbia (a problematic colonial name, to be sure), such complementarity not only strengthens the scholarly work but also takes seriously the responsibility of being a historian working in this place.  When reflecting on the histories, presents, and futurities of the Indigenous homelands where I reside, understanding the centuries old power structures of the British empire that instigated this colonisation through actions such as map making, land surveying, and textbook provisioning is essential.  Through my Fellowship at the UCL’s RIC, I strengthened my understanding of critical imperial studies alongside my engagement with local Indigenous ways of knowing and being.  As a result from dialog with colleagues such as Dr. Bhimani and while examining rare books in the RIC, I am now better able to fulfill my responsibilities as a historian who hopes to raise up previously suppressed voices and bring their histories in from the literal and figurative margins of both BC’s and Britain’s historical school textbooks.  Our vocational partnerships show much future promise and I look forward to exciting public history work together in the years to come.

Side-by-side: comparing historical textbook narratives

One specific outcome of my time as a Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellow at the Research Institute for Collections (RIC) was the development of a teaching resource that utilises these textbooks as historical objects of truth-telling instigation.  The resource seeks to embrace a pedagogical approach that is comprehensively decolonising.  By drawing upon both the UK’s Key Stage Three History curriculum alongside BC’s Grade 9 Social Studies curriculum, we now have an internationally cohesive, curriculum-aligned, learning tool.[7]  This resource guides teachers and students through critical re-readings of historical textbooks to reveal that narratives of empire did not tell the whole story and had considerable consequences lasting up until today.

By studying two contemporaneous textbook case studies, one from the UK and one from BC, we can see how notions of imperialism, settler colonialism, and nation-building were experienced both similarly and differently in disparate parts of empire.  If we consider Newbigin’s 1914 The British Empire Beyond the Seas: An Introduction to World Geography and Lawson and Young’s 1913 A History and Geography of British Columbia for use in Public Schools we observe striking comparisons.[8]  The lesson plan provides for a more thorough analysis, but brief highlights here show recurring themes of land dispossession, Indigenous removal, racialization, and settler colonial mass migration. Lawson and Young write in the preface of their A History and Geography of British Columbia for use in Public Schools that “from a wilderness, this province has become the home of civilized men, who are preparing the country for a much larger population…how the explorers came here…followed by the fur-traders…in their turn by the miners, lumbermen, manufacturers, fishermen, and merchants who now occupy the settled parts of the province.”  Here we see the establishment of a narrative of a province conceptualizing itself to have been constructed from a terra nullius, namely a nobody’s land or a territory without a previous occupant.  We know this now to be entirely false.  Countless Indigenous communities thrived, then and now, in the lands of what is often called British Columbia.  Also clear from this passage is now BC is described as a highly masculine space often characterized by resource extraction and manual labour.  Interestingly the authors of both books are early female textbook writers in an authorial field typically dominated by men—never mind that neither Lawson, Young nor Newbigin had the right to vote in BC or Britain when they wrote their influential books.

In Newbigin’s The British Empire Beyond the Seas: An Introduction to World Geography, she devotes an entire 14-page chapter to British Columbia.  It follows a chapter on the Falkland Islands and precedes a chapter on ‘Canada east of the rockies’ which is an immensely large space known more commonly then and now as the rest of Canada.  Here BC is portrayed as an unspoiled utopia, an imagined Eden of sorts, where a new Britain is superimposed on the homelands of hundreds of Indigenous communities and who have lived here since time immemorial.  In the textbook, BC is described as “practically in the latitude of Great Britain,” being forested as Scotland and England once were, its size being “three times as large as the British Isles” and having “a climate resembling that of Britain.”[9]  What is striking for a critical reader in modern day BC is how a textbook author writing from the imperial centre describes BC solely in relation to Britain’s own geographical traits.  It is as though the space that becomes BC sprung from nothing and existed purely to serve Britain.  According to this excerpt, BC is teleological or somehow an inevitable result of Britain’s physical, political, and social character.  British Columbia is relentlessly conceptualised as relativistic to Britain.  Subsequent pages outline how BC’s geographical borders are consistent to the cartography and surveying in North America where borders were not determined “as a result of a prolonged process of adjustment by the people on the spot, but by statesmen who had never seen the actual ground.”[10]  While it is often absurdly true that BC’s borders were configured by distant men in far off centres of power such as Ottawa and London, it is wholly untrue that the people who lived there before White British people came to stay did not determine their space through “prolonged adjustment.”

Perhaps most glaring to modern readers is the brief reference to Indigenous people and their qualities as being from a former time: “British Columbia is as yet but scantily peopled, though the population is increasing rapidly.  The native Indians were fishers and hunters: they are not numerous and show little desire to become cultivators.”[11]  By 1913 when the book was written, it is true that BC’s non-Indigenous population had increased dramatically.  Since its entrance into the Dominion of Canada in 1871 the population had grown at an astonishing rate by over 12 times.[12]  At the same time, the British empire was at its geographic and demographic reach of greatest extent.  However, it is entirely untrue that the “native Indians” showed little desire to cultivate.  Today we know that countless local Indigenous foodways such as the WSÁNEĆ SX̱OLE (reef net fisheries) and LƏK̓ʷƏŊƏN kwetlal (camas) bulb harvesting, were highly cultivated for many centuries; the active resurgence of these foodways is a leading priority for these communities today.[13]  Furthermore, Indigenous people continued to fish and hunt as best they could despite their rights to access their own homelands and waters being constantly reduced through frequent amendments to the federal government’s Indian Act.  This Act became law in 1876 and is still in force today as the Government of Canada’s leading mechanism for controlling many aspects of daily life for the nearly two million Indigenous people in Canada and who comprise approximately 5% of the national population.

This lesson plan will soon be available for K-12 learners and teachers in both BC and the UK.  And, those educators seeking critical, integrated support, will be able to participate in remote, video-based interpretation through synchronous and asynchronous technologies.  It is hoped that this internationally comparative lesson plan will initiate long-term, decolonising conversations in both BC and Britain as both regions further reflect on critical imperial studies and the experiences of colonial legacies in both the metropole and the peripheries of the former British empire

Conclusion

A comparative re-reading of the historical textbook narratives colonial societies taught to their youngest citizens a century ago can tell contemporary readers much about how the power structures still in place today were initially formed.  While settler colonialism was experienced rather differently between the imperial metropole and colonial periphery, many narrative similarities were constructed and persisted for decades to come.  How Britishness implanted itself into British Columbia was achieved through such well known political mechanisms such as land dispossession and Indigenous racialisation.  However, through this comparative critical analysis of two contemporaneous textbooks, it is clear that a settler colonial ethos was also enculturated into the mental landscapes of society’s youngest readers.  While the formalised structures of the British empire have diminished, its legacies endure in the places we call home still.  Critically re-reading historical textbooks provides one tangible way to begin decolonising historical settler colonial origin stories.

About

Pia Russell was the 2023 Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellow at the Research Institute for Collections (RIC) at University College London’s Faculty of Education and Society.  At her home institution, the University of Victoria, Pia is a special collections librarian, doctoral candidate, history instructor, and curator of the British Columbia Historical Textbooks (BCHT) collection.  Pia is the Primary Investigator of a Social Science and Humanities Research Council’s (SSHRC) Insight funded grant titled Unsettling History: An Interactive Digital Library of British Columbia’s Historical Textbooks, 1871-1921.  This research team won the 2022 British Columbia Library Association (BCLA) Champion of Intellectual Freedom Award.  Born and raised in xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory, she is grateful to now live and work in the homelands of lək̓ʷəŋən and SENĆOŦEN-speaking communities.  Her ancestry is Danish, Scottish, and English and she uses she/her pronouns.  Further information about her work is found on ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3887-1728

Contact

Pia Russell   BA MISt MEd MA  (she/her) Librarian—Special Collections Doctoral Candidate—Department of History University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3887-1728 Department of History profile UVic Libraries profile

 

NOTES

[1] UK Government and Parliament.  Closed petition “Teach Britain’s colonial past as part of the UK’s compulsory curriculum.”  Petition debated in parliament on June 28^th, 2021.  https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/324092

[2] UK Government. Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.  Independent report of Summary of recommendations, April 28, 2021. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities/summary-of-recommendations

[3] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015. Education for Reconciliation, Call 62.i. https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf

[4] British Columbia, Ministry of Education, 2024. BC Curriculum https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/

[5] Seixas, Peter. “What Is Historical Consciousness?” In To the Past: History Education, Public Memory, and Citizenship in Canada, R. Sandwell (Ed.), p. 78. University of Toronto Press, 2006.

[6] Rose, Jonathan. “Rereading The English Common Reader: A preface to the history of audience.” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 1: 47-70.

[7] UK Department for Education.  History programmes of study key stage 3, National curriculum in England.  September 2013.  British Columbia Ministry of Education.  BC’s Curriculum, Social Studies.   https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c66d740f0b626628abcdd/SECONDARY_national_curriculum_-_History.pdf .  https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/social-studies

[8] Newbigin, Marion. The British Empire Beyond the Seas: An Introduction to World Geography (1914). G. Bell & Sons, Ltd.: London.  https://archive.org/details/britishempirebey00newbrich/mode/2up

Lawson, Maria and Rosalind Watson Young. A History and Geography of British Columbia for use in Public Schools (1913). Gage & Co.,: Toronto. https://archive.org/details/AHistoryAndGeographyOfBC/mode/2up

[9] Newbigin, Marion. The British Empire Beyond the Seas: An Introduction to World Geography (1914). G. Bell & Sons, Ltd.: London, p. 53.  https://archive.org/details/britishempirebey00newbrich/mode/2up

[10] Newbigin, Marion. The British Empire Beyond the Seas: An Introduction to World Geography (1914). G. Bell & Sons, Ltd.: London, p. 54.  https://archive.org/details/britishempirebey00newbrich/mode/2up

[11] Newbigin, Marion. The British Empire Beyond the Seas: An Introduction to World Geography (1914). G. Bell & Sons, Ltd.: London, p. 64.  https://archive.org/details/britishempirebey00newbrich/mode/2up

[12] Belshaw, John Douglas. Becoming British Columbia: A Population History. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009.

[13] Claxton, Nicholas Xemtoltw. To Fish as Formerly: A Resurgent Journey Back to the Saanich Reef Net Fishery, 2015. https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/items/4fcd2d11-a424-459c-8cd5-e58a731eefcd.  Corntassel, Jeff Ganohalidoh. “An Interview with Cheryl Bryce: Decolonizing Place for Indigenous Food and Land Sovereignty.” Borders in Globalization Review 5, no. 1 (2024): 39–45. doi:10.18357/bigr51202421805.