No, the length of time doesn't matter. The guilt is appropriate due to the violence and inhumanity in the way the displacement was carried out (even if that was the norm at the time), and the continued oppression and erasure that occured.
I agree with you on this, at least. The length of time doesn't matter.
I would argue that the only sensible reason for a feeling of guilt is actus reus. I didn't participate in colonisation, I don't feel guilty that my ancestors did, and I'm yet to hear a clear argument for why I should.
It does seem logical to feel guilty if you benefit from the displacement of existing societies to their disadvantage, are aware of that benefit, and don't work to correct it.
I'd also suspect that the violence and inhumanity inflicted during colonisation are, as far as the "how guilty should descendents of colonisers feel" calculation goes, irrelevant. The thing that many of us are personally responsible for and should feel guilty about is shutting our eyes, and not doing enough to correct the inequity that still exists today.
This is what I meant by the "continued oppression", so we agree with each other. We agree with each other.
While the way 1700s British acted would not meet modern British standards, it's a hell of a lot closer to them than Maori behavior and values of the same time period. In the mid-1800s some Maori invaded the Chatham Islands and enslaved, killed, raped, and ate the population (called the Moriori). Here's a quote from Wikipedia:
A Moriori survivor recalled : "[The Māori] commenced to kill us like sheep.... [We] were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed – men, women and children indiscriminately." A Māori conqueror explained, "We took possession... in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people. Not one escaped....."[38] The invaders ritually killed some 10% of the population, a ritual that included staking out women and children on the beach and leaving them to die in great pain over several days.[34]
If you're interested in learning more you could read some ethnographies of modern-day (or close to modern day) primitive peoples. The Yanomamö work thinks a lot about violence because people (the antrhopology community) couldn't even believe how violent they are. The other way to go about it is to think about the development of morality in humans (like moral universals). One theory goes small gods who are fallible and many --> big gods who always watch and are few --> the kind of normative morality software you have installed right now, which doesn't depend on gods.
Anthropology is divided in two: "biological" anthropologists take evolution and biology seriously and see themselves as scientists, while other types (most notably "cultural") are much within the tradition of postmodernism, and don't aspire to do science (or only pretend to). These second kind aren't concerned much with communicating objective truth (because they don't believe in that); their politics informs their work to a great extent on average.
I don't know which kind Salmond is since I don't know her work, but it's entirely possible to collect all first-hand accounts from pre-$SOME_YEAR and search them for references to how children were treated. Then, assign each one a score based on some measure of how well the children were treated (note: "how well" is in direct reference to the moral system that modern Westerners have, and Salmon takes the same stance without mention in the article). Look at your data. This'll tell you how the people writing thought of it. You should probably also model year of writing and what that means for the writer's baseline, at minimum.
Either way it's interesting. Thanks for sharing!
That's only part of the picture, though. Some bad things happened, but as a consequence, some arguably much worse outcomes were avoided.
The sole reason that slavery and cannibalism do not exist in New Zealand today is precisely because it was colonized. The British outlawed those things (and brought Christianity, which also had an impact).
The "displacement" wasn't extensive, either. The link says the "population may have reached 100,000" prior to colonization, in a nation of 100,000 square miles. Much of it, particularly in the south, was never occupied or controlled, the terrain was neither hospitable nor accessible until colonization brought roads. Now that area is highly productive and exports from there pay for hospitals and schools.
It's also basically unfathomable that if the British hadn't colonized NZ, it would have been totally left to its own devices to develop. Another, less friendly colonizer may have come. What if it were, say, Belgium?
It gets a little tiresome to hear one side of the argument for decades on end, while people fear ostracism for even thinking of mentioning the other half of history.
Yes there were tragedies, and they went on for a very long time. Land sold by people who did not own it, children forbidden to speak their own language, fisheries robbed, an infinite list of terrible things. However, a great number of other terrible things ended. Why can we only discuss half of that?
Should it not infuriate one and all for some conman to proclaim to the media a "Maori worldview". Nobody ever comes on TV and asserts that all Pakeha share a worldview or that they should. Politicians and pundits put words in the mouths of others and lie and romanticize a past that never existed while literacy declines and moldy homes grow more expensive.
Rawiri Waititi (of The Maori Party, which is shamefully named considering most Maori vote Labour) was on twitter the day a Maori man died talking about how that man was wrong for not subscribing to Waititi's particular imagination of what a "Maori foreign policy" is and engaging in Russian apologia. (see https://www.facebook.com/RawiriWaititiMP/posts/i-hope-this-i... )
We preach the tikanga and the kaupapa and pretend that all Maori must necessarily believe those are the right way, a historical absolute that has gone unchanged since time immemorial and was corrupted only when the British arrived. Yet we abandoned slavery, cannibalism, feudal hierarchy, and reserving a large portion of education for men only.
We're the first nation to give women the right to vote, and yet it's questioned whether it's right for the prime minister to be allowed to speak on the marae simply because she's a woman, but hey, the tikanga, the evil Europeans, if only we'd stuck with slavery everything would all be better...
We're losing the unity we used to have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Manners_Street and it seems like we're slow-motion diving headlong into an unequal system of laws and government in the name of atoning for the sins of those long dead, while not mentioning all the halted evil that democracy and the rule of law stopped.
Our dishonesty will probably damn us to iniquity.
I'll be fine, but I worry about the rest of the people here and the opportunities they'll lose by forsaking modernity.