John W Foster: Let us hope that cancel culture does not now target the Planter

Yet as an east Belfastman I never thought the term ‘planter’ derogatory.

Back in 1975 I published an essay called ‘The Landscape of Planter and Gael in the Poetry of John Hewitt and John Montague,’ reprinted in my book Colonial Consequences (1991 and now Kindle).

My essay was inspired by the tour the two poets made around Northern Ireland in the late 1960s on the eve of the Troubles, sponsored by the Arts Council. I don’t recall any objections to the tour’s title, The Planter and the Gael, and at that time ‘planter’ may even have been a compliment.

Hewitt, a Belfastman, loved the glens of Co Antrim, which like Co Down was not part of the Ulster Plantation. Yet he was happy to embody and sing the virtues and vices of the planter, just as Montague, a lapsed Catholic born in Brooklyn, was happy to be the Paris-based Gael in his life and poetry.

ATQ Stewart reminded us in The Narrow Ground (1977), of “the continuous natural influx of Scottish settlers” into Ulster before and after the 17th century organised Plantation.

Planters came to mean any Dissenter Protestants in Ulster, and the twin terms, Planter and Gael, were recruited to signify the cultural cleft in Ulster life between native and settler and which later in the 1970s was celebrated as the Two Traditions.

Yet words and phrases carry changing meanings and value judgements over time and by context. It’s unlikely that Neal, a professed Irish republican in politics, meant ‘planter’ as an honorific.

However, the other relevant context besides American support for Irish nationalism is the ongoing project in the US in schools and universities to Decolonise history and society. Neal’s term ‘planter’ now has the Decolonisation revolution at its back.

This revolution is under way in other parts of the English-speaking world, including the UK, but is most advanced in New Zealand, Canada and Australia.

My academic colleagues in British Columbia now refer to themselves as ‘settler scholars’. In their email signatures they admit they are teaching on ‘unceded’ indigenous territory. They are colonial ‘planters’, they publicly confess, and that is something for which they must apologise and atone.

The prestigious Royal British Columbia Museum (RBCM) in the province’s capital, Victoria, has closed its doors, having emptied its galleries of ‘colonial’ displays as part of its Decolonisation & Indigenisation Project. When it reopens, there will be a radically new interpretation and presentation of British Columbia history, centring on indigenous culture.

The native galleries in the museum, that were already significant and impressively displayed, could certainly be augmented and given a richer indigenous cultural context.

But it is equally certain that the extraordinary British ‘discovery’, exploration, natural history, settlement and development of the vast province will be reduced in importance and cast in a negative light.

Already much loved galleries have been denigrated by curators and dismantled. When the museum reopens, the ‘Royal’ in its name will almost certainly be gone.

Publicly-funded museum administrators and curators in English-speaking countries nowadays seem to wish to make the bulk of their traditional visitors feel bad about their own culture. They have taken it upon themselves less to entertain, educate, and engender a sense of wonder than to display for the visitors the sins of their ancestors.

In a recent article (‘Six reasons for the turn against unionism, some of them reversible,’ May 14, see link below), News Letter editor Ben Lowry identified six events or factors that have wounded Ulster unionism. His fourth is the culture war. He is thinking of the progressive liberalism has challenged traditional unionism. But as cancel culture, the war is now coming closer to Northern Ireland from the rest of the English-speaking world. It is brewing, for example, among museum curators.

At a recent Queen’s-Ulster Museum conference, the Head of Curatorial at NI museums declared “the imperative to decolonise [our] collections, sites, structures and activities ... We absolutely should interrogate the British Empire and its legacy”.

Where did this imperative come from? She is appalled by “the spectre of colonial violence and injustice” and believes that the museums’ task is to tackle racism through Decolonisation. Decolonisation includes removing certain objects from public view, presumably out of shame.

This is a sensitive and legitimate subject for museums, of course, but any return of objects to their faraway cultures of origin, or removal into storage, is accompanied by unanimous denunciation of Britain and its colonial past.

But are the museums aware of the thinness of the local ice? The Decolonisation targets of speakers at the Queen’s-UM conference included “the dominance of British rule in Ireland”, “anti-Irish racism in Britain” and in the Empire, and “aristocratic collecting”, including by the Marquess of Dufferin.

The colonisation that is in the crosshairs of the RBCM is what we might call doorstep colonialism: the curators and the non-native population of the province are all products of the British coming to what became British Columbia: to Decolonise is logically to deplore one’s own past and present, and regret one’s very existence in the province. Yet the museum is pressing ahead.

How does this judgement-driven project of Decolonisation in the NI museums intend to address — explain and display — the Plantation of Ulster and the independent Scots settlers? And will the Decolonisation project be accompanied as it is in Canada by Indigenisation?

If so, what forms precisely will the latter take? Taxpayers whose Department of Communities gave over £14m in 2018-19, over 80% of their income, to the NI museums, have the right to know.

Let’s hope tomorrow’s candidate for vilification and cancellation is not the planter in Ulster.

• John W Foster is professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia. His books include Pilgrims of the Air: The Passing of the Passenger Pigeons (New York Review Books, 2017)

• Ben Lowry May 14: Here are six of the broad reasons for the recent turn against unionism, some of which are reversible

• Read this relevant news article: Body running NI’s museums withdraws objects from view ‘to support decolonisation’

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