Twentieth century policies affecting Gypsy/Traveller communities in Scotland: archival research

8. Conclusion and Key Findings

This report marks the first time that the Scottish Government as a devolved institution has sought evidence of 20th century policies specifically affecting Gypsy/Traveller communities in Scotland. We know that the evidence presented in this report on the policies, events, and actions that led to, and implemented, the ‘TE’, and how they were actualised, is only a fraction of the evidence that exists in archives across Scotland, and outside of it. Of the thousands of pages of archival evidence that we examined, only a fraction of the material is presented in this report. Moreover, it is significant to note that our report does not include the lived experiences of Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland, and especially the voices of those who were directly impacted by these events. For this reason, the information presented here is likely to be subject to both scrutiny and corrections, as no archive can represent a lived experience and no history can be told through a single narrative. This is especially the case for Gypsy/Traveller communities, and their members, who live in virtually every part of Scotland today. This report therefore cannot purport to be representative of everything that occurred, but rather is the beginning of qualifying why and how the ‘TE’ took place.

In the end, we can locate three significant patterns that help better understand the intent of the Tinker Experiments as it relates to the welfare of Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland, and the ongoing socio-political context, within which they have lived. To summarise what is expanded on below, the first pattern we identified throughout the examination of the events leading up to and during the implementation of the Tinker Experiments is a recurring societal and institutional dehumanisation of Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland. This was often carried out under the stereotype of Gypsy/Travellers as a people that collectively practiced a backwards or undeveloped way of life. The second pattern is the practice of systematic control, primarily by government-based key stakeholders, in forcibly segregating, surveilling, and/or managing the everyday actions of Gypsy/Travellers. This pattern was observed in the frequent restriction of Gypsy/Traveller individuals and families to self-determine their relationship with the wider settled community, and the absence of consent or collaborative consultation in policies that targeted their mobility and livelihoods. The final and third pattern is the forced assimilation of Gypsy/Travellers into the wider settled population of Scotland. The very nature of assimilation presumes cultural dominance of one group over another, and in the case of the TE and the intent to erode the collective cultural identity of Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland, there is a need to consider, and to recognise that the context within which the TE occurred is best characterised as cultural genocide. These patterns are ultimately key findings of the research and analysis presented in this report, and as such they offer helpful starting points for future inquiries around, and institutional understandings of, the Tinker Experiments.

“Tinkerdom can be termed a very real social disease, but its diagnosis and treatment are difficult.^[357]”

Dehumanisation

The evidence we have seen in the archives has repeatedly demonstrated attitudes across key stakeholders and wider Scottish society that have dehumanised Gypsy/Traveller individuals and communities in Scotland. Dehumanisation is known as a psychological tactic of domination whereby, in the words of Maiese (2003), “opponents view each other as less than human and thus not deserving of moral consideration”. She notes that “[o]nce certain groups are stigmatized as evil, morally inferior, and not fully human, the persecution of those groups becomes more psychologically acceptable”.^[358] There are numerous examples of the dehumanisation of Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland, both explicit and implicit, that have been revealed in the evidence underlying this report.^[359] Often, dehumanisation took the form of not treating Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland as individuals and equal members of society but rather always as part of a composite group, or even part of a ‘Tinker race’.^[360] This is also reflected in both the language and actions used against Gypsy/Traveller communities in Scotland and has been outlined in the preceding chapters. On the former, for example, we found reports describing Gypsy/Travellers as people who “infest the Scottish Highlands and the southern plants over the summer”^[361] and that they “over-ran” or “overwhelmed” the lands of settled Scottish society. Some documents that we uncovered were explicit in this dehumanisation of Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland. For example, the 1918 Departmental Committee on Tinkers - the Scottish Office-appointed committee established to recommend solutions to the ‘tinker problem’ - described Gypsy/Travellers as “an immigrant race representing a different stage of human development.”^[362] This view of Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland as being somehow ‘other’, or the ‘opponent’ to the settled population was evidenced in numerous examples throughout the archival materials and has also been highlighted in each of the key stakeholder chapters. Sometimes the language that was used was animalistic, with stakeholders arguing that “the tinkers…and their children are positively just like cattle”,^[363] or appeared to say that Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland were more likely to carry disease. The contribution of the media to the dehumanisation of Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland is also noteworthy. Newspapers added to this public discourse, which must be weighed against the actions taken by other actors presented in this report. Assimilation projects were reported on, and dehumanising narratives were shared, which often reduced or romanticised Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland.^[364] Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland, ultimately, were not seen as the same as the settled population. Consistently, they were referred to and understood as a separate group, and one that was less than, a perspective that media narratives continue to reinforce. In media portrayals of Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland, we also repeatedly saw the phrase ‘Tinker Problem’ in newspaper articles, many times as a headline or mentioned within the article itself. Aside from this, the language and attitudes of various stakeholders exhibited throughout this report do raise questions as to whether institutions involved in the TE held Gypsy/Travellers as everyday citizens or as a sub-class group, with the latter characterisation buoyed by the contribution of the media who often echoed these sentiments within newspaper reports.

Control

This finding highlights the ways in which key stakeholders sought to control Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland by forcing them to settle or enrol in surveilled spaces (e.g. schools, government housing sites), effectively displacing individual and community processes of self-determination. If sedentary behaviour is enforced through legislation (e.g. the requirement to attend school for a certain number of days) this will inherently affect nomadic communities more than settled ones. In Scotland, tactics that were used against Gypsy/Travellers that were without legal sanction included immobilisation, or ’forced sedentarism,’^[365] segregation away from the ‘settled population’, and higher levels of monitoring and surveillance by police authorities. Immobilisation is a key approach for settled societies to begin processes of assimilation of nomadic peoples, as mobility can so critically inform everyday cultural, spiritual, political, and economic activities and relationships.^[366] In Scotland, the initiatives to settle Gypsy/Travellers under the auspices of housing, education, or general child welfare, must be understood through the framing of control, as they effectively displaced Gypsy/Travellers from being able to practise, self-determine, and rely on their own lifeways for the well-being of community members and future generations. Forcibly segregating Gypsy/Travellers away from the settled populace, whether in housing or in education, acted as a way for key stakeholders such as local authorities and the police to monitor and survey their assimilation, but also to appease the dehumanising views of Gypsy/Travellers as a lower class or race of people by wider settled society. The prevalence of monitoring and surveillance, as a key tactic of control, can be seen in the decision by the 1918 Departmental Committee on Tinkers that it would be a good idea to compile a ‘Register of Tinkers’ and appoint an ‘Inspector of Tinkers’.^[367] Monitoring and surveillance assist in the control of quotidian behaviours, such as the idea, mentioned by the same committee, that any business selling alcohol should have a copy of the register and be liable to prosecution if they sold alcohol to a Gypsy/Traveller.^[368] There was also the suggestion, in evidence given to the Committee, that agricultural wages should not actually be paid to the person employed but rather to someone who would then supervise spending/saving.^[369] These examples, taken with the evidence provided in this report, demonstrate the extent to which ’settled’ society and its institutions felt it appropriate to consider the everyday lives of Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland as subject to control.

Assimilation and Cultural Genocide

Throughout the research process, at no point was it found that key stakeholders to the TE took active roles in ensuring that self-determination was part of settlement policies and processes. On the contrary, the involuntary nature of the TE and its intent to bring Gypsy/Travellers into the fold of settled Scottish society raises serious questions about its assimilationist nature. Assimilation is best understood as a process of acculturation, or cultural modification, whereby an individual is forced to adopt another culture in place of their own.^[370] Implicit within assimilation is both an assumption that one culture is somehow superior over another, and a process that demands that one group forego their own cultural values and practices to become part of a dominant group. Assimilation, as a result, remains a subtle and unnoticed form of oppression, manifesting itself through social policies and discourse that dictate what is ‘normal’ or ’acceptable’ and what is not. When contrasted with integration, as a voluntary process of acculturation and one that permits an individual to retain their cultural identity while co-existing with others, the prejudiced reasonings of forced, or involuntary, assimilation become more visible. For Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland, key stakeholders in this report have historically demonstrated a clear bias against Gypsy/Traveller culture and a desire to effectively stop the culture from being practised any further. The context within which Gypsy/Traveller-related legislation was drafted, particularly between 1895 and 1970, demonstrates that there was a clear political will to block Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland from travelling and to create the conditions for forced settlement. Indeed, assimilation is directly reflected in the words of representatives from key stakeholder institutions, with some noting that their “ultimate aim” was to “extinguish the class as distinct from the rest of the community”^[371] In the end, the theme of assimilation is the most troubling for the destructive intentions inherent in this acculturative process but also for the implications that have remained largely unaddressed.

Taken in the context of processes of dehumanisation and control, forced assimilation seen in the TE points to much historical and collective desire and intention across stakeholders to erase Gypsy/Travellers as a distinct group in Scotland. For this reason, cultural genocide more accurately reflects the reality presented in this report where key stakeholders targeted Gypsy/Travellers based on their identity.^[372] The language of cultural genocide can be found in iterative phrases throughout this report that call for the collective erasure of Gypsy/Travellers by key stakeholders. This includes need to “detinkerise” children, the need to “gradually abolish tinkerdom”, the stated idea of “ending the gypsy race”, and stopping people from ‘exist[ing] as tinkers’. On the use of the term, experts on the genocide of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, Professors David MacDonald and Graham Hudson, note that - while not explicitly noted in the 1948 Genocide Convention^[373] - cultural genocide remains a ‘moral descriptor anchored in legal process and as such is a useful ground floor’.^[374] In understanding the Tinker Experiments as part of cultural genocide, a more pointed argument can be made as to why a vast majority of Gypsy/Travellers are settled, dispersed, and/or are no longer nomadic;^[375] why Gypsy/Traveller children sent abroad through forced child migration policies are not discoverable; and why many no longer speak or were taught how to speak Cant, or their other ancestral languages and dialects.^[376] Beyond this, the socio-economic disparities and mortality rates between Gypsy/Travellers and settled society^[377] have yet to be appropriately recognised or considered as the lasting traumatic and intergenerational effects of cultural genocide.^[378] There is also little historical understanding around how the distrust, displayed by many Gypsy/Travellers towards settled society and its institutions, has come to be. Locating the TE within the context of cultural genocide thus helps to begin a long overdue conversation on the state of relations between Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland and how the authorities and institutions mentioned in this report impacted their lives, regardless of intention. On this point, Indigenous scholar George Tinker (Osage Nation) noted on the good intentions of Christian missionaries and their relationships with American Indians during the colonisation of the Americas: ’What I call cultural genocide functions at times as conscious intent, but at other times at such a systemic level that it may be largely subliminal’.^[379] In problematising the notion of good intentions and their role in perpetuating historical harms, it is vital for any institution named in this report to reflect on their proximity to the TE and the harm caused, whether intended or not. Moving forward, significant takeaways from this report must be, then, not only to continue this inquiry, but also for Scotland to begin addressing the legacies of the Tinker Experiments and what those legacies mean for Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland today.