Illustration: The Globe and Mail. Sources: Getty Images

Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii) is the Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto’s faculty of law. This essay is adapted from his upcoming book We Were Once Brothers.

Like most children, my kids did not have naturally curious taste buds. And like most children, they would often fall back on safe classics, like macaroni and cheese and instant noodles.

My son still enjoys the noodles, and he has remained loyal to the Mr. Noodles brand. That’s because Mr. Noodles alone offers his favourite flavour: “Oriental.”

One afternoon, as I stood stirring a pot of noodles, he asked, “What is Oriental, anyway?” Which is a good question. Because “Oriental” isn’t any particular flavour – it’s not soy sauce, not five-spice, but ... “Oriental.”

His question, in fact, was the subject of considerable examination by the late literary and cultural theorist Edward Said in the 1970s. He saw that the British Empire had expanded to include a significant portion of the world’s peoples. Mostly these were brown people, people from India, Persia, Asia and North Africa – the so-called “Orient.” Sure, there were also brown people from North and South America and Australasia, but these weren’t part of “the Orient.”

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The British Empire was an Enlightenment Empire – an Empire of geography, but also, an Empire of the mind. Plants, animals, languages and people were made the subject of methodical scrutiny. Amateur and professional scientists, for example, scoured forests and jungles hunting for new subspecies of butterflies to catalogue and pin to display boards and, in so doing, impose on those spaces a particularly English shape and meaning. And when it came to the study of the Empire’s various brown people, there developed an entirely new field of academic study: “Orientalism.”

Dr. Said turned the Orientalist gaze inward, applying the frameworks of anthropology and cultural theory not to the people and cultures of the Orient, but to those academics who had constructed for themselves the field of Orientalism. Dr. Said came to see that Orientalism was a projection: There was no “Orient” anywhere, only a European conception of cultural difference onto which Europeans could apply meaning. Orientalism, and the Orient, were projections of meaning, not meaning itself.

Today, amid a wave of revelations that high-profile Indigenous........

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