In a "statement of reconciliation" last Wednesday, the Canadian government formally apologised to Canada's indigenous people for the assimilation policies of the past, including the removal of children to residential schools. The government also promised an additional $C600 million over the next four years for a "healing fund" to assist those who suffered abuse at the schools, and for other compensation initiatives.
The apology was quickly dismissed as being too weak by four of the five indigenous leaders who were handed scrolls of the reconciliation statement at a ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. "I refuse to accept this", said Marilyn Buffalo, the head of the Native Women's Association of Canada. Harry Daniels, president of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, stated that the additional funding was not enough.
This response highlights a crucial aspect of the widespread current push for formal apologies for past injustices, such as assimilation and the "stolen generations" in Australia, or slavery in the United States. Many of those who are most active in calling for these apologies do not seem to be particularly concerned about restoring a moral balance, or achieving social harmony. Rather, they are engaged in political struggles over the allocation of resources, the creation of special rights for indigenous or minority groups, and the legitimacy of current states.
As the black American commentator Thomas Sowell has noted, the leaders of these struggles have little incentive to bring about a genuine reconciliation, as their position and influence usually depends on maintaining a climate of resentment. Whenever one set of demands is addressed, either the response will be denounced as inadequate -- as has just happened in Canada -- or a new list of demands will soon take its place.
Nevertheless, the Canadian apology has increased the clamour for John Howard to make a similar gesture to Australian Aborigines. He will be sensible to resist these calls, at least in the terms in which they are now being put.
When people apologise for actions for which they were not personally responsible, they run the risk of debasing our public moral language. In such circumstances, apologies quickly become trivialised, an easy sop to the sentimentality of our times. There are no obvious logical or historical limits to the actions for which apologies might be demanded. Apologies to a particular group of aggrieved people can easily leave another group with comparable experiences justifiably angry that their suffering has not been acknowledged.
If Mr Howard were to make a specific apology to the "stolen generations", he could legitimately be asked to apologise to the thousands of non-Aboriginal children of poor or single-parent families who were unjustly removed from their parents. Like the Aboriginal children, many of them also had appalling experiences in church and state-run institutions.
However, if the Australian government were to make a more broadly based apology for past assimilation policies which undermined the cultures and languages of Aboriginal people, then why shouldn't the descendants of those Aboriginal leaders who once passionately argued for assimilation also have to apologise? The "stolen generations" report simply suppressed the fact that at the time when the assimilation policies were being formulated in the 1930s and early 1940s, prominent and radical Aboriginal leaders such as Jack Patten and William Ferguson were calling for Aborigines to be absorbed, both culturally and biologically, into the white world. The authors of the report were fully aware of this, because they quoted from material taken from the same page of a book as information about these calls for assimilation was presented.
Unfortunately, while every nation and ethnic group can find praiseworthy acts in their past, virtually every people are also heir to shameful deeds as well. Good and evil are not the exclusive properties of particular groups, however much we may falsely romanticise some peoples, and demonise others. Demands for apologies for specific historical events tend to disguise this fact, and distract attention away from injustices that members of a formerly victimised group may now be inflicting on others. For instance, I am conscious that Israel's treatment of Palestinians over the past fifty years leaves a great deal to be desired. It is a leftist fantasy that a history of oppression somehow collectively ennobles a people or group.
The only circumstances in which an apology for past collective actions might be worthwhile is when there are grounds for believing that it could undermine a destructive way of thinking about people. I would suggest that the fundamental problem which lies at the basis of all the injustices that Aborigines have suffered is that they have always been regarded as different from other Australians. We have always had -- and continue to have -- laws and regulations in which people were treated differently simply because they were Aborigines.
As the head of a government which continues this tradition, Mr Howard can reasonably be asked to apologise for perpetuating this situation. But those who are most insistent about the need for an apology to Aborigines for the past are committed to an even greater degree of legal and administrative distinction between Aborigines and other Australians.
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