Australia’s thought-provoking Apology

Okay, I am merely nine months late in commenting on the breakthrough apology that Australian PM Kevin Rudd offered to the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands in the parliament in Canberra back on February 13. You can see video of Rudd delivering it here, and read the text here.
As a US citizen (and also, for my sins, a British citizen), reflecting on Rudd’s heroic– though of course not yet nearly “sufficient” act– makes me ask how long it will be until my government here in Washington issues some equivalent public apologies for past, very grave misdeeds.

* For the many acts carried out against numerous Native American peoples– exactly analogous to deeds the Anglo-heritage Australians committed against the indigenous peoples of their lands;
* For the barbaric acts carried out against African peoples ripped from their own countries, brought to our shores, and kept in a situation of enslavement that– unlike slavery systems known elsewhere in the world– was maintained intact throughout the generations;
* For the unjustified wars of aggression our government has launched, both on this continent and far afield, right down to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Well, I said, “past” misdeeds. Some of our country’s misdeeds– including the occupation of Iraq and its maintaining of a completely unfair agricultural subsidy program that has ripped the livelihoods away from hundreds of millions of poor-country farmers — continue to this day.
In the case of continuing misdeeds, it is a good question whether we should focus more on stopping the misdeed or seeking a public apology– or even, as is preferable, some form of concrete reparation– for it.
My own strong preference is to focus first of all on stopping the misdeed. Apologies and other forms of “reckoning” can wait till later. But if we wait to end the commission of the misdeed then further considerable harm will have been done in the meantime…

I should note that, despite my list above, I don’t believe that either the US or Britain are uniquely “evil” as governments. I’m even prepared to believe that many of these two countries’ misdeeds– like those of other countries– were committed from a mix of motivations that included seemingly “good” ones. Regarding the transatlantic slavery system, for example, I know that throughout several decades of its operation, Quakers were involved in many phases of it, including captaining the slave ships, owning and running slave-trading businesses, and then “owning” and exploiting the completely unpaid labor of probably many thousands of enslaved persons… But those Quakers were also– like, I suppose, many others involved in the slave trade– people who were honestly “trying to do good deeds” during their lives on earth. They had become honestly convinced, as the 18th century Quaker reformer John Woolman told us in his journal, that by bringing the enslaved persons to America they were “saving” them from horrors untold in Africa and giving them some eventual chance of education and “civilization” here in the New World…
Unbelievable today. But I suppose, believable in some way then.
Actually, those kind of “good intentions” that marked the actions of Quaker and other slaveholders in the US were probably eerily similar to the intentions of the earlier generations of Australian government and church officials who ripped thousands of Aboriginal and mestizo children from the arms of their Aboriginal mothers and took them away for a highly coercive “education” in government-supervised boarding schools. (And yes, forcing the children of Indigenous families into highly coercive, English-only “boarding schools” was something that Quakers, members of other churches, and governments in the US and Canada also did.)
In Australia, those forcibly deracinated children became known in the Stolen Generations. Wikipedia tells us that these abductions occurred from 1869 through 1969, “although, in some places, children were still being taken in the 1970s.”
What brought the issue of the Rudd apology to mind for me was the fact that on Monday I had the chance to see a 25-minute film about the whole build-up to Rudd’s Apology, at the U.S. Institute of Peace. (Sadly, I don’t have any other details about the authorship, provenance, or availability of the film, though someone at the institute has promised to mail me a copy. I hope the whole thing gets put up on the web a.s.a.p.)
The film started with a short newsclip from, maybe, the 1930s showing lots of small children in some kind of disciplined “school” environment”, while the sound-track had a government official “explaining” that the children were half-breeds being taken from their mothers in the interests of “racial purity” (?), and reassuring listeners that the mothers would not really miss them because they were too “primitive” to have normal maternal emotions like the rest of us.
I almost gagged.
The film also showed groups of “white” and non-“white” Australians meeting together in the lead-up to the Apology, discussing work they had done together over many years to arrive at this day.
When Rudd was elected PM in November 2007, one of the important planks in his platform– in addition to his strongly anti-war position on Iraq– was his plan to offer the public Apology to the country’s indigenous people that had long been discussed in Australian politics but that the previous, slavishly pro-Bush and pro-war, PM John Howard, had steadfastly refused to make.
The film focused on the efforts the government and some Indigenous and non-Indigenous community groups made to bring as many actual members of the Stolen Generations and other Aboriginals as possible to Canberra to see the Apology in person. We see Rudd and his wife welcoming many of these visitors into a hall before the Apology where they all had a tea party together.
Then, before Rudd delivered the Apology in the parliament, the session was arranged so that, for the first time ever, an elder from a locally based Aboriginal nation gave her own people’s formal “welcome” to the parliament to meet in this spot… That was all the antecedent that we saw to the Apology as you can see it in the You-Tube version.
We also saw how, during and after Rudd delivered what I thought was a very well-crafted Apology, large groups of Aboriginal people around the parliament hall and in other places around the absolutely enormous country of Australia reacted in a very emotional way, with both tears and laughter.
… Of course, the performance of one illocutionary act, however signifricant, cannot on its own suddenly solve the numerous (and often interlinked) harms to which Aboriginal societies continue to be subjected. Australian Aboriginals, like the indigenous peoples of most countries over-run by dominant settler societies, continue to be plagued with short life-spans, severe substance abuse problems, chronic social breakdown, and other longterm effects of the disruptions of their history. But Rudd’s Apology certainly established a significant new baseline for the way the country’s central government treats Aboriginal issues in the future. Many acts of very concrete reparation, at several different levels, should certainly follow.
As it happens, I recently received a few copies of a book called Pathways to Reconciliation: Between Theory and Practice, which was edited by three Australian scholars in the conflict-resolution field and contains a Preface by Jackie Huggins, A.M., a part-Aboriginal civil-society leader who appeared in the film I saw on Monday.
I have a chapter in the book, titled “Accountability, Remorse and Reconciliation: Lessons from South Africa, Mozambique and Rwanda.” It is, basically, a condensation of the last two chapters of my “Amnesty After Atrocity” book.
Pathways to Reconciliation contains a couple of chapters about the Aboriginal issue in Australia, but they appear to have been completed before Rudd’s Apology.