Mending the Past and Forging the Future

The referendum on the addition of a “Voice to Parliament” for indigenous peoples in the Australian Constitution is immanent; perhaps a next step to mending the past and forging the future.

The Christian Science Monitor recently ran a series of articles and interviews with people around the world exploring efforts to seek justice and restitution for communities subjected to historical harms, some not unlike those inflicted on indigenous communities in Australia. Insights gained from learning about what other countries are doing, can only help us to think about the Australian context in new and healing ways.

One such article seeks answers about responsibility and justice:

“For decades, Akwesasne Mohawk children were sent to schools on both sides of the border between Canada and the United States. Far too many of those children never returned home because of the physical and mental abuse they suffered in those institutions.

Today, the committee for Akwesasne Mohawk residential school survivors works to identify the kids still unaccounted for. Its work spans the border just like the Indigenous territory itself, situated along the St. Lawrence River. But it faces two historical perpetrators that are in very different stages of acknowledgment and apology.

Do apologies matter? Some Native people say no – and that governments should ask how to make reparations, rather than assigning their own.

While Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for Canada’s national residential school system in 2008, the United States has never done so publicly for its own system. It has only recently begun a thorough examination of the harms wrought by forced assimilation of Native Americans.

Marjorie Kaniehtonkie Skidders, a member of the Akwesasne school survivors committee, doesn’t think either government has come close to any kind of true reparation for Indigenous peoples. For many, reparations dictated by governments, without justice for those wronged and their heirs, are of limited value. “But you need to acknowledge what has happened here, the trauma that has so severely affected a whole generation of people, and also the next generation that came after them.”

You can access the whole article and accompanying series of articles on The Christian Science Monitor website.