Who’s Sorry Now? Government Apologies, Truth Commissions, and Indigenous Self-Determination in Australia, Canada, Guatemala, and Peru

Abstract

Official apologies and truth commissions are increasingly utilized as mechanisms to address human rights abuses. Both are intended to transform intergroup relations by marking an end point to a history of wrongdoing and providing the means for political and social relations to move beyond that history. However, state-dominated reconciliation mechanisms are inherently problematic for indigenous communities. In this paper, we examine the use of apologies, and truth and reconciliation commissions in four countries with significant indigenous populations: Canada, Australia, Peru, and Guatemala. In each case, the reconciliation mechanism differentiated the goal of reconciliation from an indigenous selfdetermination agenda. The resulting state-centered strategies ultimately failed to hold states fully accountable for past wrongs and, because of this, failed to transform inter-group relations.

Uncomfortable Comparisons: The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission in International Context

“…41 The point is not that Indigenous victims somehow benefited from these factors; on the contrary, the Guatemalan and Peruvian commissions, for instance, were saddled with mandates that ignored key Indigenous concerns. 42 Rather, it is simply to suggest that Latin American commissions have tended to operate in contexts that, however unreasonably or unfairly, have served to dampen the potentially inflammatory dangers of having to address ethnocultural and colonial factors more directly.…”

Getting to Common Ground: A Comparison of Ontario, Canada’s Provincial Policy Statement and the Auckland Council Regional Policy Statement with Respect to Indigenous Peoples

“…While reconciliation is the responsibility of all of society to address denial and make fundamental changes and restitution (Corntassel & Holder, 2008), state-based planning also has a significant role to play in its advancement. The overarching question and four primary indicators (Table 4) that inform this element of the analytical framework were chosen because they act as points of reference into how prepared governing officials and planning policymakers are in actively challenging and restructuring the status quo of Indigenous peoples-state relations based on the content of planning texts.…”

“…The overarching question and four primary indicators (Table 4) that inform this element of the analytical framework were chosen because they act as points of reference into how prepared governing officials and planning policymakers are in actively challenging and restructuring the status quo of Indigenous peoples-state relations based on the content of planning texts. The four indicators provide insight into what may be missing from current planning policy and collectively draw on Porter (2011), Borrows (1997), Corntassel and Holder (2008), Hibbard et al (2008), Maaka and Porter (2010), the RCAP (1996), Regan (2010), Sandercock (2004), Turner (2006) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations, 2007). Active reconciliation along with the previous three elements, serve to advance discussions about how we can move from the conceptual to actual changes in order to plan differently through mutual understanding and learning between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples on common ground.…”

Entire Issue / Numéro complet

“…Although some scholars address the relationship between truth and reconciliation, focusing on whether it is possible to achieve reconciliation via truth (Bachmann, 2010;Clark, 2012;Corntassel and Holder, 2008;Twose, 2010), a more fundamental question is what truth commissions mean when they refer to 'truth.' Given the contested territory that 'truth' has become in the postmodern era, it is unsurprising that truth commissions define it in different ways, with some actively acknowledging truth as a multiplicity by identifying and documenting several different kinds (Kashyap, 2009;May, 2013;Roosa, 2008).…”