Why is it that the world’s greatest democracy has yet to elect a female president? Why was it three decades behind Britain in abolishing slavery? And when, if ever, will it offer a formal apology to its Native American population?
Australia’s recently elected prime minister Kevin Rudd —
who also happens to speak Chinese
(when will America elect a president who can do that?) — apologized to the country’s Aborigines for laws and policies that “inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss.”
The tale of Australia’s lost generation — if you haven’t seen
Rabbit-Proof Fence
(2002), go out and rent it — is a down-under version of the boarding school era in the United States, when so many Native American children were torn away from their parents and forceably assimilated. They literally had their native languages beaten out of them.
Indian Country Today,
Robert Tim Coulter of
the Indian Law Resource Center in Helena, Mont. argues that an apology by Congress is necessary, but that “
To make a genuine apology … [it] needs to stop doing the things for which it is apologizing” What does he mean?
It is astonishing to most Americans that Congress and the administration are still taking Indian land and resources – without due process of law and without fair market compensation – sometimes with no compensation at all. The Constitution says that Congress may not take anyone’s property except for a public purpose, with due process of law, and with fair market compensation. But these rules are not applied to most land and resources owned by Indian tribes, and the government takes the land and resources at will. Obviously, this is wrong.
A few years ago, Congress confiscated part of the Yurok Nation’s reservation in California and turned it over to another tribe. At the time, Congress gloated that it could do this without paying compensation because of ”plenary power,” a concept that gives Congress complete power over Indian affairs. This power has almost no constitutional limitations that protect basic rights, and Indians are the only people in the United States subjected to it.
Japanese American children in an internment camp in Manzanar, Calif. during WW II. In 1988, the U.S. government formally apologized for its internment policy.
This article appears in Parting the Redwood Curtain.
I could not agree more. America and Australia still practice the law of discovery – if they discover some valuable resource on Native land, they take it with little or no compensation to the Native Americans. I doubt the US will ever appologize – that would force it to admit that it was wrong, and the US never does that.
will the casinos be taken too?
Sorry Day could become a national annual holiday. Each year, pick 10 national outrages to apologize for. We could sustain such a holiday for hundreds of years before needing new outrages, but by then we will have performed new ones.
Good for Kevin Rudd and Australia.
Being America means never having to say you’re sorry.
If you look into Australian Indigenous recent history, you’ll find that it actually makes America look pretty good in many respects. The Indigenous Australians couldn’t vote or even buy alcohol until 1962. And to this day there is little to no sovereignty for the Indigenous of Australia. For instance, the Kakadu wilderness of the Northern Territory is technically Indigenous land but managed on their behalf by the Australian National Park system. They also manage the extensive uranium mining that happens in Kakadu – on behalf of the indigenous of course.
I bring this up, because I really don’t feel that it’s a fair comparison. Native Americans could vote in 1924 (although some states continued to prohibit native voting until the 40’s, damned republic) and empirically have more self-governence than the natives of Australia.
On to women…
Women gained the right to vote in Australia 10 years earlier than in America – yet they have never had a female prime minister.
After this last political primary, I can’t help but postulate that the “world’s greatest democracy” hasn’t had a woman worth voting for?
Maybe we should worry less about what needs to be said and turn our concerns toward how to do right.
Just my two shekels.