With the release of the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Canada will take one more step towards reconciling its past and its future, its Indigenous peoples and the community at large.

Although the report is unlikely to appease all sides, Canada is among the world leaders when it comes to addressing historical wrongs.

There are more than 370 million indigenous peoples in the world, in more than 90 countries. They account for just five per cent of the global population but 15 per cent of the world’s poor.

Subject to systemic discrimination and excluded from political and economic power, they continue to be dispossessed from ancestral lands and deprived of the resources for survival, says the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

“Although the state of the world’s indigenous peoples is alarming, there is some cause for optimism. The international community increasingly recognizes indigenous peoples’ human rights,” it says.

Canada

Canada has offered three separate apologies for the treatment of Indigenous peoples.

Then Indian Affairs Minister Jane Stewart issued the first to aboriginal leaders in 1998. The absence of Prime Minister Jean Chretien was noted and the apology gained little credibility. A second apology was delivered in Parliament by a Liberal MP in 2007, again absent of any comment from the prime minister.

It wasn’t until Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself delivered an apology in 2008 that the road to reconciliation began. The apology was preceded by a $60-million residential schools settlement and the advent of the truth and reconciliation commission.

United States, American Indians

The so-called “Indian Wars” have made lucrative fodder for Hollywood westerns but the defining moment of American Indian history is the so-called Trail of Tears, which saw thousands of Native Americans forced to march to a specially designated “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma. It has been estimated that one in five did not make it.

In 1990, Congress approved an “expression of regret” to the Sioux for the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre and in September 2000, the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs apologized for the ethnic violence against Native tribes.

“These wrongs,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Kevin Gover said, “must be acknowledged if the healing is to begin.”

In 2009, President Barack Obama signed, without fanfare, the Native American Apology Resolution, which apologized “on behalf of the people of the United States for the many instances of violence, maltreatment and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States [and] expresses its regret…”

In 2012, the U.S. government signed a US$3.4-billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit over federal mismanagement of tribal lands and accounts. The U.S. has not initiated any kind of formal reconciliation process with the country’s 560 Native American tribes.

United States, Hawaii

In 1893, a group of American businessmen and missionaries, as well as American diplomat John Stevens, organized a coup to overthrow the monarchy of Hawaii. Queen Liliuokalani was forced to abdicate and the group declared themselves rulers of a new Republic of Hawaii, taking over land without any compensation to indigenous Hawaiians. The islands were annexed by the United States in 1900 and gained statehood in 1959.

In 1993, Congress signed an Apology Resolution, acknowledging the overthrow as a violation of international law. The federal government established the Office of Hawaiian Affairs in 1980 and there are state and federal programs to address health, education, language, employment and children’s services for indigenous Hawaiians.

A Hawaii Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was established and Native Hawaiians continue to press politically for rights to self-determination.

New Zealand

In 1995, Queen Elizabeth apologized to the Tainui people for the injustices committed against the large Maori tribe during the English colonization of New Zealand. The apology was accompanied by an NZ$170 million settlement and the return of land seized from the tribe.

That apology opened the floodgates to a series of apologies to individual Maori tribes over the next decade. The country has implemented a treaty settlement process to address grievances over the Treaty of Waitangi, an agreement that the government has acknowledged was largely ignored by the Crown.

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