The Canadian Government, among other governments around the world, has issued a number of apologies for historic wrongs. It has apologized to Japanese-Canadians for interning them during World War II and confiscating their property. It has apologized to the Chinese-Canadian community for the exorbitant tax that was imposed on early settlers from China in order to deter them from staying in Canada. An apology was provided to Indo-Canadians for the Komagata Maru incident wherein a boatload of Sikhs were detained and then turned away from Canada because of a desire to maintain a 'white' society in Canada. There was an apology for the Inuit High Arctic relocation. And of course, there was the apology for the Indian Residential School system.
This past weekend there was a world broadcast premiere of a documentary called "A Sorry State". There is much academic literature on the issue of state apologies. However I found the personal perspective of the filmmaker on the issue much more cogent and visceral than many of the papers on the topic.
Mitch Miyagawa has a very interesting perspective because his family members were on the receiving end of three formal state apologies. His father had been interned by the Canadian government during WWII and had lost their property. His parents divorced and each remarried. His father married a woman who had attended an Indian Residential School and who had thus received an apology in that regard. His mother married a man whose parents had paid head taxes in order to come to Canada. So the topic of apologies is a personal theme.
Coming from the perspective of a child of apology recipients, and also as a father who is teaching his children about apologies, Miyagawa takes the viewer through a simple yet profound journey about the meaning of state apologies. He is skeptical about them - feeling at first that state apologies are politically expedient and shallow if unaccompanied by action. But he goes further to explore the various meanings given to them by recipients. His father denied a negative impact resulting from the internment and the need for an apology. In any event, he feels that there is no need to dwell on the past. However, because the apology has sparked interest and discussion with his filmmaker son, we find that at the end of the movie and at the end of his life, Mr. Miyagawa does acknowledge that his family did suffer. So the apology was a vehicle for raising consciousness both for him and his son.
For his step-mother, a health support worker who is immersed in the world of recovery from residential school trauma, the apology was important. However Miyagawa also interviewed residential school survivors who were very cynical about it because their residential school experiences were denied by government because of a lack of records.
For his step-father, the apology was an important step to help him feel less alienated in Canadian society. As he noted, he was not proud to be Chinese-Canadian when he was young. It was hard to be Asian in a sometimes hostile society. Acknowledgment that past treatment was wrong, was important for him to feel a sense of belonging.
I think one of the most interesting concepts came from a Japanese-Canadian activist who noted that the important thing is that a government acknowledge that democracy is diminished the moment when the human rights of citizens are denied by government action. His main concern was that there be some sanction or check in place so that governments realize that their actions will have political, institutional and other consequences.
The key thing that I was reminded of when watching this documentary is that apologies are very personal and very emotional. They are a very basic part of human interaction. They are meant to happen between individuals who have had some conflict. It is these characteristics that are necessary to give them meaning. The meanings associated with them are as varied as the types of relationships that exist between each person apologizing and each recipient.
State apologies, however, are abstract and often distant in time. Also, the type of responsibility behind the apology is sometimes hard to grasp because it is vicarious. It is rarely the direct perpetrator who is apologizing to the person harmed. So the emotional transaction between the perpetrator and the transgressed person is sometimes hard to find.
I am not saying that the raison d'etre for state apologies is wrong. I think that the fact that a government is willing to examine its past and address the harms suffered by its citizens through its policies and legislation is critical. But I do not think that an apology is actually terribly meaningful as a vehicle for social change where the transgressor is the government.
I realize that many will contradict me on this point because they feel that an apology is the deepest form of acknowledgment that a government can give. It indicates that a government is not qualifying how wrong the action was and it understands the personal significance of past actions to its citizens. I have in fact witnessed profound emotional reactions by those who have received apologies for historic wrongs.
But I think that to personalize a government is a mistake because it gives the recipient a false sense that there is some level of emotional responsibility for the recipient's well-being that will result in a change of action. In fact there is no sense of emotional responsibility in a government. It is an institution with a task to govern the people. In a democracy, it is tasked with governing through representation by the people. When a group of people is transgressed, the institution is weakened. Government is moved by different levers than emotional responsibility. Consequently, apologies - which are more appropriately interpersonal emotional interactions between a wrongdoer and a victim - are not the right vehicles to capture the complexity of the transaction and the type of responsibility between a state and its citizens.
It is perhaps for this reason that no matter the level of apparent abasement by a government and the emotional impact on the recipients, government apologies strike people as being problematic. Somehow they don't make sense entirely, and they don't quite capture what is needed to address historic wrongs.
Something as simple as saying "I'm sorry" should not trigger such a lot of complicated writing....
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