Orange Shirt Day and the Blameless American

Today is Truth and Reconciliation Day, a Canadian national holiday meant as a memorial to the atrocities of Indian residential schools and to the continuing, intergenerational trauma they inflicted. It’s not my place to comment on whether the truth has fully come to light, or whether there has actually been any reconciliation. 

I will say that when South Africa established its Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with the crimes of the apartheid era, individuals were only eligible for amnesty from the criminal justice system if they made a full disclosure of their own personal crimes. I will quote the head of that Commission, Bishop Desmond Tutu, who wrote in 1999 that unless the economics of apartheid are resolved - the poor housing, lack of clean water and electricity, second-class schools and health care - “we can just as well kiss reconciliation good bye.” 

But I will also note that the United States continually refuses even to pretend… with either truth or reconciliation. How many states have made it illegal to teach schoolchildren the history of racism in this country? How many have made it illegal to discuss gender? 

In 2008, the House of Representatives issued a formal “apology” to African Americans for both slavery and Jim Crow, but its substance was limited to claiming a “commitment to rectify the lingering consequences of the misdeeds committed against African Americans under slavery and Jim Crow.” And that was the end of that. No particulars. No attempt at reparation. This looks a lot like “forgive and forget,” ie, impunity. 

Hidden in the 2010 Defense Appropriation Act was another “apology,” this one to Native Americans for “violence, maltreatment, and neglect.” Congress committed itself “to move toward a brighter future where all the people of this land live reconciled as brothers and sisters.” But the many lawyers in the House and Senate made certain to include this language: “Nothing in this section authorizes or supports any claim against the United States.” Nor, again, was there any discussion of what reconciliation might actually look like. It reads to me like, “We said ’Sorry.’ What more do you want?” 

And the only nation on Earth that has ever used nuclear weapons against people - the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - continues to refuse an apology. In 1994, the National Museum of Air and Space at the Smithsonian planned a balanced exhibit for the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing. Despite multiple revisions intended to accommodate the people who thought the exhibit too pro-Japanese, the museum eventually cancelled it. In the end they just displayed the airplane that dropped the bomb: without interpretation, without images of the destruction, without melted artifacts of the bombing. 

So I will just avoid being overly critical of Canada. 

Because I am a blameless American.