Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
MR. KEVIN GOVER: Thank you very much, Tim. First, let me welcome you
all to the National Museum of the American Indian. It is our honor to have you here during
this American Indian Heritage month. We have a little bit of housekeeping. I would like
to remind everyone to please turn off your cell phones. We are recording and you know
how that goes. I’m going to be introducing our panel to you one by one, and you have
bios in your program, so I’ll be brief with each
of them. But let me talk just a little bit about the genesis of this program. While I
was at the Interior Department in the late ‘90s,
we had the experience of President Clinton making a decision that he would travel to
the Pine Ridge Reservation as part of a tour for his program to fight poverty. And at the
Interior Department, or more accurately, at my office at the Interior Department, we began
thinking about whether it would be possible to urge the president to offer an apology
to the Lakota people for the historical conduct of the United States
toward them in particular, and in specific, the taking of the Black Hills. Well, let me
tell you, that went over like a lead balloon. That has led me since to wonder what are the
conditions that lead to national apologies to indigenous people or other peoples who
have been oppressed? The United States has offered similar apologies in other
cases. In the case of Native Hawaiians where the United States has officially apologized
for the overthrow of the kingdom of Hawai’i. The United States has also offered
both an apology and compensation to the Japanese Americans who were interned during World War
II. And yet, there still seems to be some difficulty in our national politics about
offering apologies to Native Americans, to African Americans, for slavery, so we wanted
to begin to explore that. The other thing that we’ve noticed in the past
two decades is that the pace of these apologies has picked up rather dramatically, and two
in particular come to mind. First was the apology of the Australian government to the
Aboriginal people for the taking of children during a period of policy that they now refer
to as the lost generation. The second was the
apology by the Canadian government to the First Nations of Canada for the residential
boarding schools in that country. We do have some live examples from which to work. As
we continued our research, we began to discover
other national apologies, for example, the apology in Guatemala, and so it seemed a timely
event just in those circumstances. But one other thing of note is that there is, in fact,
pending in the United States Congress a resolution that would offer an apology to Native Americans
for the historical conduct of the United States vis a vis Native American
people. That resolution as it happens passed the Senate earlier this fall. It has not yet
passed the House of Representatives, and we have no idea whether it will do so or not.
We will have a presentation by our good friend, Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, to discuss
that potential apology, if you will, and just to
explore these issues. Among the issues we have to think about is what good is an apology?
What’s the point? Does it really undo anything? Does it do anything? What are the
benefits? Is there any downside to apology? Just basically, what does it all mean. We
have some very outstanding people to help us explore these issues, and I am grateful
to all of our panelists for agreeing to come here today.