The Long Memory of Mourning: An Investigation into the Process of Political Apologies from Refusal to Recognition

The first domestic apology delivered by the leader of the Canadian government was in 1988 for the Second World War injustices against Japanese Canadians.The apology became the first of at least a dozen formal apologies since issued by the federal government to acknowledge past wrongs, particularly to racialized minorities and Indigenous communities.Dubbed as <the age of apology= by scholar Roy L. Brooks, state apologies are wielded in modern nation-building discourses and become the official lens through which societies understand historical events.This research critically contextualizes the agency of aggrieved groups in positing the arc of their own historical narratives and draws from three temporally overlapping case studies to trace a better understanding of political recognition in the settler state, as well as its limitations.The aim of this dissertation is to critically examine the sociopolitical contexts that led to three separate apologies between 1988 and 2010 to better understand why the Canadian state apologizes for some grievances while ignoring others.Ranging from human rights violations and systemic discrimination, to state abandonment of civilians involved in Japanese Canadian redress, redress for the High Arctic relocation, and the remembrance of Air India Flt 182, the through line of these different case studies is the pursuit by each community for political recognition, which this study defines as obtaining the federal government9s formal acknowledgement of its past wrongs in violating a group9s human rights and dignity through acute oppression or structural discrimination.Each study takes an interdisciplinary approach blending archival research and original oral interviews to offer new insights into the provisional nature of political recognition.At its heart, this research examines the decades of state refusal, including their liberal logics of private property and national security, to better understand the subsequent proliferation of settler state apologies.By doing so, this research centers the memorymaking of aggrieved communities in their pursuit of political recognition, memorials, and reparations and critically analyzes the limits of recognition in a settler state.series of interdepartmental meetings held in Ottawa who believed Inuit could be forced back into hunting and trapping for subsistence rather than relying on state relief, even as Inuit were affirmed in 1953 by the Minister of Northern Affairs and Resource Development, Jean Lesage as having <the same rights, privileges, opportunities, and responsibilities as all other 9 Canadians, in short to enable them to share fully in the national life of Canada.=The High Arctic relocatees, who were neither legally under the purview of the Indian Act or treated as equal to Canadians, lived under the wardship of stationed officers from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord with no access to communication with the outside world or adequate access to education or healthcare.Beginning in the late 1970s and through to the 1980s, allegations began to surface against the RCMP for financial mismanagement, sexual abuse, and charges that Inuit had been used as <human flagpoles= to assert Canadian sovereignty, which led to a concerted effort of redress for High Arctic relocatees who self-identified as exiles.10 This second case study chronologically charts the High Arctic relocatees9 efforts to seek recognition for these wrongs and to be treated equally as other aggrieved Canadians, namely Japanese Canadians who received the first state apology as examined in the first case study.Chapter Three examines how Inuit grievances were treated differently by focusing on the tensions between the relocatees9 oral testimonies and public memory-making with the state9s records from parliamentary committee meetings to commissioned reports that adamantly refused any wrongdoing was undertaken.This study concludes with an examination of the state9s belated acknowledgement of its colonial past across Nunavut, including an exploration of the 9 Diubaldo, The Government of Canada and the Inuit, 113. 10 Frank James Tester and Peter Kulchyski, Tammarniit (Mistakes): Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic, 1939-1963 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994).Whereas Wolfe defined the invasion of Indigenous territory for settler occupation as the negative dimension of eliminating Indigenous jurisdiction in favour of settler colonial societies, extractive colonialism becomes the surplus of this negation.Extraction-based colonialism historically preceded settler colonialism, but for settler states, these two forms of colonialism are inextricably linked in mutual economic dependency.Extraction drives the ongoing colonial occupation of Indigenous territories in Canada and internationally in the pursuit of economic gain.The rule of law in favour of settler colonialism supports the ongoing industrialization of extraction.In the mining industry alone, the commodification of surface and subsurface property rights, exploration rights, and mineral rights generates a perpetually expanding field of settler state jurisdiction.34 In other words, settler colonialism and its ongoing expansion of territorial rights <commits the violence of gross interference on Indigenous territories and of Indigenous lifeways by viewing water, minerals, land and trees through the lens of market value rather than the lens of relationship and stewardship.=35 The elimination of Indigenous self-determination is neither a past historic event or in the discourse of apologies, a <dark chapter= in the nation9s past, but its negative dimension 34 A quote from an anonymous Serpent River First Nation elder recounted: <When the white man came here first, he killed our animals and sold the furs.Then he cut down our trees and sent them off as lumber.And now4 never satisfied4he is taking away our rocks.=Pearson9s response to this painful recounting of First Nations history was:

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