Sorry day

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In my Indigenous studies class, I’m doing a lot of reading on various native groups’ struggles for recognition and sovereignty, in all possible forms of those words. Most unfamiliar, and therefore in a lot of ways, the most interesting, is the case of Aborigines in Australia. It’s interesting to me simply on the surface because (1) they have never received the type of (limited) sovereignty afforded Native American Indian tribes recognized by the U.S. in the reservation system; and (2) they constituted an entire continent.

An entire continent: I emphasize it because Hawai’i, like the other Pacific Islands, are easily written off as small, nowhere places. The islands are considered by the U.S. and other imperial powers as so unimportant in the larger scheme of First World nations that, so the discourse goes, surely the native people cannot either (a) think that they could ever change their situation, or (b) think that their situation is even worth changing. This is all despite the fact, of course, that Hawai’i and many other Pacific Islands are of dire importance to the U.S., most starkly in terms of military power and tourism industry capital.

The (neo)colonial discourse for Aboriginal people has to situate itself differently, because, in fact, the expanse of Australia, or at least its southeastern cities, is undeniably important in Western eyes. Australia was founded by the British on the legal idea of terra nullius: that is, empty land. The first colonialists to Australia recognized that there were some Aboriginal settlements, but they argued that they were too few to last for long. Thus, the British empire had the right to claim the continent in total. This is nominally different from initial European settlement in the Americas, and American expansion across the continental west: though not all American Indians were recognized legally, many were seen as foreign entities to negotiate with, i.e. make treaties with, and/or kill. This legal difference in colonial tact, my professor suggests, is one of Britain learning a history lesson. The British began to claim and settle Australia in the late 1770s and 1780s: just as they were losing another colony, America. The British didn’t want to fight anyone (other European powers or indigenous people), so they refused to recognize their existence in that part of the Southern hemisphere entirely.

What stuns me so much is that it worked. And continues to work. Despite the clear-cut lingering violence done to Aboriginal people: they are invisible, a whole nation of people whose (post)colonial neighbors continue to act surprised when reminded they exist. In 1997, the Australian Parliament heard a report called Bringing Them Home, detailing the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their homes and communities over 150 years, into the 1980s. From the Report’s website: “The most shocking finding of the Bringing Them Home Report was that to date, not one Aboriginal family had escaped the effects of the forced removal policies.” The Parliament then instituted a National Sorry Day, every May 26th, “to commemorate the history of forcible removals and its effects.”

Sorry Day: so evocative, isn’t it? I imagine my own personal sorry day, with people from my life trailing in my front door with peace-offerings of brownies and poems. Ridiculous. Because apologies are so often so very empty, but even when they aren’t: they are never, in and of themselves, enough. They hold the potential of a new start, maybe, at best. And because apologies are such intimate affairs: one person to another, over something that happened definitively in the past. That there is no one person to either do the apologizing or be apologized to, is what upsets (the defensively unapologetic) neoconservatives about Sorry Day. That what the apology is ostensibly for is continuing to happen, is what upsets the Aborigines.

There is the Hawaiian version of Sorry Day: under Clinton, the U.S. Congress formally apologized for overthrowing Queen Liliu’okalani and the Hawaiian government, in 1993. There’s no day: neoconservatives in Hawai’i would fall over themselves flipping the hell out. And not that a nominal day would do much, as we have seen in Australia. But I do like the idea that it is brought up again every year: even if all it does serve is to make some white guys uncomfortable. That so rarely happens, on a large public scale, in Hawai’i. Maybe I will dig out the date of the Act and start commemorating it myself.

*My discussion of terra nullius is largely based on conversations with my class and Henry Reynolds’ book Aboriginal Sovereignty, 1996.

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Filed under ethnic studies, hawaiian sovereignty, hawaiʻi, race politics

Tags: apologies, australia, indigenous sovereignty, reparations, sorry day