A Sorry State: Apology Excepted

Abstract

Hegemony is a preferred mode of governance. Because it relies more heavily on consent than on coercion, it tends to produce a more willing, and less resistant, citizenry. By its nature, hegemony depends crucially upon a widely shared, common-sensical view that elites are acting in the interests of those being governed, and this common sense underpins the legitimacy and authority of those in power. Failure to maintain such legitimacy can produce moments of severe crisis in governance, and such threats must be avoided or ameliorated. Typically, this kind of boundary work takes place “behind the scenes.” There are moments, however, when these efforts at state maintenance become visible, and might be investigated to reveal mechanisms that could be turned to progressive ends. We contend that official, state apologies offer one such avenue for investigation, and we offer our substantiation for this claim in the paper below.

“They could take you out for coffee and call it consultation!”: The colonial antipolitics of Indigenous consultation in Jasper National Park

“…It is also problematic to conceive of ''reconciliation'' as forgiveness for an event that occurred in the past. The function of state apologies and other symbolic mechanisms of reconciliation is to construct egregious conduct as being bounded to a particular spatiotemporal setting to (re)produce and maintain the ''common sense'' legitimacy of the state, so that hegemony is not overtly threatened (Waterstone and de Leeuw, 2010). Such reconciliatory gestures may be offered at the same time that comparable egregious conduct is taking place.…”

“…free to determine their own culturally specific forms of political governance and pursue their own social, cultural, and economic development with authority over their lands). In a similar vein, gestures toward “reconciliation,” such as the public apology from former Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the atrocities Indigenous peoples suffered in Residential Schools, or creating space for Indigenous peoples on resource comanagement boards – although powerful forms of recognition and points of hope for many Indigenous people – run the risk of further legitimating colonial hegemony and relations of power (Sandlos, 2014; Waterstone and de Leeuw, 2010). A reconciliatory politics that imagines colonial injustices as occurring in the past does nothing to confront the ongoing alienation of Indigenous peoples from their lands, so that their territories remain available for neocolonial–capitalist gains (Alfred, 2005; Coulthard, 2014).…”

“…Such reconciliatory gestures may be offered at the same time that comparable egregious conduct is taking place. The moral and affective work of state remorse is important for the buy-in of Canadians, and also importantly paints those who do not accept the apology or gestures of reconciliation as unreasonable and beyond assistance (Coulthard, 2014; Waterstone and de Leeuw, 2010). But forgiving a past injustice does not question whether the current park-led authority over the Jasper territory is just, and it ignores the ways in which First Nations continue to be dispossessed from their lands in the name of colonial–capitalist growth.…”

Turning a new page: cultural safety, critical creative literary interventions, truth and reconciliation, and the crisis of child welfare

“…More than a half decade in the making, the six-volume report is thousands of pages long and centers on documenting and honoring statements made by more than 6,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis people impacted by the physical, biological and cultural genocide at the core of residential schooling in Canada (TRC, 2015a). The Commission worked for 6 years, following a class action lawsuit brought forward by residential school survivors and, in 2007, an apology from the federal government about residential schools, which itself received criticism (see, for instance, Waterstone & de Leeuw, 2010). The TRC follows a long lineage of federal inquiries into the inequalities lived by Indigenous peoples in Canada, including the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), and is in dialogue with multiple reports and investigations into the deeply problematic child-welfare relationships between government and Indigenous communities, including in British Columbia where this article is focused (see, for instance, Hughes, 2006; Turpel-Lafond, 2011, 2013).…”

State of care: the ontologies of child welfare in British Columbia

“…As written about elsewhere in reference to ways that colonial powers are sustained, 6 Gramsci's examination of common sense is useful for understanding colonial state hegemony. Common sense has a powerful ability to transform and adapt to 'scientific notions and philosophical opinions that have entered into common circulation' and to then make rigid 'popular knowledge in a given time and place.'…”