About that Apology – The Independent

For Innu and Inuit, it’s not about money. It’s about the beneficiaries of colonization giving back what was taken.

November 7, 2023

Healing can be far less burdensome when the person who inflicted the pain comes to realize how wrong they were to behave so hurtfully or abusively, and then apologizes for that behaviour.

But if a person apologizes while continuing their hurtful behaviour, then the target of the violence or hurt might feel foolish to accept the apology.

“Sorry” amid ongoing injustice?

The colonization of Labrador by the Newfoundland and Canadian governments has unequivocally left Innu and Inuit in a long fight for their rights, sovereignty —and even for their very lives.

Residential school survivors in this province waited almost a decade after Canada apologized to their counterparts from other provinces. When that apology finally came, in 2017, the Trudeau government deliberately excluded some of the survivors. What was communicated as a personal, heartfelt apology by a teary-eyed prime minister six years ago, was really a political event with lawyers’ fingerprints all over it.