How does Canada compare when it comes to reconciliation?

With the release of the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Canada will take one more step towards reconciling its past and its future, its Indigenous peoples and the community at large.

Although the report is unlikely to appease all sides, Canada is among the world leaders when it comes to addressing historical wrongs.

There are more than 370 million indigenous peoples in the world, in more than 90 countries. They account for just five per cent of the global population but 15 per cent of the world’s poor.

Subject to systemic discrimination and excluded from political and economic power, they continue to be dispossessed from ancestral lands and deprived of the resources for survival, says the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

“Although the state of the world’s indigenous peoples is alarming, there is some cause for optimism. The international community increasingly recognizes indigenous peoples’ human rights,” it says.

Canada

Canada has offered three separate apologies for the treatment of Indigenous peoples.

Then Indian Affairs Minister Jane Stewart issued the first to aboriginal leaders in 1998. The absence of Prime Minister Jean Chretien was noted and the apology gained little credibility. A second apology was delivered in Parliament by a Liberal MP in 2007, again absent of any comment from the prime minister.

It wasn’t until Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself delivered an apology in 2008 that the road to reconciliation began. The apology was preceded by a $60-million residential schools settlement and the advent of the truth and reconciliation commission.

United States, American Indians

The so-called “Indian Wars” have made lucrative fodder for Hollywood westerns but the defining moment of American Indian history is the so-called Trail of Tears, which saw thousands of Native Americans forced to march to a specially designated “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma. It has been estimated that one in five did not make it.

In 1990, Congress approved an “expression of regret” to the Sioux for the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre and in September 2000, the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs apologized for the ethnic violence against Native tribes.

“These wrongs,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Kevin Gover said, “must be acknowledged if the healing is to begin.”

In 2009, President Barack Obama signed, without fanfare, the Native American Apology Resolution, which apologized “on behalf of the people of the United States for the many instances of violence, maltreatment and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States [and] expresses its regret…”

In 2012, the U.S. government signed a US$3.4-billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit over federal mismanagement of tribal lands and accounts. The U.S. has not initiated any kind of formal reconciliation process with the country’s 560 Native American tribes.

United States, Hawaii

In 1893, a group of American businessmen and missionaries, as well as American diplomat John Stevens, organized a coup to overthrow the monarchy of Hawaii. Queen Liliuokalani was forced to abdicate and the group declared themselves rulers of a new Republic of Hawaii, taking over land without any compensation to indigenous Hawaiians. The islands were annexed by the United States in 1900 and gained statehood in 1959.

In 1993, Congress signed an Apology Resolution, acknowledging the overthrow as a violation of international law. The federal government established the Office of Hawaiian Affairs in 1980 and there are state and federal programs to address health, education, language, employment and children’s services for indigenous Hawaiians.

A Hawaii Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was established and Native Hawaiians continue to press politically for rights to self-determination.

New Zealand

In 1995, Queen Elizabeth apologized to the Tainui people for the injustices committed against the large Maori tribe during the English colonization of New Zealand. The apology was accompanied by an NZ$170 million settlement and the return of land seized from the tribe.

That apology opened the floodgates to a series of apologies to individual Maori tribes over the next decade. The country has implemented a treaty settlement process to address grievances over the Treaty of Waitangi, an agreement that the government has acknowledged was largely ignored by the Crown.

In 2008, following more than two decades of negotiations, the New Zealand government signed an unprecedented land and financial settlement with seven Maori tribes and committed to resolving remaining claims by 2020. The deal was hailed as an example to other states by the United Nations and Peoples Organization.

Australia

A 1967 referendum, following a 10-year civil rights movement, removed clauses in the constitution that discriminated against Aboriginal Australians. Like Canada, the government of Australia offered an apology to Aboriginal Australians in 2008 for policies that, like Canada, saw forced child removals, official discrimination and land removals.

Australia did not establish a truth commission and relies on their Human Rights Commission as the primary means of addressing past wrongs. The government did establish Reconciliation Australia, an independent body that implements and monitors the country’s national Reconciliation Action Plan.

South Africa

The formerly apartheid state established its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995, after a new constitution granted Black South Africans the right to vote and a non-white majority was elected for the first time in 1994. The commission – a court-like body where victims of apartheid violence could come forward to be heard and perpetrators could come forward and request amnesty from prosecution – heard thousands upon thousands of horror stories from the apartheid era. In the end, the commission was criticized for failing to hold the leaders and decision-makers accountable. Still, Bishop Desmond Tutu has credited the commission for laying the foundation for reconciliation and the South African process has served as an example for other nations trying to come to terms with violent histories.

Bahamas

The Tainos inhabited the Greater Antilles when Columbia arrived. Numbering approximately 250,000, they fell from disease brought by the Europeans and from the colonialist weapons. Those who managed to survive were enslaved. The Tainos were effectively extinct by 1650.

Peru

With 51 distinct Indigenous peoples, Peru has the largest indigenous population of South America. While many of the tribes that occupied the South American nation before Spanish colonizes arrived in 1500 are now extinct – the Inca for example - Native Peruvians still account for about 45 per cent of the population.

The Institution for Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian People is a public body was established to protect Indigenous rights but violent conflicts continue between Indigenous rights activists and authorities over natural resource extraction and land grabs.