Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

by Patty Krawec

This very simplistic way of understanding apology and forgiveness is okay for small children, and it helped me move past my frustration with whatever it was he had done and would probably keep on doing. But it is not sufficient for adults. Yet when we talk about reconciliation with Indigenous people, that is exactly the way that we talk about it. There is a push for the Catholic Church to apologize for its role in residential schools. Other denominations in Canada have apologized. The government has apologized. And after the remains of hundreds of children were found outside one residential school after another after another in the summer of 2021, the demand for the Catholic Church to apologize heightened. But the way that settlers and Indigenous people think about apology and reconciliation is very different, and so we use the same language, but we don’t mean the same thing. Churches and governments keep what they stole and tell us, “We said we’re sorry; you have to forgive us.”