Last week Australia's Parliment offered an official apology to the native people of the continent. The wording is forceful and active, acknowledging the history of brutality and racism that has occurred up into the current generation: We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

And you may ask yourself, why has the U.S. not apologized to this continent's Native Americans? According to a video on the Resolution of Apology to the Native Peoples website, it appears that the public acknowledgement would be presumed to go hand in hand with the R word, reparations. In 2007 H.J. Res. 3 was introduced : To acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the United States Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.

I am thinking about this so much because as I am preparing for my written exams in ethnomusicology I am painfully aware of the discipline's historical origins in these "ill-conceived policies," the dark impulse to send anthropologists along on behalf of the Indian Affairs Bureau to document the "culture" of the very communities the government was disrupting, dismembering, betraying or warring with only a generation prior. The post-colonial critique on anthropology has addressed these questions in a macro, theoretical way but the thing is...I spend a lot of time thinking "How am I implicated? What is my responsibility as a part of this community," and as such, I feel that it is quite important to support resolutions like the one above that show that the might of the current American regime is not built only on the righteousness of those Enlightment documents but also the blood and betrayal of our by my ancestors in their manifest destiny. There are every day current manifestations of these historical injustices, as evidenced in the video on that NativeRes site, and it is through this country's domestic neglect of poverty and racism that country's internationally have mocked the U.S.'s attempt to provide a "moral example" for developing nations. It took too long for Australia, but at least this is a beginning. As Americans, how can we do as well or better?