Bringing Culture in: Community Responses to Apology, Reconciliation, and Reparations

In this paper, the author describes historic Coast Salish ritual practices and the concepts regarding wrongdoing and redemption that underlie them. He draws out the implications, particularly the associated dangers, derived from these existing rituals for ritual work conducted by outsiders engaging Coast Salish peoples. Finally, he considers the responses of Coast Salish peoples to recent apologies and reparations in Washington State and British Columbia. Despite the difficulties and potential traps, there can be benefits to considering existing cultural practices and incorporating them with top-down state-driven apologies. Over the last few generations, Coast Salish leaders have developed their own ways of incorporating representatives of government and industry within local rituals of reconciliation. But, as the author has noted, the state's use of rituals of apology to manage relations with constituent groups internationally creates the context for this development in North America, and so he briefly considers the insights and shortcomings of current scholarship on these issues. (Contains 48 notes.)