The Freedom Of Real Apologies

“And I was personally really surprised that I hadn’t heard about it before. Part of the reason I hadn’t was because it was so quiet. And there really was not a lot of risk taken in how it was delivered. “

Just like Layli Long Soldier, I was really surprised to hear that the US government made a formal apology to Native Americans because I haven’t heard all over the news and social media that the United States Government has issued an apology. I never thought the Us Government would have be able to push away their pride and say sorry to a group of individuals who have deserved one for a long time. After hearing this, I was ecstatic that they finally got an apology, but also, mad that it wasn’t presented as a huge event. It is important to note that Layli never heard about it because she is part of the native American community. If Layli never heard about it before, we can deduce that many other Native Americans probably haven’t heard the apology also.

Now the readers may wonder what the United States said sorry to for. We all know that they took a lot of their land and killed a lot of innocent families, but did the US really admit to their wrongdoings or did they carefully acknowledge what happened. Look at the following quote from the podcast:

"So even the phrasing of “the arrival of Europeans opened a new chapter for Native People” — that’s crazy. It wasn’t opening a new chapter. That’s almost poetry. I mean, that’s a very interesting way to look at what happened. And going further into the document, just the idea — for example, they never mention genocide. Things are phrased as “conflicts,” “lives were taken on both sides,” and things like that."

The United States government is slanting their words to stray away from saying what we did as a country is unforgivable. While they aren’t lying, they are using the words to paint a prettier picture than what actually happened. As mentioned above they used conflicts instead of genocide. This makes sense because genocide is a nasty word that don’t want the United States to be correlated with yet that happened. As you can see, phrasing can be a useful to fuel your bias.

Specificity is so important in this podcast because it shows the United States didn’t say a really sorry and admit to their wrongdoings yet they made it into it is part of our past and we both did things wrong. The idea of specificity in our papers is important because we need to be clear with what ideas we are trying to broadcast. What the United States Government did was use words to never fully state that what happened was a tragedy. The goal of our research paper and to have minimal bias unlike the United States Government.

The structure of this interview most of the time is going off a quote then discussing it, which leads to more personal aspect of the Ms. Long Soldier’s life. Throughout the podcast, you can tell that both Ms. Tippett and Ms. Long Soldier are extremely disappointed in the apology given by the American government. I take away that I could way to interpret the interview I am going to have into my paper is by asking quotes from a specific article and see what they have to say about it.