SANDRA DEVLIN, "FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES: . . . AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US," CHARLOTTETOWN GUARDIAN  (OCTOBER 13, 2001).

Copyright Charlottetown Guardian 2001

Maybe the Queen of England ought to apologize to the Acadians for the dastardly deeds of 1755.

The Deportation or the Expulsion, whichever you call it, is unequivocally an indelible, disgraceful blot on the pages of our history.

No one can rightly deny that.

For the past 10 years, Warren Perrin, a Louisiana lawyer has been pushing for an apology from the British Crown on behalf of himself, his long-dead ancestors and the more than one million Acadians and Cajuns in Canada and the United States.

But, I worry about the damage caused by holding a grudge for 226 years.

I worry about the counterproductive negative energy and the fuelling of a simmering back burner hatefulness that must inevitably spin off from a propensity to focus too keenly on that which divides us.

After all, isn't long memories of real or perceived injustices the root cause of and excuse for every atrocity perpetuated against fellow human beings . . . up to and including Sept. 11 and heaven knows what next?

I think we ought to be very, very worried about the effects of any myopic versions of history touted by extremists, hell bent to gather us into their fold.

Perrin characterizes himself as a survivor of a horrific ethnic cleansing.

His assessment of the long-range consequences as enduring and resonating for generations is, without any doubt, accurate.

Is this grounds for an official apology from the Crown?

Perhaps.

Or is the Deportation being viewed out of context, as comments attributed to one spokesman for the Crown seem to suggested: While "some imperial actions seem . . . quite deplorable by modern standards, they may have appeared to be necessary at the time . . ."

Probably the real truth, blurred beyond comprehension by the passing of time, lies somewhere in the middle.

Unfortunately, it is not difficult to find disgraceful actions of governments and power lords against any number of peoples recorded throughout the annals of time.

I see parallels to the unspeakable cruelty of snatching Acadian children from their parents, never to be seen again, and indenturing them to cruel masters . . . to the wholesale exporting of more than 100,000 pauper children from England to Canada beginning in the latter-19th Century (many of them, too, involuntarily removed from their parents). These so-called Home Children were utterly powerless and frequently regarded as less important than farm animals in their new homes, a practice that was sanctioned by our government and taken advantage of by our very own families for decades . . . well into the 20th century.

What of the Irish pawns of history, an estimated half-million evicted from their cottages during the famines of the mid-1840s by unscrupulous landlords who used nefarious remedies to remove their penniless tenants, like packing half-naked people in overcrowded, unsanitary, often unseaworthy coffin ships, and shipping them off with nothing more than phony promises of money, food and clothing to Canada where they were neither wanted nor welcomed.

Aren't the Scots due for an apology for the highland clearances, when greedy 18th century landlords brutally evicted people whose families had resided on their property for several generations?

If any one people deserve an apology, it most surely must be our aboriginal natives subjected by supposedly civilized Canadians to ritualistic assimilation.

We forcibly removed young native children from their parents' homes and communities so we could brainwash them in residential schools, the last of which was only closed in 1969.

Much of the funding for these schools came directly from the collection plates in our churches and from the money raised through various charity bingo games or bake sales.

Home missions, we called it.

Farther afield, we are all familiar with the concentration camps operated by our enemies during war time, but what do we know about the concentration camps run here, virtually right under our very noses?

One such example, among many, is the 1914 internment of nearly 9,000 Canadians deemed "enemy aliens," of which more than 5,000 were Ukrainians who had immigrated to Canada from territories under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

These prisoners were forced (not to mention free) labourers in the steel mills and mines throughout Nova Scotia.

The list goes on and on: our United Empire Loyalists, our Huguenots, our Blacks, our Chinese and Japanese nationals . . . all unfairly and unjustly punished by wider events in history.

None of us escapes unscathed from a family or cultural history of persecution.

Nor are any one of us lily white and free from guilt or errors of judgment for our own unjust treatment of our fellow humans.

It never hurts to seek an apology or to say "I'm sorry," but that's not a be-all, end-all goal.

Our challenge is in the here and now, to learn from our mistakes and band together through our commonalities with a firm resolve to guard against further injustices one to another.

We can't undo the past, we can only influence the future.