Hall of Apologies

(Beyond) Apologies

While universities often promote equity, diversity, and reconciliation, these readings made me see how much of that language functions as a protective layer rather than a practice of transformation. Ahmed (2006) explains that institutional commitments to diversity often operate as non-performatives, statements that name change to avoid making it happen. Her concept helped me understand why so many strategic plans and equity frameworks may at times feel hollow. I have seen how committees celebrate producing a policy as if it were an outcome rather than the beginning of hard work. Ahmed’s analysis reminded me that these discourses often protect institutional self-image rather than disrupt systemic inequities. 

Ambo and Rocha Beardall’s (2023) study of land-grab universities brings this performativity into sharper focus. Their concept of rhetorical removal shows how land acknowledgments, meant to express respect for Indigenous Peoples, often erase the material realities of ongoing dispossession. Reading this, I immediately thought of the acknowledgments recited at every event I attend. While they sound sincere, they rarely translate into shared authority, land return, or sustained partnerships with Indigenous Nations. Their insistence that acknowledgment must be tied to responsibility and redistribution made me realize that reconciliation without material repair becomes another form of institutional branding. Universities, including the one I work at, can too easily transform moral responsibility into public relations.

Palmer (2023) extends this critique by reframing reparations as a practice of relationship rather than repayment. Her emphasis on good relations built through Indigenous protocols of reciprocity offered me a powerful alternative to performative equity work. She warns that repair cannot occur on the same terms as dispossession, meaning that colonial hierarchies cannot be dismantled using the same bureaucratic structures that produced them. I found this insight both humbling and instructive. As an immigrant educator living and working on unceded land, I am constantly aware that I have benefitted from privileges that come with being here such as opportunities, stability, and belonging grounded in someone else’s displacement. I often wonder what reciprocity truly means in this context. Beyond reading land acknowledgments, I ask myself how to act in ways that honour the spirit rather than the form of repair.

As a non-settler who also occupies a learning position within this system, I sometimes feel that opportunities for genuine exchange are limited by the very structures that claim to promote inclusion. Educational spaces often reproduce a quiet segregation. Indigenous learners and knowledge holders are welcomed into designated programs, yet the criteria for belonging remain shaped by Western epistemologies. Palmer’s invitation to think relationally makes me question what it would mean to create common ground such spaces where teaching itself becomes a mutual exchange of knowledge and where learning flows both ways. Perhaps reparative education begins when universities see teaching not as transmission from the powerful to the marginalized, but as a shared act of listening, learning, and co-creation that restores balance to relationships historically defined by hierarchy.

Sriprakash (2022) builds on these ideas by proposing a reparative future of education, one that connects past injustices to future possibilities. She argues that reparations are not only about correcting harm but also about transforming educational systems to prevent its repetition. Her discussion of reparative pedagogy resonated deeply with me. I realized that as instructors we can cultivate repair by inviting students to examine how their education is tied to structures of inequality and to imagine alternative futures grounded in justice and care. Her perspective repositions education from a pathway to personal advancement toward a collective project of moral responsibility.

As I think about these ideas of repair and responsibility, I cannot ignore how reparations and equity work are approached very differently across public and private institutions. Public universities tend to have visible frameworks, committees, and initiatives tied to public accountability, while private institutions often meet these expectations only at the level of policy documentation. Requirements from governing bodies such as the Degree Quality Assessment Board (DQAB) are necessary for program approvals and renewals, but I often wonder how much genuine action takes place beyond the written reports. In many private institutions, statements about reconciliation or equity are present in strategic plans and renewal documents but remain distant from classroom realities. The performative aspect becomes a way to demonstrate compliance rather than to cultivate ongoing reflection or transformation.

Leadership narratives reveal this same pattern. At UBC, Santa Ono spoke about equity and reconciliation as moral responsibilities, describing them as the university’s duty to “do what’s right.” His tone was personal and grounded in justice. Years later, at Michigan, his message shifted toward compliance and policy, and at Florida, it aligned with anti-DEI politics that portrayed diversity as divisive. This transformation from moral conviction to political conformity shows how institutional language adapts to its surroundings. What began as an ethical stance became a strategic response to survive shifting political pressures. It reminds me that institutional commitments often follow the climate of approval rather than the courage of principle.

At the same time, new settlers, including international students, are rarely introduced to the deeper histories of the land they now inhabit. They arrive focused on opportunity and success, yet their education seldom includes the context of how that opportunity was made possible. This realization leaves me questioning how institutions, particularly private ones, could move beyond procedural gestures toward genuine understanding and reciprocity. Perhaps accountability begins when we teach these histories not as formalities but as living responsibilities that belong to all of us. True repair, as these readings suggest, may only begin when education itself becomes a shared exchange, where learning includes listening, giving back, and unlearning the hierarchies that have long defined whose knowledge counts.

 

 

References

Ahmed, S. (2006). The nonperformativity of antiracism. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 7(1), 104–126. https://doi.org/10.2979/MER.2006.7.1.104

Ambo, T., & Rocha Beardall, T. (2023). Performance or progress? The physical and rhetorical removal of Indigenous Peoples in settler land acknowledgments at land-grab universities. American Educational Research Journal, 60(1), 103–140. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312221141981

Palmer, M. A. (2023). Good intentions are not good relations: Grounding the terms of debt and redress at land grab universities. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 22(4), 1239–1257. https://doi.org/10.7202/1106683ar

Sriprakash, A. (2023). Reparations: Theorising just futures of education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44(5), 782–795. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2022.2144141