A/HRC/21/47/Add.1 apology also “urges the President to acknowledge the wrongs of the United States against Indian tribes in the history of the United States in order to bring healing to this land.”16 The full text of the apology bears reading. However, strangely, the apology was buried deep in a defense appropriations act, and apparently few indigenous people, much less the public in general, were made aware of it. 75. Such an apology should not go unnoticed. Rather, it should be a point of public awakening and mark a path toward reconciliation, a path for concrete steps to address issues whose resolution is essential to defeating disharmony, and a path toward more enlightened framing of relations between indigenous peoples and the United States. 76. Among the pending issues that should be addressed with firm determination, within a programme of reconciliation, are the severed or frayed connections with culturally significant landscapes and sacred sites, such as those resulting from the taking of the Black Hills or from environmental pollution in countless places; imposed limitations on indigenous self-governance capacity, such as that preventing indigenous authorities from acting with full force to combat violence against women; the pathologies left by the removal of indigenous children from their communities; and other persistent symbols of subordination, such as the refusal of the United States thus far to make good on its longstanding promise to provide reparations for the Sand Creek massacre. Also to be addressed are the pervasive problems left in the aftermath of Alaska Statehood and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and the still not remedied, yet acknowledged, suppression of indigenous Hawaiian sovereignty. 77. The Special Rapporteur notes the previous significant effort made by the United States to comprehensively resolve the grievances of Indian tribes by its creation in 1946 of the Indian Claims Commission and by extending the Commission’s authority widely to include claims based on “fair and honourable dealings,” inter alia. Over its life the Commission determined hundreds of land claims based on treaties or ancestral occupation, but the only remedies provided under the relevant statute were for monetary compensation upon a finding of extinguishment or taking of rights, a product of the assimilationist frame of thinking of the period in which the Commission was created, which left many fundamental issues unresolved or further complicated. Still the establishment of the Commission represents the capacity of the United States to take sweeping action to address evident wrongs on the basis of prevailing policy preferences. 78. What is now needed is a resolve to take action to address the pending, deep-seated concerns of indigenous peoples, but within current notions of justice and the human rights of indigenous peoples. Exemplifying the kind of restorative action to be taken consistent with contemporary human rights values is the return of the sacred Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo and the restoration of land to the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe. Both land areas were restored from land under federal administration, with no consequence for any individual property interests. Another exemplary action is the more recent initiative to transfer management of national park lands to the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. Such measures reveal a needed understanding of the centrality of land and geographic spaces to the physical and cultural well-being of indigenous peoples, in accordance with standards now prevailing internationally and accepted by the United States. 16 18 H.R. 3326 (111th): Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010.