I strongly recommend taking the time to watch this documentary by Canadian filmmaker Mitch Miyagawa.  With a Japanese-Canadian father, an Aboriginal step-mother and a Chinese-Canadian step-father and three official Canadian government apologies to his family, he asserts that he has the most apologized to family in the country.  His exploration of his family history and the meaning of an apology is at times funny and light and at others very moving and heart wrenching.

http://ww3.tvo.org/video/184814/sorry-state

A couple of the conclusions he comes to are:

There is a difference between an apology and acknowledgement.  Sometimes, the acknowledgement is more important than the apology. 

Apologies are more about the future than about the past.  It’s about much more than just saying something. 

Apologies, acknowledgement, stories and all the memorials and other ways we have of dealing with the mistakes of our past, they aren’t about endings, they’re about beginnings.