Understanding the Debate on Reparations for Native Americans

Native American reparations are designed to remedy the U.S. government’s historical treatment of indigenous tribes, ranging from monetary compensation to land redistribution and recognition of cultural rights.

Hallmarks of Support for Reparations for Indigenous Peoples

1. Human rights: The U.S.’s treatment of indigenous tribes not only violates civil rights but also international human rights. Even prospective development of reparations requires creating protections against the systems that enabled the US’s atrocities against indigenous peoples, informed by international law.

2. American values: America’s founding legitimacy rests on popular sovereignty and liberal values—values that the US’s territorial expansion and conquest of indigenous tribes violated. Reparations reflect the U.S.’s commitment to secure these values once again.

3. Compensation for Boarding School Policies: The policy of indigenous child separation constituted a cultural genocide. Many records from the boarding schools are still not public. In order to help heal those targeted by the boarding school policies, reparations entail truth commissions like the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy Act, which release these records and potentially provide monetary assistance.

4. Land rights: Monetary reparations for land expropriation have historically acted as bribes to prevent indigenous tribes from pressing for redistribution. Land reparations help return indigenous lands of cultural, historic, and economic significance to indigenous tribes.

The legislative inertia that helped pass federal reparations has dwindled in the last ten years, with the last settlement over the management of federal indigenous lands occurring in 2012. Since then, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy Act has failed to pass in Congress. However, the Department of the Interior did renew the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which provides a systematic process for repatriating cultural burial objects. Recent reparations programs have concentrated on the state and local level. In California, legislators created a statewide reparations fund to help indigenous tribes in 2022, in addition to a land reparations bank in Oakland.

Resistance to Reparations

Opponents of reparations have centered their resistance on the economic or legal feasibility of maintaining or transferring land.

1. Concerns about Qualifications: Some fear that capitulating to demands for indigenous reparations would spur other disadvantaged groups. New claims from different groups would raise questions of qualifications for reparations and the risk of exacerbating intragroup inequality with redistribution. Supporters of reparations argue that they do not necessarily have to focus on remedying past historical injustices, which is a complex issue, but on focusing on the needs of tribes today and one-time returns of land.

2. Concerns for the Practicality of Land Reparations in National Parks: Opponents of returning National Park ownership to indigenous tribes question their capacity to maintain parks relative to the federal government’s fiscal and administrative capacity. By contrast, many indigenous scholars, such as historian David Treuer, contend that tribal nations’ experiences managing their land and negotiating with the federal government create a unique capability to manage national parks.

3. Violating the Statute of Limitations: Some legal scholars contend that raising indigenous land claims in American courts may conflict with the statute of limitations, making their claims non-justiciable. However, legally classifying the federal government’s treatment of indigenous peoples as genocide would refute this argument. Genocide has no statute of limitations under federal law.

The slack in federal support for reparations will likely continue under the current administration; however, state and local reparations efforts have continued to gather and expand support. Nevertheless, the issue still swings between the type of reparations that should be used and their effectiveness.

Understanding the Debate on Reparations for Native Americans was originally published by The Alliance for Citizen Engagement.