Land Claims: An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States
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- Published on Tuesday, 06 October 2015 00:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1170 .... October 6, 2015
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Land Claims:
An Indigenous People’s History of the United States
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
With a large part of Indigenous nations’ territories and resources in what is now the United States taken through aggressive war, outright theft, and legislative appropriations, Native peoples have vast claims to reparations and restitution. Indigenous nations negotiated numerous treaties with the United States that included land transfers and monetary compensation, but the remaining Indigenous territories have steadily shrunk due to direct federal appropriation by various means as well as through government failure to meet its obligation to protect Indigenous landholdings as required under treaties. The U.S. government has acknowledged some of these claims and has offered monetary compensation. However, since the upsurge of Indian rights movements in the 1960s, Indigenous nations have... demanded restoration of treaty-guaranteed land rather than monetary compensation.
Native Americans, including those who are legal scholars, ordinarily do not use the term "reparations" in reference to their land claims and treaty rights. Rather, they demand restoration, restitution or repatriation of lands acquired by the United States outside valid treaties. These demands for return of lands and water and other resource rights illegally taken certainly could be termed "reparations," but they have no parallel in the monetary reparations owed, for example, to Japanese Americans for forced incarceration or to descendants of enslaved African Americans. No monetary amount can compensate for lands illegally seized, particularly those sacred lands necessary for Indigenous peoples to regain social coherence.
