Collective Wrongdoing, Reparations, And Native Americans

North American history is replete with accounts of atrocities being inflicted by members of one group on members of another. Some such examples include: the seizure by the French, the British, the Spanish, the Dutch (and later by the United States and Canadian) governments, respectively, of millions of acres of land inhabited by Native (North) Americans; the genocide (or attempt therein) of various Native Americans¹ by the U.S. military at the order of, among others, former U.S. president Andrew Jackson; the enslavement of several Native Americans in the U.S., etc.² These and other significant harms have found little or no justice in the form of reparations. This chapter seeks to clarify the nature of reparations and analyzes philosophically objections to policies of reparations to historically and seriously wronged groups with the primary focus being on the Native American experiences in the U.S.

It is an embarrassing fact that major Western political philosophies by and large ignore (or, at best, give short shrift to) the claims of Native Americans4 to property.5 And given the importance of the concept of private property rights in historic and contemporary Western political philosophy,6 it is vital to delve into problems which, among other things, question who ought to be seen as having the overriding moral claim, interest or right to, say, the lands on which entire countries and their respective citizens reside, such as with the U.S.. For the moral legitimacy of a country, it is assumed, is contingent on at least the extent to which that country acquires justly the land on which it and its citizens reside. The problem of reparations to Native Americans raises queries concerning the fundamental moral legitimacy of the U.S.. For it challenges the moral basis of putative U.S. rights to lands that, it is assumed, are necessary for its economic and political survival.