The University of Minnesota is at the centre of a battle for Native American reparations. The university sits on tens of thousands of acres of land that once belonged to indigenous tribes. That land was sold in the 1800s for a fraction of what it’s worth today – and some think the university, which has an endowment of around $3.2 billion (£2.6 billion), should fork out to the descendants of those who once lived there.
Minnesota is not alone. Cornell University in New York is facing demands to cough up. The University of Wisconsin at Madison also benefitted from land taken from 250 tribes following the signing of the Morrill Act by president Abraham Lincoln in 1862. Madison bowed to pressure from students back in 2021 by displaying the flag of the Ho-Chunk Nation on campus to acknowledge the land taken from the tribe. But gestures alone are not enough to satisfy the demands.
‘You have these schools that have tens of millions of dollars at their disposal, but they are not looking at any ways they can improve living situations for Indigenous peoples today,’ An Garagiola, a descendant of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, told the Washington Post.
The push for Native Americans to get reparations is growing, but is it right that descendants of indigenous people are compensated?
Back when Barack Obama was in power, the issue of reparations for African-Americans was considered a non-starter: the president swatted it away in 2008, dismissing talk of money to right historic wrongs as both unhelpful and unrealistic. Instead, he insisted that the priorities of government should be focused on correcting modern-day wealth gaps and other disadvantages. But in the wake of the George Floyd riots and the rise of Black Lives Matter, Obama – and others – changed tack: in 2021, Obama went on the record saying ‘So, if you ask me theoretically: ‘Are reparations justified?’ The answer is yes.’
As Obama is undoubtedly aware, the reparations idea remains just as illogical and unworkable now as it was when he first dismissed it. Yet sensing a once-in-a-generation political opportunity, indigenous groups across the Anglophone diaspora have emerged from the woodwork. They point to poverty, abuse, historical land theft, institutional racism, the appropriation of sacred sites, and a unique insight into environmental stewardship as major reasons why non-natives ought to be paying natives more compensation, or, ideally, ought to return all formerly native land to the ancestors of natives living today. In Canada, books such as the Reconciliation Manifesto, which advocate control over Canadian land by a tiny fraction of the population, are growing in popularity.
Tribal Native Americans are among the most compensated minority group in the United States
Indigenous claims are meeting with unprecedented success. Canadian federal spending on indigenous people has been ballooning in recent years; it is already seven per cent of the Canadian federal budget, and it is predicted to overtake the current defense budget of approximately $35 billion CAD (£21 billion) by 2026. In the summer of 2020, at the height of the George Floyd backlash in the United States, even the Conservative-leaning US Supreme Court agreed to cede some three million acres of Oklahoma land to the Creek Nation, a self-governed Native American tribe located in Okmulgee. Scenting blood, activists have called for more and more concessions.
On social media, this is viewed by some as a simple restoration of historic land rights to people who were cheated by European-American settlers. The Native American reparations issue might seem not only just, but even obvious; a no-brainer. But taxpayers who are swayed by arguments about land justice ought to understand the full implications of what they are approving, before they countenance the continuing removal of land and tax money from the public purse into tribal hands.
The first argument is an economic one. Many tribes were in fact compensated back in the day, with land, money, or trade goods they deemed valuable at the time. This should not be sneezed at, simply because modern economic growth has changed the playing field entirely.
Today, resources such as land, timber, and minerals are far more valuable than they were in tribal times, before the central United States was connected to the global economy. Modern land and resources have value precisely because there are so many (mostly non-native) people on the land. These teeming masses create massive demand for acreage, which drive up land prices accordingly.
Even more significant is the fact that settlers connected the land and its resources to a global market, just as industrialisation drove demand for minerals and other products sky high. Without settlers, and without the global markets they provide access to, an acre of forest is virtually worthless and the question of compensation becomes a moot point.
Secondly, even the basic questions of who counts as a ‘native’ and who should be compensated is anything but straightforward. Since the 19th century, and earlier in some instances, relatively large numbers of explorers, trappers, and traders came to live with the Indians. Since many tribes had traditions of freely adopting people into their tribes, these outsiders were often welcomed into the tribe and began families. The same process occurred in Mexico and in Canada. Why? Because the simple fact is that many people in the nineteenth century, both white and native, were not against miscegenation, as many might assume today.
Just as many outsiders came to live with tribes, so, from the very beginning, were natives since the days of Pocahontas and John Wompas (who attended Harvard in 1665) ready and willing to spend their lives living in predominantly white settlements. Today, millions of people who self-identify as European-Americans have trace amounts of native blood, testament, perhaps, to a native ancestor who came to live amongst the settlers.
The wide spectrum of people with degrees of native blood already makes the question of historical wrongs rather a semantic one. If you are registered in a tribe but half of your ancestors were white, then does it make any sense for you to be compensated for historical wrongs done by one half of your ancestors to the other half?
Of course, the only way that reparations are going to be awarded in any modern transfer will be by tribe. This opens another can of worms, which is that of the perhaps four to five million people in the US who identify as Native American, a much smaller number – perhaps as low as around two million or so – are officially registered with a tribe, and eligible to receive tribal benefits. The very act of compensating tribes excludes, as is well known, a number of full-blooded American Indians who, perhaps because their ancestors came from different tribes, are not eligible to be on any given tribal register. The odds of such people receiving ‘justice’ fade to close to nil.
And then there is the fact that tribal Native Americans are among the most compensated minority group in the United States. When the reserve system was created at the end of the nineteenth century, something like 2.3 per cent of all United States land was ceded in perpetuity to a native population thought to have been less than 300,000 people. This amounted to more than 180 acres of land per individual, which was much more per capita than the average American owned in 1900. Today, the value of this land can be estimated at $700 billion USD (£575 billion). No small chunk of change, that.
Native Americans began to receive transfer payments from the United States even before the creation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824, and this system was greatly increased by the 1870s. Some scholars have remarked that Native Americans became the first demographic to have access to a regular welfare system, one that antedates the New Deal by some half a century. Today, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education dispose of budgets that amount to some $20,000 USD (£16,000) per capita. In addition, Native Americans are usually eligible for state-funded welfare systems, which across the United States average out to about $35,000 (£28,000) per capita. This is to say nothing of tribal resources, which often provide shelter, for example, at subsidised rates – thus dramatically reducing monthly expenditure for some native households. It is estimated that some 20 per cent of US tribes also have casino revenue of between $10 and $25 million (£8 million – £20 million), making possible per capita payments that soar into the thousands. Tribes also dispose of many other sources of revenue, including mineral rights, rents from shopping districts, and the like. In general, though statistics on this are conspicuously lacking, it seems safe to conclude that Native Americans fare better than other US minorities such as African-Americans.
Is it ‘fair’ or ‘just’ then to transfer land over to tribes, who could effectively manage that land in perpetuity? This type of arrangement has not really been seen in Europe since the end of the ancien régime.
There is also the question of precisely who benefits from these modern land transfers and payments. One criticism is that the tribal system creates an apartheid set up where, by dint of birth, some lucky people get far more compensation and access to group resources than others.
As US speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill was fond of saying, all politics is local in the end. Canadian academic Frances Widdowson has done more than any other scholar to investigate just how much money earmarked for ‘natives’ actually goes to a bevvy of (often non-tribal) lawyers, PR people, local politicians, developers, and tribal insiders who are keenly aware of how new Federal money will benefit them personally. Only the Navajo nation exceeds a population of a quarter-of-a-million, and most are much smaller. Small-scale politics with little outside oversight is a classic formula that risks breeding corruption and graft.
The problems that face many Native American communities are unmistakable. Poverty rates are about double the national average. While 25 per cent of Americans hold a bachelor’s degree, only about 11.5 per cent of Native Americans do so. On some reservations, unemployment rates have hit 35 per cent. Given statistics such as these, it is no wonder that Native Americans are the most likely of any ethnic group to become the victim of a violent crime – albeit sometimes at the hands of another Native American.
The question of how to solve this situation is a vexed one. While tribal organisations undoubtedly do much to enrich the cultural lives of Native Americans and perpetuate certain traditions, the ability of tribal societies to flout normal safety standards, for example, can exacerbate problems. Over 40 per cent of Native youths, for instance, admit to ‘never wearing a seatbelt’ – a statistic which contributes to disproportionately high rates of car-related fatalities on reservations.
Is shovelling more money into tribal coffers a wise or fair use of money?
One thing is certain: the case for reparations is a political novelty, inflated by activists in recent years as self-justification for their antagonistic view of society. As such, the reparations issue does worse than nothing to help the plight of Native Americans, especially women – it wastes crucial resources chasing chimeras, which otherwise might make a real difference in their lives.
Jeff Fynn-Paul’s book Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, is out with Post Hill Press
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