The argument that governments owe reparations to Native peoples might be a tough sell to many conservatives. But conservatives nevertheless should take the claims seriously. Conservatives are supposed to care about property rights, the sanctity of contract, and the rule of just law. All of those principles were violated, in spades, with respect to government treatment of Native tribes in the Colorado region.
Last week I spent the day at an event hosted by the University of Colorado’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies. Panels discussed land protection and restoration efforts in North, Central, and South America, as well as bison restoration in our region. The day ended with the screening of a short film featuring Richard Williams of the People of the Sacred Land, an organization that also has issued reports totaling hundreds of pages detailing injustices suffered by Native peoples in our region.
In case you are tempted to think of all this as ancient history, too long ago to matter now, bear in mind that Williams heard from the lips of his great-grandmother about the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn.
Ideas for reparations
I think we, the people of Colorado and the government institutions active in our area, should seriously consider several of the proposals of the Truth, Restoration, and Education Commission (TREC), associated with People of the Sacred Land.
Some lands currently held by regional, state, and federal governments could be transferred to tribal control. For example, the reports suggest that CSU holds thousands of acres of land associated with a land grant that could be transferred. The facts here seem a little uncertain; still, the claim is worth looking into.
Moreover, established Native organizations could be granted more control over lands, and especially sites of particular historical significance, kept in government hands. Williams suggested that Native peoples could help manage the bison herd and eagle feather repository at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Another speaker suggested that CU Boulder start up its own bison herd.
Some financial benefits probably make sense. Although hunting and fishing should be managed by the state, I’d have no problem giving free hunting and fishing licenses to Native peoples. Williams also suggested that Native students be able to attend CU Boulder (and presumably other state-related colleges) at no charge. Notably, Fort Lewis College and the University of Denver (which is private) already offer free tuition, and other institutions, including CU, offer some benefits. Increased benefits would involve taxpayer subsidies; on the other hand, taxpayers in the area generally benefit from the lands unjustly taken from Native tribes.
I’m also open to the idea of straight-up cash transfers of a limited duration to Native descendants of people who were dispossessed. Maybe a better idea: exempt those Native people from income and property taxes in the state.
Notably, substantial action already has been taken at the federal level. The National Archives relates, “Between August 1946 and September 30, 1978, when the ICC [Indian Claims Commission] was abolished, the Commission heard and issued rulings in hundreds of cases. Most related to land claims. The ICC was not empowered to grant or restore land to tribes, but it could award tribes money based on the market value of lands lost at the time of taking. The ICC ultimately awarded over $800 million to tribes.”
More recently, Ken Salazar was involved in the “Interior’s trust management of nearly $4 billion in Native American trust funds.”
So it’s not as if no government action has been taken to restore the descendants of dispossessed Native peoples. The open question is whether more still should be done.
The limits of reparations
All that said, I think the TREC reports go too far in some areas. Williams argues that a great deal of privately held property in Colorado, including a huge chunk of Denver, legally belongs to Native peoples. He is quick to add that Native peoples do not wish to dispossess people currently living on this land; hence the focus on government-controlled lands (with voluntary private transfers welcome). Still, I think the presumption that the properties in question are illegitimately held is wrong.
There is practically no occupied land anywhere that did not at some point, and probably at many points, change hands by violent means. Searching for the “true” original owner is a fool’s errand. There simply is no pristine line.
At some point, if we wish to live in a peaceful society, we have to take existing property holdings largely as given. That doesn’t mean governments can’t recognize past injustice or make reparations. It does mean we can’t massively disrupt current landholdings to make up for past injustices. Those involved with People of the Sacred Land seem to recognize that implicitly, but their premises potentially suggest broader conclusions.
People of the Sacred Land engages in a bit of historical fiction to make its case. The organization supports “land acquisition for the purposes of preserving sacred sites, practicing cultural ways, and perpetuation of the sacred traditions of American Indian people who occupied the land within the boundaries of the State of Colorado for over 11,000 years.”
Williams claims Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne ancestry. So did those specific tribes occupy our region for the previous 11,000 years? No. The Cheyenne in particular violently invaded the region in the aftermath of Spanish movement into the Americas. The horse-based lifestyle of the plains Indians was made possible by the Spanish reintroduction of horses into North America. Although horses originally evolved in North America, they were driven to extinction here by climate changes, perhaps with the help of human hunting.
So if we were to take seriously claims of original ownership, we’d have to transfer lands, not to the tribes displaced by European settlers and the U.S. government, but to the tribes displaced in turn by those invading tribes.
If instead we take longstanding use and occupation of lands as sufficient for ownership rights, then we have to recognize legitimate claims both by dispossessed tribes and by people who have since lived on the land. This is inherently messy. But I think justice demands that we take both current land claims and claims of past injustices seriously.
A world that could have been
If I could live multiple lives, in one life I’d write a novel of alternate historical fiction in which European settlers and U.S. and state governments scrupulously respected the rights of Native peoples.
What might the world now look like? What I think roughly would have happened is that tribes would have maintained control of a great deal of land in our region while ceding substantial control, through leases and permanent property transfers, for development, cattle ranching, mining, and, later, oil and gas extraction. Native peoples probably would have engaged extensively in those enterprises on the lands they maintained, in conjunction with conservation.
This idea that Native peoples were anticapitalists and environmental absolutists is largely a myth, a projection of contemporary leftist ideologies. As the history of Bent’s Fort illustrates, Native peoples actively participated in the trade of buffalo robes. Cherokee also played some role in the gold rush.
As the Ken Burns film “American Buffalo” shows, European settlers and travelers, sanctioned by government, nearly drove the bison to extinction in an intentional effort to deprive Native peoples of resources. In a just world, Native tribes would have been empowered to protect the bison on their lands, and people would have come to realize that overuse of bison threatened the herds, necessitating management systems, much as today the state manages herds of deer and elk.
A tragic fact of history is that Native peoples suffered immense losses from European diseases against which they had not built immunity. Tribal leaders may have been more willing to deal away more land (or land use) in such circumstances than if Native populations had not suffered such losses. Regardless, the diminished strength of Native tribes hardly was justification for European settlers to ignore their land claims.
Progressive dissonance
There is a strange tension in modern progressive thought. On one hand (and here I agree), progressives regard the current treatment of immigrants as a grave injustice, because “there’s no such thing as an illegal human,” and people have some right to migrate. On the other hand, progressives tend to regard European settlement of the Americas as an unalloyed evil. So which is it? Do people have some right to migrate, or not? If yes, then Europeans had some right to settle North America. If no, then people today have no right to immigrate to America.
I think the answer is that just migration respects the rightful property holdings and land use of people already in the area. The principle is easy to state; the details are very hard to sort.
Regardless, as much as we can imagine what could have been and should have been, the fact remains that governments of the region treated Native peoples horribly unjustly, especially during the later 1800s. I think this establishes a case for targeted reparations.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
