The greatest harm done to us was the theft of land – our homeland – often accompanied by forced removals and under the cover of law. To American Indians, land is not simply a property value or a piece of real estate. It is a source of traditions and identities, ones that have emerged from centuries and millenia of relationships with landscapes and seascapes.

That territory is irreplaceable.

Reparations are ill-suited to address the harm and damage experienced by people who understand themselves, in a very practical and moral sense, as members of communities that include nonhuman life. For many Native Americans, our land (including the air, water, and biological life on which we depend) is a natural relative, not a natural resource. And our justice traditions require the restoration of our land relationship, not monetary reparations.