Repatriation and Reparations: The Critical Intersection
What might happen if we think about both of these things at once?
A couple years ago, on the second day into a movement conference on municipalist efforts, I cornered one of the keynote speakers from the opening evening panel. A burr had been sticking in my side for some time, and I had become convinced that if anyone had an answer for me on how to take that burr out and maybe even make it useful, this organizer—incredibly well-versed in history and economics, and part of some collective efforts truly pushing back on both white supremacy and capitalism—would have an answer.
“I have a question for you,” I told the organizer. “I want to put myself at the intersection of native sovereignty and [Black] reparations—it seems to me that whatever sits right there is going to get us where we need to go, and that’s where I’d like to be. And I’m wondering, from your perspective, what you think is at that intersection?”
He, older and Black, took a look at me—a younger white organizer whom he had only just met—and opted to make sure I had some context about the potential frictions at that meeting place. He described the difficulty, as a Black man in the southern U.S., of sitting through discussions about sovereignty that overlooked tribal participation in slavery. I had, truthfully, at that moment not spent much time dwelling on that fact, though I knew it. “Yes,” I said. “There are many forms of harm, from many directions, that will need repair.”
At which point he acknowledged that he thought this also a fruitful place to work in, but that he did not know, either, what that might look like, though he would be interested to find out. As were others, it turned out, who had begun leaning in to hear our exchange. I ended up with a small list of email addresses of various folks interested in pursuing the conversation.
Only I remained unclear on how to facilitate such a discussion—with parties from across the globe, no less. I had and have a fair amount of respect for this particular organizer; I had no interest in wasting his time, if I was not willing to seriously put in the work myself, which I did not think I was yet doing. I felt like I needed a better starting place than the hunch I was walking around with about ‘the space I wanted to be in.’ I never wrote the follow-up email.
Unsettling is, in a way, an attempt to do the learning that might make it possible to really collaborate on such work and gain the capacities to finally write that darn email. Learning that might generate possible answers to that question—what is at the intersection of reparations and indigenous sovereignty? Because two more years of running around working on climate action, though it began to touch on these themes, never took me fully into the heart of them. Nor did last year, with all its fretful focus on the presidential election; not even with all the work to be done to support the work for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd. Clearly, there is momentum on both fronts. Who would have thought that 2020 would have given us both #DefundthePolice and #LandBack as trending hashtags? Yet I tend to experience, in my interactions with movement groups, the feeling that these are for still mostly running on parallel tracks. Cross-acknowledgment, inter-movement solidarity, yes; broad consensus about the critical pieces of work at their intersection, less so. Consensus about the broad systems that need to be radically changed, again, yes: white supremacy, capitalism, settler-colonialism, etc. But about the actual work, the effective actions, at the intersection of those three things? Less so.
There are others trying to think through this intersection. Recently, I came across a literature review entitled Repatriation and Reparations: Land-Based Indigenous and Black Futurity by artist Olivia Kutse (who DJs as livtuwang) during her time at Seattle University, which I found useful for its overview of different Indigenous and Black theoretical perspectives on this question and the ways in which they may fail to fully align. She likewise notes the absence of clear solutions in this space, and the tendency to forego a full view of the problem:
However, there is a deficit in literature that moves beyond the problem Black occupation poses for Indigenous liberation, particularly in work that theorizes Black liberation. “The next step, however, is for Black people to begin to interrogate how “stolen people on stolen land” can situate themselves in relation to today’s existing Native peoples who are still struggling to reclaim stolen lands” (Amadahy and Lawrence 125:2009). In many works articulating conceptions of Black liberation, the settler state is taken for granted or conceived of as a historic event rather than as a continuing structure, such as in the case of some theories of reparations.
Kutse ends her review on several important points. The first is that “Black and Indigenous solidarity is inescapably land-based.” The second takes up the notion of “incommensurability” (described by scholars such as Eve Tuck) and questions the possibility of the very type of intersection that my question hopes to find. “Indigenous-Black solidarity can never be fully aligned,” is her blunt assessment. But this is not a reason to cease collaboration or the process of seeking alignment. As she concludes:
From the literature reviewed here, the need to theorize use of a method that simultaneously does not reproduce settler colonial methods of inquiry and envisions the tangible futurity of Black and Indigenous collaboration and resistance arises. Fruitful collaboration will recognize barriers to full alignment, persist despite them, and seek to grow Black and Indigenous resilience. (How) do the existing frameworks and practices of Black and Indigenous land-based collectives in the United States and Canada align in their engagement with the land and strategies for liberation?
It seems that Kutse in many ways ended up in the same place. What is at the intersection of repatriation and reparations, if they do indeed intersect? I still think the answer to this question is key to upending all the destructive systems people love to label and shout about. How do we move beyond labeling and shouting? Again, I agree with Kutse: we need to be looking at land. How to repair the relationship with those who were made to work upon it by force. How to repatriate it to those who belong to it but had that relationship severed. How—and I think this is a critical addition to what Kutse and others have laid out—how to transform the broader social relationship to land, our very conception of how connections are made to it. Such transformation must, I believe, ultimately involve finding methods for decommodifying. How do we cease to think of land as something that any group of people owns, and think of it instead as a living entity to which they might belong?
There are, indeed, collectives aiming to do some or all of these things, and we’ll be digging into some of the details of those efforts in future posts. If you are a reader who happens to know of projects or collaborations that you think exist in that space—the nexus of repatriation and reparation, or of restoration of people to land in a way that evades replication of colonial logics—I’d love to learn about them. Send info my way at unsettling@substack.com.
Thanks for reading, and see you next time—
Meg at Unsettling