Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s historic appointment and orchestration of a budgetary expansion of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ from $3.2 billion in 2024 to $4.6 billion for 2025 marks a new era for reparations and Indian treaties. The pecuniary maneuver compared to smaller budget growth in previous years feels reparative in tone yet is more directly tied to Indian treaty obligations. But unlike the more frank conversation about reparations for the Black community –– affecting New York’s City Council commission for its study in 2024, and California being the primary state to introduce the idea into law –– these treaty relationships involve multilayered historical commitments, legal precedents, and ongoing negotiations that resist straightforward financial reconciliation. The budget increase serves as a bureaucratic gesture that acknowledges historical injustices while simultaneously revealing the intricate, often unresolved nature of sovereign relationships between the United States and Indigenous nations.
But the precedent for Secretary Haaland’s strategy was set nearly a decade earlier. The Dakota Access Pipeline and Black Lives Matter movements in 2016 opened a portal through which stepped many “first” appointments and a chilling feeling among colonial governments, signaled by the new vanguard and activism of a profound social unrest across marginalized communities affected by ongoing genocides, land theft, and historical and contemporary erasure.
In a global landscape of incremental accountability, 2024 has witnessed a complex array of government reparations that challenge traditional narratives of historical reconciliation. King Philippe of Belgium expressed his “deepest regrets” to the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, awarding 50,000 euros in reparations to five octogenarian Congolese women who survived Belgian Catholic boarding schools. In Canada, a $31.5 billion settlement addressing First Nations child welfare systems offers a more holistic model of institutional repair and healing. Japan’s ongoing negotiations with Korean comfort women, though fraught with diplomatic tension, continue to demonstrate how historical trauma can be addressed through financial and diplomatic channels. In the United Kingdom, nascent discussions about reparations for Caribbean nations impacted by slavery have gained momentum, with preliminary governmental commissions exploring potential compensation frameworks. Most recently, the Netherlands has initiated a national dialogue and initial financial commitments addressing its historical role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, signaling a potentially transformative approach to confronting colonial legacies. These disparate yet interconnected efforts reveal a global zeitgeist in which governments are increasingly compelled to reckon with historical injustices, not as isolated incidents, but as systemic failures requiring nuanced, multifaceted approaches to recognition and repair.
“Reconciliation itself can be somewhat debatable because to reconcile indicates that at one point the relationship was a good one and we have never truly had a good relationship with the federal government,” said Edgar Villanueva, founder of Decolonizing Wealth Project.
Indian boarding school survivors in the United States received a less material atonement from President Biden in 2024. His speech characterized Indian boarding schools as “a blot on American history,” in a clearer verbal apology for the U.S. federal government’s role in the torture, neglect, and expungement of Native American identity.
Secretary Haaland deftly addressed semiotic differences that reflect the federal government’s approach to reparations versus Indian treaties in a press conference at Air Force One in October. “I want to just be clear about the word ‘reparations,’ you will never hear me using that term because we have a government-to-government relationship with our nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes,” she said. Adding, “The United States, the federal government has obligations to uphold the trust and treaty obligations to those tribes.”
Indian Treaties Are Your Treaties
Between 1778 and 1871, a period called the Treaty Era, a staggering 400 treaties were created and ratified. Treaties were legally binding agreements between sovereign nations, made first by Native nations and European nations, colonies, states, and finally the United States to guarantee each side defined land rights, hunting and fishing rights, sovereignty and religious freedom, self-government, and jurisdiction over their respective lands.
“This is why the treaty conversation hit different than “reparations” language. Sure, we absolutely deserve compensation for genocide and land theft. But treaties are proof that we were and still are nations with legitimate legal and sovereign rights,” said Natives Rising Board of Directors Advisor, Matthew Yazzie. Adding, “They can’t paint us as primitive “merciless Indian savages” when there’s literally hundreds of treaties proving they had to negotiate with us as equals. That’s why they’d rather bury that history and hope everyone forgets these treaties.”
Destabilization of Indigenous sovereignty is enacted most effectively and perniciously through erasure from the law enacted by average Americans who do not view Indian treaties as belonging or related to the same legal structures that define their own lives. By being either unaware of Indian treaties or consciously denying them they become agents of Indigenous invisibility. Yet, Indian treaties are cut from the same cloth as that which fashioned our covenants with Germany and Japan at the end of World War II.
Japanese Americans have recently encouraged President Biden to offer reparations to Black Americans. They themselves were recipients of 38 million dollars in reparations after World War II in 1948 and 20 thousand dollars was granted to individual survivors of internment forty years later in 1988 by President Reagan.
Reparations’ Strange Bedfellows
The United States and Germany, on the other hand, offer starkly divergent models of historical accountability, revealing how national trauma is processed through different cultural and legal frameworks. While the U.S. approach to Indigenous treaties and Black reparations remains fragmented—oscillating between performative acknowledgment and systemic resistance—Germany has developed a more structured, proactive model of historical reconciliation. Germany’s approach to Holocaust reparations, characterized by direct financial compensation, institutional reforms, and comprehensive educational programs, stands in marked contrast to the United States’ more tentative gestures. The German Wiedergutmachung (literally “making good again”) has involved not just monetary reparations, but a sustained, nationwide commitment to confronting historical atrocities through education, memorial sites, and legal accountability. In the U.S., by contrast, reparations discussions remain largely theoretical, with Native treaty obligations and potential Black reparations caught in a perpetual political limbo. Where Germany has institutionalized a national process of confronting its colonial and genocidal past, the United States continues to negotiate historical accountability through a patchwork of limited governmental actions, sporadic judicial interventions, and ongoing political debate, revealing fundamentally different national approaches to historical reconciliation.
Truth and Reconciliation
Despite U.S. trust responsibility for tribes, philanthropy may also play a significant role in advancing treaty rights and reparations within the shifting geopolitical weltanschauung. Humanistic organizations tend to focus on one ethnic group, but some operate under the assumption that Indigenous and Black liberation as inextricably linked.
“My work around reparations is focused more on the Black community. I have found in the Native community there are folks who use that term. But more often than not, Native communities are more focused on truth, healing, and reconciliation,” said Edgar Villanueva (DCP).
An effort to ameliorate historic sins is already more formally underway with Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission started in 2007. By 2015, Canada committed $72 million to support TRC’s work. The Canadian government has also committed a $31.5 billion settlement to rectify harms caused by the child welfare system that removed 115,000 children from their families since 1991, all together creating a more robust model for other governments and NGOs to follow.
“Because there are treaties that have been broken, there needs to be consequences and accountability for the federal government. It’s not just bringing back what you took, or reinstating what you stole, it is also being held accountable and I think there needs to be a process of Truth and Reconciliation,” said Edgar Villanueva (DCP).
Racial Revanchism and Soul Wounds
Donald Trump’s return has reinforced a kind of psychological doomscrolling through history among conservatives that surmises white people are under imminent threat –– yet not culpable in the imagined backlash –– demanding the exercise of white supremacy at all costs, including inflation already mobilized by Trump’s jingoistic antics. Even among less rabid right-wing circles, a pervasive rhetorical strategy is employed when challenged by the past; attempting to sanitize systemic racism, conservative and moderate Americans frequently reframe race-based crimes as distant historical artifacts, disconnected from contemporary social realities. Confronted with evidence of intergenerational wealth disparities and white privilege, these voices often deflect responsibility, implicitly suggesting that Black Americans somehow choose their marginal social position—a perspective that reveals a deeply problematic understanding of structural inequality. This narrative mirrors a form of psychological conditioning that W.E.B. Du Bois presciently described as “double consciousness,” wherein African Americans are compelled to navigate a complex psychological landscape, presenting a carefully modulated public persona that minimizes threat while privately being their true selves and harboring unresolved generational trauma. Such a dynamic reveals not individual choice, but a sophisticated survival mechanism born from centuries of systemic oppression, where the psychological and epigenetic wounds of slavery continue to reverberate through generations, demanding recognition and meaningful reconciliation.
The lack of meaningful redress by the U.S. government and its consistent failure to uphold treaties with Native nations have profound mental health impacts, perpetuating cycles of historical trauma and collective disenfranchisement. Native psychologist Eduardo Duran describes this phenomenon as a “soul wound,” wherein the unresolved grief of treaty violations and systemic dispossession compounds over generations, manifesting in high rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide in Native communities. This ongoing harm is exacerbated by the structural violence of eroded sovereignty and resource theft, which continually destabilizes the foundations of collective identity and cultural continuity. From a Western psychological perspective, Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development underscores how the violation of treaties disrupts the ability of Native communities to achieve a sense of generativity—investing in future generations and building a stable legacy—leading to a pervasive sense of despair at the societal level. Together, Duran and Erikson’s insights illuminate the psychological toll of broken promises, underscoring the critical need for reparative justice, land restoration, and the fulfillment of treaty obligations to address the deep scars of historical and ongoing injustices.
The miasma of fear connected to racial backlash over historical wrongs or potential reparations extends beyond political parties. U.S. progressive leader Bernie Sanders in 2016 said reparations’ likelihood of passing in Congress is nil, and the notion is divisive, and should be replaced by other strategies addressing poverty and unemployment in Black communities.
During an era of purported racial progress, cold statistical realities expose the profound economic apartheid that continues to define the American experience, transforming abstract narratives of historical injustice into a stark mathematical indictment of systemic inequality. In the U.S. today, if the wealth of white households remained static, it would take Black households 228 years to catch up, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.
In 2000, the average Native American household had 8 cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth in a white American household. This gap has increased in the past two decades, according to the National Indian Council on Aging and the Bush Foundation.
The impact of Secretary Haaland growing the pot for the Bureau of Indian Affairs is complicated by the Bureau’s funding primarily benefitting reservations, which comprise 13% of the overall Native population, while 87% are urban Natives living in cities with far fewer resources tailored to them.
America’s Sustainability is its Original Sin
Modern reparations advocates from legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw and New York Senator James Sanders to Black Lives Matter are contributing to momentum in the United States for reparations. But radical proponents of reparations like the Uhuru Movement, an unarmed version of the Black Panthers have been targeted by the state with their Chairman Omali Yeshitela and Chairwoman Penny Hess being wrongfully accused without evidence of being Russian spies. The anachronistic tactic to tear down proponents of reparations may be a red herring about the U.S. government’s strategy and psyche.
Vice President Kamala Harris is also being urged to do fundraising for reparations after her monumental campaign contributions she garnered in the 2024 U.S. presidential race.
Much of the maneuvering in the White House promoting accountability and representation, appointing a diverse administration and 61 Black judges, 39 of whom are women, et al., appear to be signals of racial progress that in some ways may prove to be red herrings.
The Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to renewable energy on its face feels like a solution they’ve withheld until the midnight hour, ignoring for four years one of the world’s greatest threats. These promises are permitted by the DOI, which approved several lithium mining stations in states like Nevada, that threaten delicate ecosystems, sacred sites, and poisoning water and threatening earthquakes and other issues for nearby Paiute and Shoshone tribes (et al.) not meaningfully consulted before sanctioning these projects. At the interstices of renewable energy and treaty obligations, lies this unsurprising spin on an old story of resource extraction.
The cyclical nature of extraction—wherein attempts at progressive representation are simultaneously undermined by continued economic imperatives—reveals a profound continuity in geopolitical strategies of resource acquisition, transforming ostensibly transformative political gestures into yet another iteration of historical patterns of systematic dispossession.
This pattern of calculated resource extraction through diplomatic maneuvering continues in contemporary geopolitical landscapes, epitomized by President Biden’s 2024 diplomatic visit to Angola. Much like historical treaty negotiations that fundamentally sought territorial and resource access under the guise of diplomatic engagement, Biden’s African tour explicitly aimed to secure critical mineral rights for electric vehicle battery production. This modern diplomatic intervention mirrors earlier colonial and settler-colonial strategies of resource acquisition, where geopolitical powers negotiate access to fundamental economic resources through ostensibly equitable diplomatic channels. European nations and the United States are currently engaged in similar strategic negotiations across African nations, seeking to secure lithium, cobalt, and rare earth minerals essential for green technology infrastructure. These contemporary negotiations echo the extractive logics of Indigenous treaty negotiations, where diplomatic discourse masks fundamental economic imperatives of resource acquisition, presenting a continuation of historical patterns of global economic hierarchies disguised as mutual diplomatic engagement.
The global reparations landscape reveals a complex interplay between historical accountability and systemic inequities, as nations grapple with the legacies of colonialism and exploitation. From Canada’s child welfare settlements to Belgium’s acknowledgment of atrocities in the Congo, these efforts demonstrate both the promise and limitations of financial and institutional redress. In the United States, Secretary Haaland’s focus on treaty obligations underscores the distinctiveness of Indigenous reparations, which hinge on sovereignty and legal commitments rather than traditional reparative frameworks. Yet, as resource extraction and broken promises persist, the gap between symbolic gestures and meaningful systemic change highlights the enduring challenge of reconciling historical injustices with present-day realities.
Petala Ironcloud (he/they) is a Lakota writer focused on art, culture, technology, politics, and Indigenous affairs and has contributed to Art in America. Previously, he sat on the board of the American Indian Cultural Center of San Francisco, working with Mayor London Breed to launch the American Indian Cultural District, the first of its kind in the U.S.
Top photo: Flickr (Entrance gate to Wounded Knee cemetery, Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, site of the Wounded Knee Massacre and later mass grave for victims)
