American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In his recent book, Elazar Barkan proposes that since August 1952, when Germany agreed to compensate Jews for the crimes of the Holocaust, there has been a gathering momentum for nations to admit that they committed historical injustices and to offer restitution to the victims. The claims of indigenous peoples for return of land, for compensation for dispossession, and for repatriation of skeletal remains and other sacred items are an essential part of this transition to what Barkan sees as a new age of “moral politics.” By admitting to injustice and offering some form of compensation, Barkan argues, the state assuages its guilt and the indigenous population gains a reinforced identity, an enhanced legitimacy, and perhaps improved economic status. In Barkan’s conception, this is a global process worked out differently in each national setting, because each nation has a particular colonial narrative and a distinctive political culture. This is the point of departure for this article, a comparison of the US Indian Claims Commission, which heard Native American claims from 1946 to 1978, and New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal, which has received Maori claims since 1975. The objective is to ascertain which forum-and society-has achieved the most in redressing the injustices of colonial rule and which, therefore, offers the better precedent for other societies negotiating the contorted terrain of land and other categories of claims. There exists a considerable body of scholarship comparing indigenous peoples’ dispossession and claims in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Yet the United States and Native Americans are often set apart in such comparisons. The assumption seems to be that, because the United States (through the Marshall Trilogy) early and unambiguously recognized Native title in law as a right of occupancy that could only be extinguished through treaty, its relationship to its indigenous people is exceptional.