What are the indigenous peoples owed by their colonizers

JULIO MONTERO

Graz

Workshop; Workshop "The Temporal Orientation of Justice"; 2018

The paper is structured as follows. In section 2 I briefly reconstruct the supersession argument and the account of property rights it presupposes. In section 3 I present three successive objections against that account. In section 4 I develop the normative core of an alternative model for thinking about property rights in general and territorial claims in particular. Finally, in section 5 I apply the model to the indigenous case and conclude that provided they live under reasonably just political institutions they must accept their present situation and give up their territorial claims. I think this paper may make two modest contributions to the debate. The first one is to suggest that the supersession approach may not be the best normative platform to assess the territorial claims of the aboriginals, while the second one is to show that both the advocates of the indigenous cause and its detractors too quickly assume that these peoples once enjoyed territorial rights over their ancestral lands. As I hope to prove such assumption is completely unwarranted.