I don't know enough about the history between the white Canadian nation and the First People to comment on what could or should happen w/regard to reparations. In the US, just focusing on economic harm to Black people, harm to Black people continued after 1865 and into today. I saw one study that specified damages at $150 million per Black person. I'm not sure even that amount would make whole the people harmed by US racism against the Black people of our nation. I'm pretty sure a cash payout of that amount will not happen I said it to provide scale to how much harm and how much benefit was gained by those doing harm. It's a very big dollar figure. How should that money be allocated? I very much liked what Kamala Harris said about reparations:
You can look at the issue of untreated and undiagnosed trauma. African-Americans have higher rates of heart disease and high blood pressure. It is environmental. It is centuries of slavery, which was a form of violence where women were raped, where children were taken from their parents - violence associated with slavery. And that never - there was never any real intervention to break up what had been generations of people experiencing the highest forms of trauma. And trauma, undiagnosed and untreated, leads to physiological outcomes.
unless there's intervention done, it will appear to be, perhaps, generational. But it's generational only because the environment has not experienced a significant enough change to reverse the symptoms. You need to put resources and direct resources - extra resources - into those communities that have experienced that trauma.
I think that the word, the term reparations, it means different things to different people. But what I mean by it is that we need to study the effects of generations of discrimination and institutional racism and determine what can be done, in terms of intervention, to correct course.
I'm not going to derail this thread and won't comment on this topic going forward. This is, after all a thread for Canada stuff. I posted my comment to provide insight into where the topic of reparations may be headed in the US.