Reparations prevent self-determination – only land return can disrupt colonialism.

<(e) Inability to Transform Racial Attitudes, Alter Legal Structures, or Restore Land Although a claim for Indian reparations would present a potentially transformative national moment wherein to challenge and upset the assumptions and normative judgments of Indian inferiority and United States' infallibility, a lump-sum payment, although it might materially enrich Indian tribes, would be unlikely to advance the progressive perfection of the American social and legal order. Although Indian tribes seeking to obtain a [*133] measured separatism might be less concerned than other social groups about the prospect that reparations would permit the United States to relax enforcement of civil rights laws on their behalf or to withdraw from the more general struggle for fourth-tier democracy, n618 payment of reparations might obviate recognition of any continuing responsibilities under the trust doctrine, including programs to aid tribes in the transition to self-determination. n619 Moreover, Indian reparations would thrust Indians and non-Indians into contending camps and lock them in political and legal combat in which anything goes in the fight over the wealth and power of the state. n620 In so doing, Indian reparations would miss a key opportunity to employ moral argument n621 to creatively restructure attitudes and institutions and reconcile interdependent peoples, processes that are almost certainly necessary conditions precedent to the award of Indian reparations and, even more significantly, to the reinvestiture of legitimacy in the nation. n622 Furthermore, money cannot be directed to the satisfaction of the harms of which Indians complain: most seek to exercise the rights to self-determine and to express their unique cultures and religions upon sacred ancestral lands. n623 Only land restoration and legal restructuring to permit development of separate political identities can potentiate these fundamental human rights and relieve the economic deprivation and emotional pain borne inter-generationally by Indian tribes and individuals. In sum, because reparations are a far-too-costly and - [*134] improbable remedy toward which to commit their resources, n624 because reparations portends more racial strife than reconciliation and fixates on cash rather than justice or healing, n625 many Indian tribes and indigenous rights groups n626 oppose it as a remedy.>