Reflection on the historical injustice inflicted on many formerly colonized groups has left us with a peculiar account of their entitlements to land and resources. One important upshot of that account, relevant to present day distribution, is that most people tend to agree that indigenous people have special claims to the natural resources essential to the continuous pursuit of particular group projects. In this paper I argue against that claim. In the first part of the paper I suggest that those claims should be considered in analogy to individual expensive tastes, and are subject to similar distributive constraints. In the second part of the paper I explore the implications of my view and defend it against two objections: the triviality objection which argues that my view trivializes the claims of indigenous people and fails to show respect for their past suffering and the asymmetry objection which insists on the difference between certain groups’ claims to resources and individual ones. I conclude with some “bullets to bite” for those who resist my claim.
