My paper will argue that one of the strongest justifications for indigenous rights lies in their significance for rebuilding trust and affirming equality in societies that have a colonial history.
John Rawls holds that self-respect is the most important primary good for humans and that without it all other primary goods lose much of their value for humans. Consequently, his Theory of Justice and especially the principles of justice are structured in such a way that they provide the social bases of self-respect for citizens. In order to do so, the state should secure equal rights for all citizens which is supposed to express mutual respect and the equal status of each citizen and their life plans. Moreover, equal basic rights enable associations to form in which people can pursue their life plans and receive appreciation. Thus, the priority of liberties protects central sources of self-respect and Rawls assumes that together with the other two principles of justices it is sufficient to ensure equal social bases of self-respect for everyone.
My paper will argue that this assumption does not hold for groups which have been subject to historic injustices. Historic injustices shatter the victim group's basic trust into the state and their fellow citizens. They no longer have good reasons to believe that they will be treated or even viewed as equals and that the state will protect their rights. As a result, their social bases of self-respect will be severely undermined for a long time. I propose that if self-respect is the most important primary good and historic injustices endanger it, states have a duty to rebuild the group's trust in the state and wider society. In order to do so, it is not enough that states re-institute equal rights for all and distance themselves from their former deeds by apologizing. They will also have to convince the former victim group that the historic injustice will not be repeated in the future and that they truly consider them as equals now. I will suggest that a combination of reparations and special protective and recognitional rights for the respective group is most suited to do so.
I will illustrate my argument with the case of indigenous rights. Indigenous peoples are one of the most paradigmatic groups that have been subject to historic injustice. Their current rights claims can be understood both as a demand for restituting what was lost during colonialism and as having symbolic and pragmatic meaning: Symbolic in that recognizing their sovereignty recognizes their status as self-determined nations equal to that of the colonial state; pragmatic in that it safeguards them from exactly the rights infringements that they endured during colonial times, namely loss of lands, destruction of culture, political patronization.
