Repair Beyond Property: Restoring Complexity to Land

Land reparations have often been dismissed as too complex, politically unworkable, and legally questionable. Questions of who qualifies are thorny. Land restoration might require a second act of dispossession. Too much time has passed. Claims to and uses of land overlap and are often conflictual. What happens, though, if we approach such complexity as not a reason for the infeasibility of land reparations but rather a reflection of the irreparability of the ownership model of property itself? This is a model, after all, that constitutes an individualistic earth-owning subject with exclusive legal rights grounded in racial hierarchies. Repair rooted solely in this model risks further division and exclusion. How might attending to the complexities of land reparations move us toward forms of repair beyond the ownership model? What might these complexities reveal about the ongoing collective negotiation of the intensive and extensive nature of harm and care? This article thinks with contemporary forms of localized landed repair across the North Atlantic to consider how they take place within normative socio-legal structures while also making space for epistemologies and subjecthood beyond ownership.