This article was hastily written for the New Afrikan revolutionary movement in the late 1980s, at a time when there were confused discussions going on about the surprising Japanese-American reparations legislation then in Congress. The overall story can still stand as correct, but there are small factual inaccuracies of the moment. The individual dollar amounts for the u.s. reparations for Aleut peoples were changed after this article was written (upped to $16,000). We received reparations in one lump sum payment, not dragged out over ten years as first proposed in Congress (although the payouts were only slowly dispersed well into the Clinton administration years). In the 25 years since then, the freer Aleut communities have grown economically, both from their commercial fishing and from the islands’ role as a regional fishing industry supply base.
What wasn’t clear enough to us when this article was put together was how the u.s. government intended to use these reparations as a cover for quietly maintaining its “legal” right under u.s. law to carry out ethnic targeting, ethnic removal, and ethnic cleansing anytime in the future. We decided to leave the original article unchanged, though, as evidence of the earlier movement discussion. This article was originally circulated as a discussion paper in the Winter of 1988, and later published in the New Afrikan revolutionary nationalist journal, Crossroad, in April 1989.
How did Japanese-Americans get over $3 billion in reparations from the USA? What’s behind this surprising act “to right a grave wrong,” as none other than Ronald Reagan called it last August?(1)
Japanese-American reparations is as much about New Afrika and the indigenous nations — particularly the Pribilof Aleuts, as shown extensively below — as it is about Japanese. Even more so. When right-wing president Reagan signed the reparations act into law on August 10, 1988, many New Afrikans saw it as a precedent that morally must be extended to them. But what the U.S. Empire is doing now is more about preparations than reparations, i.e., preparing their Empire to do New Afrikan genocide, covering up and legitimizing the genocide they’ve already done to the Native Nations.
“‘The Japanese people were just awarded $20,000 each for America’s mistreatment of them, for putting them in camps during world War II,’ Queen Mother Audley Moore reminded the gathering at her 90th birthday celebration in Harlem last summer. She raised the obvious question: ‘When will our elected officials, our people in Congress, begin to demand reparations for the almost irreparable damage that slavery did to our people? When will We get paid for the 18 hours a day, 7 days a week labor that We were forced to do for free during slavery?’”(2)
Some people are naturally expressing resentment at Japanese-Americans for somehow getting preferential treatment. Writing for The Final Call, Sept. 16, 1988, J. Wayne Tukes asks: “Why should African-American tax dollars be used to compensate others?” Tukes sees a conspiracy, with Japan behind it all: “What kind of pressure is Japan placing on the American government/business to extract a public and financial apology at this time? Is it because of the position Japan holds in the current world economy?”
Two African-American reporters for The Sun, Sandra Crockett and Jerry Bemby, put forward another theory: That reparations is due to Japanese Americans’ superior political power. In their column “$1.7 Million and a Mule,” the two reporters incorrectly calculate that the Japanese-Americans will get “restitution that amounts to $6,666.00 for each year of suffering … At the going government rate of $6,666.00 per year, and calculating it from the arrival of the first slaves in the early 1600s to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 … black Americans are due $1.7 million each.”(3)
After telling their readers that “a lot of black Americans were probably appalled” at the U.S. giving reparations to Japanese-Americans, Crockett and Bemby say that Japanese-Americans’ apparent power should be an example to black politicians: “Japanese American lobbyists pushed hard to get the bill passed and did an admirable job. So it’s time that the members of the Congressional Black Caucus begin pushing…”
These kind of theories sound plausible, but they aren’t even close to true. To sum up what really happened:
Japanese-American politicians didn’t fight for us to get reparations. Nor was there any mass movement or struggle or lobbying for it until the U.S. government gave the go-ahead. Japanese-American reparations first came into legislation as part of a bill by a white congressman to compensate for the genocide of the Pribilof Aleut indigenous people. Japan, which doesn’t consider Japanese-Americans to be Japanese … couldn’t care less and wasn’t involved at all.
Japanese-American congressmen were against cash reparations at first, until the U.S. ruling class decided that it needed this and told them to jump in and take the credit for it. That’s a matter of record. The bill covers up U.S. genocide against the Aleut peoples, and U.S. plans for new genocide against New Afrika. It’s about nothing but genocide, coming and going.
Just to clear away some fantasies: This bill doesn’t mean that every Japanese-American won the lottery or that our community is being compensated for suffering and loss of human rights. What it means is simply that those survivors of the WWII concentration camps still alive today (about ten percent of our people) will be repaid for our property losses back then.
In 1942 we were ordered to sell all our land, businesses, farms, houses, and household goods before we boarded the trains to the camps. White settler vultures, knowing we had no bargaining position, bought up everything we had for nickels and dimes. A new car was worth maybe $50 that day, a home maybe $300 or $500. Many whites just went down to the courthouse and said that a Japanese had sold them their farm, and were given title as new owners. All legal to this day.
Our going to concentration camps was a big holiday to nearby white settlers, a close-out sale. After the War the U.S. government itself assessed our direct property losses at $400 million in 1940 dollars (many billions in today’s inflated dollars). The Evacuation Claims Act after the War only compensated us for those losses at 8 percent or 8¢ for every dollar we lost. So, in effect, this reparations act only repays the property losses of 48 years ago, and only for those 60,000 individuals still alive on the day Ronald Reagan signed the bill. And by the terms of the act, repayment will be stretched out over a ten year period or more, with the dying getting theirs first.(4)[This article was written before the reparations act was finalized into administrative form. In the finished act, the u.s. government gave up on all its penny-pinching hopes. Everyone got one-time reparations payment in full, not in annual payments stretched out over years. In a surprise, the number of Japanese-American camp survivors still alive when the bill was signed turned out to be many more than the government planners had counted on having to pay.]
Played down in the news about Japanese-American reparations was the section of the act giving an estimated 400 Pribilof Aleuts $12,500 each. The reparations act established that the Pribilof Aleuts deserve less compensation than Japanese-Americans because their WWII imprisonment was supposedly justified. This is where the real story begins.(5)
Most people never heard of the Pribilof Aleuts before this, and if the U.S. has its way never will know about them. They are an indigenous people (who do not like being called “Indians”), living on a desolate chain of islands in the Bering Sea between the USSR and Alaska. Until the year 1966 they were the last remaining slaves in the USA.
When the expansionist USA purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire right after the U.S. Civil War, in 1867, the Pribilof Aleuts were just considered part of the property being sold. For the Pribilof Islands, uninhabited by humans before their “discovery” by the Russian explorer Gerasim Pribilof in 1786, are home to 1.5 million seals. The great seal colony, valuable because of their fur, became an imperial business owned by the Russian Czars.
To get the workers needed to hunt the seals and process their pelts, the Czars forced hundreds of indigenous families from the larger Aleutian Islands to move to the Pribilofs to be imperial serfs. Serfs were the bottom class in pre-socialist Russian society. While they could not be bought and sold as chattel slaves were in the U.S., serfs were still a class of slaves. The property of wealthy masters to whom they owed life-long obedience and labor, serfs lived without wages or rights. On the Pribilofs, the Aleut slaves were given Russian names and converted to the Russian Orthodox faith. The islands became slave plantations.
To the Pribilof Aleuts, the change of Euro-capitalist owners in 1867 changed nothing in their own lives. For their seal hunt became a profitable U.S. government monopoly, and they became slaves of the USA. From 1867 to 1966, everything and everyone on the Pribilof Islands was owned by the U.S. government. Although the Bering Sea is rich in fish, the Pribilof Aleuts were forbidden to fish or work for themselves!
Their food and housing was doled out or withheld as punishment by the white slave-owners from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Their only work was the annual seal harvest, while they survived the rest of the year by running up their debt at the U.S. government-owned store. Federal agents tightly controlled travel to and from the islands. Outsiders who might raise political questions were kept out.(6)
In 1942 this tight little slave colony was interrupted by World War II. Japanese military forces captured the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska in June 1942. Hundreds of Aleuts fled to the mainland. U.S. military authorities decided to remove the remaining slaves, since their communities were needed as military camps and the fur trade was suspended anyway. Then, too, the U.S. didn’t entirely trust their slaves.(7)
Ordered by soldiers to board military transports with only what they could carry in their arms, 881 Pribilof Aleuts were relocated to old, unused buildings at abandoned Alaskan mines and canneries. Survivors remember that they were dumped without blankets or even food, forced to live in derelict wooden barracks that had only gaping holes where windows and doors used to be. After two Alaskan winters, one out of every four Pribilof Aleuts had died from malnutrition and exposure.(8)
Another surprise gift from America awaited them in 1945 when they were returned to the Pribilofs. Everything was gone. GIs had burglarized their communities, stealing all the religious icons from the churches and taking “souvenirs” from the homes. Everything that the GIs didn’t want or couldn’t take — native boats, homes, churches, clothing, and dishes — had been smashed. Appeals to the U.S. for emergency compensation brought a response from the U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, who authorized $10,000 compensation — not $10,000 for each person or each family, but for the entire community — about $12 each. Labor and life with the seal harvest began again on Amerika’s arctic slave plantation.
The first change came only in the 1960s, as the world anti-colonial revolution was pressing the U.S. Empire to reform. A political candidate for the Alaskan State legislature tried to visit the Pribilofs, but was denied permission to speak with the Pribilof Aleut slaves by their white overseers. It was a local scandal, since America always pats itself on the back for allegedly abolishing slavery before in 1863.
So in the 1966 Fur Seal Act, a U.S. Senate amendment gave the Pribilof Aleuts the right to travel freely and speak to whomever they wished for the first time in their colonial history. The U.S. government was still their only employer, and still owned the islands and all the physical property on them, however. It wasn’t until 1978 that the Pribilof Aleuts were finally given the right to vote, to have their own local government, and to own their own homes. Finally, they have reached the level of New Afrikans and Puerto Ricans.(9)
The 1988 reparations act, in addition to paying Aleut survivors $12,500 each, gives the Pribilof Aleut communities $5 million as tardy reimbursement for the WWII burglary by U.S. troops as well as $1.4 million as compensation for destruction of religious property. The Aleut people get another $15 million to finally settle and make permanent their involuntary exclusion from Attu Island in the Aleutians. Attu was taken for a U.S. naval base and is now forbidden to native people as a U.S. government “wildlife sanctuary.”(10)
This reparations act is serving genocide, both coming and going. The act gives Aleuts money in return for finalizing U.S. ownership of their islands and natural resources. It even justifies their WWII removal and internment. It is important to America right now to make everything look nice, to pay small amounts of cash to supposedly settle all the old human rights injustices. Because the U.S. is quietly wiping out the Aleut people. They don’t want Aleut labor anymore and, in fact, the possibility of Aleut claims to control their islands and the rich seabed around them is seen as a problem for America, a problem for which America has a “Final Solution.”
U.S. military planners have always seen the Pribilofs and Aleutians as the stepping stones for invaders to the “soft underbelly” of the South Alaskan coast. Their doctrine calls for maintaining strategic control of these colonial islands as a military barrier against the Russians. That is why they’ve never permitted the Aleuts to return to Attu Island. Their worst-case nightmare would be for native people to demand sovereignty and kick the U.S. military out.
Pribilof Aleut poverty (there is 80 percent unemployment) is “Made in the USA.” With one of the world’s richest fishing areas, with large seal herds for food, oil, and fur, the Pribilofs can easily support an Aleut population of only 750. But being U.S. citizens, being part of the U.S., means that all those resources are owned by the U.S. Empire. The reparations act, in appearing to right old injustices, in setting the seal on U.S. ownership of the fur seal trade and fishing rights, is legalizing the decline of Aleut population.
To help break up Pribilof Aleut communities, the U.S. government has even suggested ending the fur seal hunt, supposedly out of respect for animal rights. The seal hunt isn’t so profitable anymore, anyway. Once the Aleuts gained certain rights in the 1960s and 1970s, and started demanding things like electricity, medical care, and wages, the profits went away. It wasn’t seals that were the origin of profits, it turns out, but owning whole villages of slave women, children, and men.
Aleuts are still forbidden by U.S. law from hunting seals for themselves, since the government says that its treaty with Japan and Canada forces it to own the fur seal trade (Canada and Japan are 15% each minority partners). To the Aleuts this is the final irony. In 1911 there were 300,000 seals on the Pribilofs, but now there are 1.5 million (25,000 are killed each year). While Aleuts go hungry and their numbers shrink. One Aleut leader said: “If we didn’t have the fur harvest, we on the Pribilofs wouldn’t have anything. Once there were 15,000 Aleuts. Now there are 3,000 to 1.5 million seals. It’s the Aleut people who are the endangered species.”(11)
It isn’t that Japanese-Americans don’t justly deserve reparations. We do, and this $20,000 is tiny in terms of what we suffered, but that has nothing to do with why the U.S. ruling class is doing this. In 1979 the first congressional bill was introduced to give cash reparations to U.S. civilian internment survivors. Its sponsor, Rep. Mike Lowry (D-Wash.), proposed giving each Aleut and Japanese-American survivor $15,000 plus $15 for each day imprisoned. His bill was instantly unpopular with the white nation. There was the usual moaning from the brain-dead white majority (Lowry got calls demanding “Why are we paying the people who attacked us at Pearl Harbor?”), from candidate Ron Reagan and the GOP.
Japanese-American congressmen, like Norman Mineta (D-Calif.), who are put into congress to represent white interests, were the loudest in their opposition to the Lowry bill. We watched the strange sight of the biggest Japanese-American politicians, such as U.S. senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), attacking the idea of Japanese-American reparations while New Afrikan congressmen like Ron Dellums (D-Calif.) were fighting for it.(12)
U.S. senator Inouye, who was never imprisoned himself, argued that giving the rest of us money would dishonor the memory of our noble suffering: “You can’t put a price tag on it. Putting a price tag on it would cheapen the whole thing.”(13)
Intelligent settler opposition to reparations wasn’t really concerned about Japanese-Americans one way or the other, but was afraid that a bad example was being set for New Afrikans! Samuel Rabinove, the director of anti-discrimination programs for the American Jewish Committee, warned against Japanese-American reparations in this way: “If $25,000 restitution were to be paid for each of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans incarcerated, what would be a fair and reasonable sum for each of the 25 million black Americans who are descended from slaves and who have suffered the most grievous injustice since Emancipation? What would be a fair and reasonable sum for each of the one million American Indians living today for the virtual genocide perpetrated on their peoples? Any attempts to quantify appropriate reparations for blacks and Indians simply boggle the mind and quickly become political impossibilities. A special reparations payment for one group but not for the others is difficult to rationalize.”(14)
Within that settler debate on Japanese-American reparations loomed the much larger issue of America’s unresolved war with its New Afrikan colony. It was for this reason that the U.S. ruling class decided on not merely Japanese-American reparations, but for a final round of public settlements of “all other” human rights and territorial claims against the Empire. If need be, the ruling class was going to shove reparations and cash settlements of treaty claims down the throats of its racist white citizenry.
This policy was advanced, step by step, even during the reactionary Reagan years, precisely because “human rights” is a ruling class strategy! When reparations finally came up for a vote in 1988, the way had been arranged behind the scenes. Rep. Lowry had withdrawn his name, so that the bill could be reintroduced as the work of the Japanese-American congressmen who had at first opposed it. The Republican Party joined the Democrats on this. While a fogged-in Ronald Reagan kept wondering why people wanted reparations, and threatened to veto the bill, his White House Chief of Staff, Howard Baker, and vice-president Bush supported reparations. It sailed through the Senate by 69 votes for to 27 against, and Reagan obediently signed it into law.
America needs to look like it has clean hands on colonialism, has to have final settlements on territorial claims. Because human rights is a world issue now. People around the world already know that the USA is a center of injustice and violence-for-profit.
Look at how the U.S. government has been unable to kill the rumors that Americans are adopting Latin American infants to use as organ donors for their white children. This charge was first made by the wife of the president of Honduras, a pro-U.S. death squad pretending to be a nation. Since then it has appeared, despite U.S. protests, in hundreds of newspapers in Asia, Afrika, and all over the world.
Last October, the European Parliament passed a French motion to condemn the U.S. for this inhuman practice. That’s a special embarrassment for America, since among the 12 nations of the European Parliament are America’s closest NATO allies. Even after the U.S. State Department got the UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar to confirm their denial, that this rumor was without any factual basis, the story still spreads and spreads. Washington cannot stop it, because the people of the world believe that this is exactly what “J.R. Ewing” would do.(15)
The U.S. ruling class needs human rights settlements to help America keep its stolen territory. The world balance of power is shifting. Large empires like the USA and USSR are declining faster and faster, and small oppressed nations within them are kicking to be independent. If that’s obviously true for Estonia and Armenia and Tibet and Northern Ireland, why isn’t it going to be true for Hawaii and Aztlán and New Afrika, too?
Now the U.S. ruling class wants its government to spread some cash around. They want to get people’s voluntary-looking consent to U.S. government ownership of Third World land and natural resources. This policy led to the historic 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Without voluntary agreement by the 80,000 Inuit, Aleut, and other natives of Alaska, who are the true owners, the U.S. couldn’t safely invest billions to develop the huge Alaskan oil fields.
Just imagine what a small Inuit (whites call them “Eskimos” but that isn’t their name) liberation army, with sticks of dynamite, could do to the lonely crude oil pipelines snaking their unguarded way across the arctic tundra. In return for recognizing U.S. sovereignty over their lands and resources, the 80,000 native people got $1 billion, got to set up 13 regional economic development corporations, and got back 44 million acres of arctic territory for themselves (until white people discover something else valuable there).
“Let’s Make A Deal!” is the hottest neocolonial operation going in the U.S. Every year there are more cash settlements. Last August, the 1,400 member Puyallup “tribe” whose 1873 reservation included what later became the city of Tacoma, Washington, accepted $162 million and 900 acres of forest and waterfront land to settle their claim to the city.(16) Ironically, when the U.S. army first rounded up the Japanese-Americans in Seattle in 1942, it named its temporary internment camp after the Native peoples—“Puyallup Assembly Center.”(17)
There are cases now where the U.S. government is forcing cash on reluctant Native Nations (“Indians”). In California, the U.S. government is urging Yurok peoples to accept $15,000 each in return for renouncing all rights to their reservation. In the Black Hills of South Dakota, a sacred Sioux religious and cultural area that U.S. corporations want to rip up for uranium and other minerals, the U.S. congress has voted the Lakota Nation $1.5 billion as a final settlement. But the struggle goes on, because the Lakota have officially refused the money — they want their land and sovereignty, instead. Did you ever think you’d see the day when white people were trying to force an indigenous nation to take $1.5 billion?
This is why the U.S. ruling class didn’t blink an eyelash at the $3–4 billion that Japanese-American reparations will eventually cost. (To save face for Republicans, the Act appropriates only $1.25 billion. That sum is put in a trust and invested, with the interest paid out each year for ten years or more, limited to $500 million in any one year. Total payout will be well over $3 billion.) Billy Joe Blob, white neanderthal, scratches his head and can’t believe that “colored people” are getting all this money. But the U.S. ruling class knows what it’s doing.
The struggle for New Afrikan reparations is coming. In fact, last November 25, people watching the Morton Downey, Jr. television talk show saw a free-for-all on the topic of New Afrikan reparations, with guests including reparations organizers and New Afrikan independent presidential candidate Lenora Fulani. The ruling class is stalling for now, saying that Civil Rights has settled all New Afrikan human rights claims. Japanese-Americans get $3 billion-plus, the Puyallup get $162 million, and New Afrikans get Jesse — a low-calorie substitute.
Don’t forget: reparations are part of the preparations. All these settlements recognizing U.S. sovereignty, all these cash deals showing good-hearted Uncle Sam trying to right old human rights abuses, are setting a scene. They are encircling New Afrika, trying to isolate New Afrika internationally. Why, even former presidents Ford and Carter have said that the U.S. might have to offer Puerto Ricans a showdown “statehood or independence” plebiscite. America ain’t offering New Afrika any choices or plebiscites, though, because the Empire has a different solution on the way.
Until 1988, committing genocide wasn’t a felony, not even a misdemeanor, in the U.S. It’s no coincidence that after stalling for 40 years, the U.S. Senate finally completed ratifying the international genocide treaty at the same session that approved Pribilof Aleut and Japanese-American reparations. For the first time genocide is a Federal crime. We know why the white nation never wanted genocide to be illegal. They put Nazis and Japanese warlords on trial for doing genocide, but were very careful never to make it a crime inside the U.S. — until now, when they feel safely shielded by their human rights and reparations offensive.
On December 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly had passed the pact outlawing genocide, and 97 nations had ratified the treaty. Not the U.S. however, where the genocide treaty was frozen in the U.S. Senate for 40 years. Why? New Afrika, of course!! After the treaty was finally enacted into U.S. law last summer, the New York Times admitted: “Senate racists fought it out of fear that Blacks might use it.” Behind the story of Japanese-American reparations and settlements of human rights claims, is the unresolved war between America and New Afrika: Independence or Genocide.(18)