Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law. To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right. I disagree with this reasoning. As a counterexample I point you to squatters rights. If I live on your land long and openly enough, my unlawful act will confer ownership of…
Good. The natives deserve a fair shake and the land is roomy enough for people to get along and work together. Forcing that is a damn good thing. The USA has a lot to account for, and it is very sick. Rough roads ahead. Maybe they lead to better places. I do not feel good about the last 4 or so decades of travel. As a people, maybe world, we may well be better for going down this road.
However I also strongly believe that our future prosperity is based more on current actions than past circumstances. And therefore believe that attempts to redress long past ills are actively harmful to us as a society. And furthermore believe that a focus on long past harms on the part of groups who were victimized is actively harmful to the people who are focused on the past.
And therefore I believe that there should be some sort of statute of limitations on which past harms we are willing to try to redress. I don't support trying to redress ills from over a century ago whether we are talking about restoring native reservations, or paying reparations for slavery. If you go back far enough, we all were done wrong to by someone else. And usually you don't have to go back too far to find it.
For example it was less than 100 years ago that my Irish grandparents were targeted by the KKK in a part of Oregon where my cousins still live. I know because my now deceased aunt and uncles told me about it. Many descendants of the KKK members still live in the same place.
On a side note, it is a little shocking to me that so many support a decision in favor of a man who was convicted of sodomizing a 4 year old child.