Abstract

Excerpted From: Anna Kirstine Schirrer, Ancestral Rights, Ancestral Land: Reparations and Collective Property in the Plantation's Wake, 48 PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 1 (May, 2025) (15 Footnotes/References) (Full Document)

In 2013, an intergovernmental organization called the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) endorsed a mandate for a Reparations Commission along with the establishment of national reparation committees across CARICOM's member states. The national committees, such as the Reparations Group, were tasked with gathering historical information and outlining evidence of contemporary racial discrimination resulting from the earth-shattering and structuring processes of transatlantic slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Unexpectedly, in addition to preparing case material for the regional and international CARICOM reparation claim, the Reparations Group (hereafter noted as the group)--whose members are primarily of African descent--began crafting a communal claim to land in the form of an African Ancestral Rights Bill (hereafter referred to as the bill). Winston, the legal adviser to the group, said the labor of enslaved people “indigenized land in Guyana,” and for this “uncompensated labor, Guyana owed the African Guyanese reparatory land justice.”,

The bill required the government of Guyana to recognize African Guyanese rights to 15,000 hectares of land in the constitution, which was the equivalent of about 18 percent of Guyana's total land mass. The bill was framed around the idea of ancestral rights and so diverged from more conventional communal claims to land as it represented a declaration of a debt in the form of land that the postcolonial national government--the successor state of the Dutch and British colonial administration--owed to the descendants of enslaved people in Guyana. Most other Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous claims to land based on the collective right to property in the region were structured around an assertion of continued occupation of land and traditional forms of livelihood. The bill positioned descendants of enslaved people as people of African descent in Guyana to whom the state owes an unpaid debt for centuries of enslaved labor: the materiality of that debt was land. This narrative consistently reappeared in the language of group members speaking on the bill. The bill's framing of ancestral rights was not immediately legible in a conventional liberal imaginary of international human rights, including Indigenous collective property rights. This tension prompted the question: How do members of the group understand an idea of ancestral rights to land? And how does an idea of ancestral rights converge on or diverge from Indigenous rights to land?,

This article discusses the legal implications of rights claims to land raised by people of African descent in the Americas by focusing on an interpretation of ancestral rights in the local context of Guyana and in what I refer to as the plantation's wake. I invoke an idea of the plantation's wake because I believe that to adequately conceive of the legal-political dimensions of these rights-claims, scholars and practitioners need to consider their emergence within a longer history of the plantation economy in the Caribbean. The notion of ancestral rights, I argue, offers away to conceive of material reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans in the postplantation context of the Caribbean.,

Two characteristics define the claim for such rights. First, these are claims raised by descendants of enslaved persons, who under the Dutch or British colonial administration may not have escaped the plantations; as a group they do not self-identify as Indigenous or practice distinct cultural traditions in any formalized way that relates to a specific place. Group members lead modern working-class lives and reside in different areas of Georgetown and other urban areas. Second, the reasoning of the bill links to the notion that a debt is owed for uncompensated enslaved labor.,

In most cases, neoliberal multicultural policies tie identity to territory through ethnic recognition politics when granting title to land to communities. Scholars in the social sciences are increasingly studying how fixed legalistic categories of ethnicity are inadequate to address the various ways in which communities relate to land. However, not all communities--particularly of African descent in the Americas--can successfully claim rights to collective land title. Indeed, some claimants represent an “Afro-descendant political subject” that does not “subscribe to the representations of rural, sea-side or riverine commonalities with traditional production practices, harmonious relationships with nature and a collective territory”. The observation that the group's bill makes no claim based on traditional cultural difference or continued occupation of land illuminates a need to examine more closely the radical terms of the bill.,

The article joins a broader critique of late liberal governance of racial difference, forging novel questions about material reparations as ancestral rights grounded in histories of Black dispossession. Resisting the broader erasure of histories of Indigenous Africans in settler colonial studies, this article engages with the idea of ancestral rights to land as reparations for chattel slavery, linking to the ongoing development of Black indigeneity as a more theoretical yet vital analytic through which to understand attempts to create belonging on dispossessed Indigenous land. As such, the article contributes to literature on Black geographies and relational place-making in the Americas.

Claims to ancestral rights illustrate an important way in which people mobilize collectively to confront the unpredictable afterlives of colonialism in the plantation's wake. I analyze this socio-legal process, drawing on the work of anthropologists who have conceived of political practices and the circulation of knowledge by studying transnational networks and the artifacts they produce. Echoing a larger conversation about Black dispossession through histories of exploited labor, the bill expands a legalistic focus on identity and place to a question about equity and justice articulated through the language of ancestral rights. As such, the bill pushes the legislative boundaries for ethnic recognition by introducing a claim to land as a right that is framed around a notion of a debt that is owed for uncompensated labor.,

For the past 10 years I have been coming to the Anglophone Caribbean conducting research on regional claims to reparations for transatlantic slavery--namely, with the CARICOM Secretariat and with the Reparations Group, both located in Georgetown, Guyana. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2020 with the group. I spent eighteen consecutive months in Georgetown, and for 12 of them, I participated in events and gatherings organized or co-organized by the group, and I attended weekly group meetings during this time. I draw on ethnographic material based on 15 recorded interviews, 25 informal interviews--including with human rights lawyers, and central members of the group, such as the chair, the legal advisor, and a senior spokesperson for the committee--field notes, and photos, as well as document analysis of policies, laws, and regulations. My encounter with the work of the group highlighted how reparation claims operate on national, regional, and international scales. In one instance, a claim may implicate former colonizing European states, such as in the case of the CARICOM claim. In another instance, it may implicate postcolonial successor states in the Caribbean, such as in the African Ancestral Rights Bill. This tangled institutional predicament highlights the various ways in which demands are placed on postcolonial sovereign states to assume responsibility for redressing historical harms. It also accentuates the complex material forms that reparation demands lay claim to: from land to monetary form, to development programs and so forth. These complexities require researchers in the social sciences committed to processes of reparatory justice to take seriously postslavery material reparations claims, a sociopolitical and legal phenomenon that anthropologists, especially in the global North have paid much too little attention to despite the long-standing social presence in postcolonial societies of such claims.,

The reparations paradigm embedded in the idea of ancestral rights was different from the regional claim to reparations endorsed by CARICOM in 2014, for example, which centered on political apologies and development programs, among others. It also differed from other compensatory political claims emerging from the land back movement in the United States among both Indigenous and African-American communities. Rather than focusing on prior occupation, ancestral rights in the bill represented a radical claim to reparation by foregrounding an idea of marginalization understood within a longer history of chattel slavery and forced labor.,

In what follows, I offer an introduction to the Reparations Group and their work on the African Ancestral Rights Bill. I continue with a discussion of how the term “ancestral” in the context of Guyana and in the logics of bill links to histories of labor and land through an idea of “indiginize.” Ancestral rights frame an idea of reparations as rights to land structured around an assertion of debt for uncompensated labor. I proceed by locating my analysis of the bill within a longer colonial history of Guyana, focusing on how its focus on ancestral rights is in ongoing contestation with Indigenous or Amerindian statutory rights to land as well as histories of Indian indentured labor in Guyana. To contextualize the bill, I show how in recent decades, people of African descent in the Americas have turned to an international legal grammar of Indigenous rights in claiming collective rights to land, drawing on conventional logics of continuity so central to international Indigenous jurisprudence. In conclusion, I discuss how the bill's idea of ancestral rights pushes forward a concrete legal proposition about diasporic belonging, which pushes a radical reading of claims to proprietary rights in late liberal postcolonial and postslavery societies. An analysis of ancestral rights offers a novel contribution to debates about material reparations for transatlantic slavery in the 21st century, unsettling normative assumptions in contemporary settler colonial studies.,

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The Reparations Group's African Ancestral Rights Bill pushes forward fundamental questions about a relationship between the postcolonial state and people of African descent. This relationship between political subjects and the state has been revised in global forms of neoliberal multicultural governance that focus on ethnic difference. In propositioning the idea of an African ancestral right to land and framing this right as a debt that is owed based on centuries of uncompensated labor, the bill stirs up controversial questions about histories of Black dispossession and the absence of compensation for enslaved labor.,

Questions about African self-determination reverberate across the Americas, where people of African descent have claimed Indigenous or tribal forms of identity and been granted collective property by right. As I have shown in this article, not all people of African descent have been able to claim rights to land through ethnic recognition politics. In the early 21st century, claims to reparations for chattel slavery gain global propensity across organizational scales. In laying claim to a distinct interpretation of ancestral rights, claimants of the bill appeal to a novel political and legal process that insists on the juridical value of African continental displacement and its exploitative aftermath. The bill contests structures of racial exclusion exceedingly alive in the aftermath of colonialism and slavery by insisting on the reparatory potential of recognizing ancestral rights within neoliberal multicultural policies and international jurisprudence of collective property.,

This article has suggested that the African Ancestral Rights Bill and the work of the Reparations Group may be understood within a longer history of Black dispossession. A forced loss of native status and the systemic erasure of African place-making under colonial rule are constitutive of this history. In examining a claim to ancestral rights to land, however, one also examines how people of African descent create forms of belonging on dispossessed Indigenous land. In the context of Guyana, in particular, this is important because people of African descent, East Indians, and Amerindians have been historically structured in relations of dominance. As such, my analysis of ancestral rights to land must be understood as a political project that is in ongoing negotiation with power. Rather than conceiving of the idea of ancestral rights as an (involuntary) settler Creole politics, however, this article proposes to view the bill as an example of the radical claims to proprietary rights that may emerge in postslavery and postcolonial societies. This proposition does not negate that conceiving of land justice as reparatory justice for chattel slavery may partially represent a classic liberal political project. It suggests, however, that there is a need to understand the radical terms of such a project, especially in the postcolonial context of the Caribbean and the overlapping histories of dispossession that are constitutive to its modernity.,

Anna Kirstine Schirrer