A 1971 commission awarded Shawnee $300,000 for unconscionable treaty terms.

Evidence

The Absentee Shawnee Tribe, for example, submitted a claim based on two treaties they had entered into with the United States—one in 1825 and one in 1831—for more than one million acres of land located in what is now eastern Kansas. But by the 1850s, the federal government had decided it wanted white Americans to resettle in the territory. Therefore, on March 3, 1853, Congress authorized the president to take the land back. The government proceeded to “negotiate” with the Shawnee Tribe through the commissioner of Indian Affairs, who began by telling the Shawnee that they had no choice but to sell. The final price “agreed” upon was 829,000. When their claim was brought before the commission under the 1946 claims act, officials agreed that the amount the Tribe had been paid could be considered “unconscionable”—a term defined by the court of claims as “so much less than the actual value of the property sold that the disparity shocks the conscience.” In 1971 the commission awarded the Shawnee Tribe additional compensation of 300,000 (worth a little more than $2.3 million today) for two broken treaties and unconscionable contract terms. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 158

Categorization

• DEFINE: Quotes the court of claims’ definition of ‘unconscionable’ as the operative legal standard for measuring land-theft compensation.
• XREF: The $2.3 million for a million acres shows how compensation radically undervalued Tribal land, echoing the gap between market value and reparative value in Brown’s framework.