Swift payment to tribes in 1946 would now be worth nearly $21 billion.

Evidence

The total amount of claims that the commission paid to Tribal Nations through 1978 was 818 million. The cases transferred to the US Court of Federal Claims resulted in additional awards, bringing the total amount paid to roughly 1.3 billion. If payments had been made as swiftly as they were to the former enslavers in the District of Columbia, within a year of their claims being filed, or to Italy for the lynching of Italians in New Orleans, then the total amount due to the Tribal Nations would have been paid in 1946 and would be worth almost $21 billion in 2024. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 161

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the timing/interest argument Brown runs throughout — the cost of delay is itself part of the harm accounting, parallel to the DC enslavers paid within a year theme from earlier chapters.
• SEED: The interest-accumulation contrast across victim groups (enslavers paid immediately, tribes left for decades) is a strong polemical throughline for any reparations essay.