My parents, immigrants from Haiti, settled in Canada. I grew up in Sept-Ⓘles, a town with an Indigenous community. We were the first Black family to put down roots there. One day, Steve, an Indigenous friend, invited me to his home, a brand-new house on the reserve.1 I was shocked. The walls were covered with graffiti of despair, “red sacrifice,” and “black mourning.” As an Indigenous person assigned a house by the Federal Government, it “was living in prison.” For Steve, an Indian residential school (IRS) survivor’s descendant, it was the symbol of the “civilizing” society that wiped out his Indigenous values and culture, eradicating the foundation of his identity. The graffiti was a form of resistance.

Formerly colonized peoples and their governments have long sought repatriation of cultural heritage taken under the auspices of colonialism. Increasingly, states and museums are acknowledging ethical obligations to undertake such returns.1 This essay argues that, unless combined with other measures, repatriation represents incomplete reparation of the harms caused by the loss of such heritage. But repatriation alone does serve some reparative function. It can also operate as a necessary initial step enabling further reparative measures. The U.S. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) illustrates these dynamics.2

Designing meaningful reparations for Indigenous communities requires grappling with the enduring effects of historical and contemporary injustices. Despite the existence of international legal frameworks such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and International Labour Organization Convention 169, Indigenous peoples around the world continue to experience systemic land dispossession, exclusion from decision making, and environmental harm tied to extractive and infrastructure projects. These harms are often compounded by the lack of formal legal recognition of Indigenous land rights and the failure to uphold principles like Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). Addressing these realities demands reparative frameworks that go beyond symbolic recognition, offering structural responses grounded in accountability, restitution, and the restoration of Indigenous autonomy over land and resources.

In this essay, we will use the Haiti Cholera case study to explore how the victims and the socioeconomic turns are increasingly pivotal in the field of reparations as part of transitional justice. On December 1, 2016, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon apologized for the cholera epidemic in Haiti, an illness which arrived with Nepalese peacekeepers deployed after the 2010 earthquake. After years of silence and denial from the UN, the UN finally established a “New Approach to Cholera in Haiti,” promising material assistance and support to the victims through a “victim-centered approach.” The essay builds on our previous matrix used to clarify the debate made of two separate dimensions: the focus of reparations—collective versus individual—and the means of reparations—symbolic versus material.1 Based on fieldwork conducted in March 2017 in the communities most affected by the cholera outbreak, we demonstrate how the tensions between reparations offered by the UN (with a preference for collective symbolic reparations) and the reparations demanded by the victims (individual material reparations) can help explain why reparations were not fully (at best) successful in providing justice for the Haiti cholera victims and hopefully inform practice in this area for other UN trust funds and victims’ rights mechanisms. The first section discusses the specifics of the cholera crisis in Haiti and the subsequent Haiti Cholera Claims, including the sudden change of position by the UN in 2016 and the nature of reparations included in the New Approach to Cholera in Haiti. The second section looks at the reparations debate and the preferences expressed by the affected communities in Haiti. The third section puts the Haiti Cholera Claims in perspective, discussing the Kosovo Lead Poisoning case and the Mothers of Srebrenica case, both third party cases involving a UN peacekeeping presence like the Haiti Cholera Claims. Finally, the last section looks at the ramifications of the Haiti Cholera Claims and how reparations debates need to take into account wider structural factors impacting the development of third world countries.

“If, therefore, we are going to sin, we must sin quietly.”1

With the end of the slave trade and the general emancipation of slaves, the problems of race did not disappear but simply were transformed.1