Uncovering JAPA
Using Public Testimony to Guide Restorative Land Policies
summary
- Public testimony from two California state-led processes provides a valuable repository for how participants communicate about their relationship to land.
- Planners can use public archives as a guide for constructing reparative land policies.
- Six themes emerged from participants, including access, use, authority, ownership, stewardship, and education.
Existing reparations commissions and task forces provide guiding theories and concrete recommendations for redistributive policies. Planners can use existing public processes on reparations to kick-start and guide interventions. In "Listening Like a State: Using Public Reparations Testimony to Guide Planning" (Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 91, No. 4), Marisa Raya, Bettina Ng'weno, and Mark H. Cooper analyze public testimony from two California state-led processes on reparations to provide recommendations for planning practice.
How Policy Created Gaps
California has issued executive orders mandating state support for Native American land acquisition and racially inclusive government practices. Yet the state also has some of the highest racial and tribal land ownership disparities in the United States. Historic settler and state-led violence, including Native genocide, unratified treaties, sundown towns, and anti-immigrant laws, created the conditions for these disparities.
Currently, the cost of land and policies prioritizing existing landowners exclude underrepresented groups from land access and the gains in state-led investment programs requiring land ownership, including housing, agriculture, clean energy, and carbon sequestration.
Racial and tribal disparities in land access and ownership lie at the root of many inequalities in both the built and natural environments. Land-based reparations and reparative land use planning remain excluded from standard planning practices. California took a first step toward multiracial reparative planning by convening the California Reparations Task Force and the Truth and Healing Council.
About the reparations processes
The California Reparations Task Force (2021–2023) studied the institution of U.S. slavery and its effects on living African Americans. The task force issued specific recommendations for reparations.
The California Truth and Healing Council (2021–present) seeks to "clarify the relationship of Native Californians to the State, in the spirit of truth and healing" (Governor's Office of Tribal Affairs, 2025). The council immediately launched a fund to support reparative efforts.
Listening to Public Testimony
Participants in both processes agreed on the need for place-based education for those outside their communities. They shared ongoing harms from how their ancestors were alienated as property, and emphasized the need for reestablishing a relationship with the land access and stewardship.
Both Native American and African American participants expressed a desire for access to and decision-making consultation on places where their exploitation and exclusion created private profits.
Truth and Healing Council participants asserted the ways Native Americans are erased in urban areas and their lifeways in rural and natural areas. The council detailed the need to restore community and the regional ecosystems that co-constitute who they are. The Reparations Task Force members emphasized the right to return to the community, including restoration of homes, businesses, and African American foodways. Restitutions were important for lost homes and business opportunities, but also for the loss of individual and collective autonomy among a suite of other losses. Cash was not mentioned as often as land and homes.
Figure 1: An unnamed participant at the August 2023 Regional Hearing of the California Truth and Healing Council in Weaverville. (Credit: California Tribal Affairs, via Instagram)
Specifically, policy governing land can impede a community's ability to fully restore the landscape. Land returns in natural places often limit housing for only rangers or tourists, which challenges tribes' ability to reclaim knowledge, train young people, return from forced diaspora, and rebuild Native economies. Ongoing limitations of land returns can be addressed through changes to zoning and land use policies.
There are still many state planning areas that subsidize large private landowners through agriculture, mitigation banks, clean energy infrastructure, conservation, and restoration programs. Addressing access disparities can be prioritized in these programs by using reparations processes as input and by continuing engagement.
Planners in state, regional, and local public agencies can consider how to implement reparations through the following themes identified by participants: access, use, authority, ownership, stewardship, and education. Planners must show how communities continue constructing spaces within oppressive property regimes.
Reparative planning actions to restore land relations
Access
- Broadly, reclaiming and reconnecting to dispossessed land and the cultural community tied to place.
- Access can be for shelter, food production, or community gathering.
- Includes temporary access for walking, hunting, fishing, or ceremony.
Use
- Ability to place homes and gathering places on land, as expressed through zoning or deregulation.
- Ability to hunt, fish, or farm, necessitating healthy land and water as well as ongoing environmental care.
Authority
- Land use authority and representation in decision-making, community-based planning, and extended consultation, including tribal or representative zoning authority over returned land.
- Political recognition for descendants of enslaved African Americans, unrecognized tribes, and urban Native Americans.
Ownership
- Investment in homes, land-based businesses, and community or tribal ownership, restitution from the state and private interests that have benefited from dispossession and water diversions, and potentially limits on profit-driven land accumulation.
Stewardship
- Ability to take responsibility for both agricultural land and ecosystem health, hiring and contracting as land stewards, removal of pollution, and enforcement against violators.
Education
- Identifying unjust property takings, understanding history, and revising place names.
Building a Listening State
Reparative planning demands that those most affected by harm and discrimination co-design and determine reparative solutions. The state becomes a facilitator of the people's own sovereign organizing and their desired relationships to land. By identifying affected classes of people, rather than races, reparative planning can make legally defensible investments into targeted communities.
Tools such as racial equity analyses and related data-driven policies are often difficult to use for issues of land access and reparations. Reparations processes grounded in community experiences and aspirations for self-determination can help a municipal racial equity analysis or other equity policy effort to identify specific needs. Through these reparations processes, engaged stakeholders clearly articulated hundreds of land policies that planners can consider.
Building on James Scott's critique of the administrative ordering and labeling of nature and society in "Seeing Like a State" (Scott 1998), the authors make clear how reparations processes rely on experiential knowledge — processes, not categories.
When government is displaced from its authoritative role as surveyor and tax collector, it begins listening rather than seeing. A listening state must then alter its governance to repair harm, which can be achieved through comprehensive planning. These two processes produced a unique repository of public discourse that can guide planning and prompt more states to listen.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Identify affected classes to support legally defensible reparative investments.
- Convene local reparative processes.
- Implement property tax relief in formerly segregated areas.
- Provide financial assistance for land acquisition.
- Research local land-use ordinances for their segregating impacts and potential for restitution.
- Update zoning to match the affected community's goals for land and community.
- Intervene to reduce land speculation and increase community access to purchase.
- Support self-determination in land uses and investments.
Top image: Photo by iStock/Getty Images Plus/ Heidi Patricola
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