After the Biden administration detailed revelations of the federal government’s role in upholding racist Native American boarding schools that historically forced Indigenous tribes to assimilate, two tribal nations are suing the federal government for recompense.

As The Associated Press reports:

In the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, the Wichita Tribe and the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California said that by the U.S. government’s own admission, the schools were funded using money raised by forcing tribal nations into treaties to cede their lands. That money was to be held in trust for the collective benefit of tribes. “The United States Government, the trustee over Native children’s education and these funds, has never accounted for the funds that it took, or detailed how, or even whether, those funds were ultimately expended. It has failed to identify any funds that remain,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit over the schools, which lasted from 1819 to 1969, names Interior Secretary Doug Burgum as a defendant in his official capacity, along with the Interior Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education. (“As a matter of policy, the Department does not comment on litigation,” an Interior Department spokesperson told MSNBC.)

Burgum’s predecessor, Deb Haaland — who was the first Indigenous person to hold a Cabinet position — produced a report highlighting the disturbing history of the federal boarding schools, which often deployed violence and other corporal punishment — such as the denial of food — to bring Indigenous children into compliance and try to force them to assimilate into a white American way of life. I wrote about Haaland’s report when it was released in 2022 and framed it as a warning about the danger in conservatives’ attempts to provide students with a whitewashed teaching of American history.

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The tribes’ lawsuit is just the latest attempt by a marginalized group to seek reparations for bigoted — and violent — policy that has been systemically imposed. Last week, a coalition of congressional Democrats reintroduced a resolution to grant reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans and people of African descent.

In spite of the obvious headwinds, I think the lawsuits and the proposed legislation send a powerful message.

They show that even as the Trump administration and conservatives demonstrate their open hostility to nonwhite people — with their attacks on diversity, their promotion of white nationalist talking points and their rollback of anti-segregation measures — the movement to highlight racist wrongs and grant damages to people harmed by them is unrelenting.