I will present a chapter of my thesis in which I argue that liberal public reason does not appear to be able to justify the current coercive relationship between liberal states, such as the US and Australia, and the Indigenous peoples within those geopolitically defined states.  I will look at three broad ways of achieving justification for liberal public reason theorists:  overlapping consensus (Rawls), discursive modus vivendi (Ivison), and convergence (Gaus and Vallier).  Each of these justificatory strategies fails for a different reason:  Rawls presupposes a controversial conception of the good; Ivison’s strategy is attractive but only tells us how mutually justified principles can eventually come into existence, not why the status quo is justified; and Gaus’ strategy does not conclusively show that a convergence in this case would produce a Pareto optimal society.