Decolonizing Restorative Justice

When I first heard about restorative justice, I remember feeling liberated and inspired by the idea of a movement that advocates responses to harm that do not inflict more harm. What a concept! It gave me hope that the untold harms in this world could be addressed in healing ways—ways that addressed why harms were happening in the first place. We could put our energies and resources into repairing whatever needed mending and changing whatever was generating hurt. Because there is no part of our lives where conflicts, hurts, and harms do not arise, restorative justice can be revolutionary to virtually everything we do. The concept seemed so simple yet so profound.

The biannual Dakota Commemorative March retraces the 150-mile forced march imposed on about 1,700 Dakota people in 1862. The photographer, Reuben Kitto, marches with his family every time in memory of his ancestor Pazahiyayewin, who endured the march at age twenty-six with her four children and elderly mother, at the same time that her husband was sentenced by a military tribunal to death by hanging. Is restorative justice able to address harms on the scale of genocide and white supremacy?

Restorative justice still gives me hope, but my experiences and conversations on the 2004 Dakota Commemorative March, and my reflections since then, have dramatically changed my orientation to the restorative justice movement. I still believe that it holds huge promise for helping us learn how to coexist, but I now think the very essence of restorative justice as a philosophy and way of life calls us to expand our focus to include more than person-to-person harms. What about our history—how we got to where we are as peoples? How did we end up with this “square pegs only” pegboard, and at what cost?

These are the more fundamental questions—those that make us look at the roots of harm. As we do, we are challenged to apply what restorative justice practitioners have learned about healing harms between individuals to healing harms between peoples. This is the direction restorative justice must go, I believe, or it will fall short of fulfilling its promise. Indeed, it will risk joining the other side and becoming part of the institutions that not only deny the greatest causes of suffering but also actively perpetuate harm.

The Dakota Commemorative March

Participating in the Dakota Commemorative March was like watching, all week long, a movie about the terrible ways the white colonizers have treated the indigenous people in my home state of Minnesota, only I was in the movie and living it. I still am. The march commemorates what happened at the end of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, when about 2,000 Dakota people surrendered to the U.S. army with the assumption they would be treated humanely as prisoners of war. The organizers of the march explain on their website (dakota-march.50megs.com) what ensued:

The men were separated out and tried as war criminals by a five-man military tribunal. As many as forty cases were tried in a single day, some taking as little as five minutes. Upon completion of the trials, 307 men were condemned to death and sixteen were given prison sentences. The remaining Dakota people, primarily women, children, and elderly, were then forced to endure brutal conditions as they were forcibly marched to Fort Snelling and then imprisoned in Minnesota’s first concentration camp through a difficult winter.

As both groups were paraded through Minnesota towns on their way to the camps, white citizens of Minnesota lined the streets to taunt and assault the defenseless Dakota. Poignant and painful oral historical accounts detail the abuses suffered by Dakota people on these journeys. In addition to suffering cold, hunger, and sickness, the Dakota also endured having rotten food, rocks, sticks, and even boiling water thrown at them. An unknown number of men, women and children died along the way from beatings and other assaults perpetrated by both soldiery and citizens. Dakota people of today still do not...