Circles and Cultural Appropriation
By Sayra Pinto
Cultural appropriation is what happens when people with personal, interpersonal, and institutional power in a racialized society adopt, adapt, claim ownership, and rob people of their traditional cultural practices, cultural adaptations, and innovations to gain personal, reputational, monetary, and institutional advantages within that racialized society.
We believe that this is what has been done with the indigenous circle process by many in the restorative, transformative, and healing justice movements. A prime example of this dynamic is Kay Pranis’ work along with others who have supported her and built on her work in the restorative justice movement. Over the past 25 years, our communities have witnessed in disbelief as she has been held up by academics, restorative justice advocates and knowledge makers to the extent of providing funding, publishing opportunities and reputational support while indigenous people and people of color are marginally involved or even welcomed.
At For a Loving Future, we have been busily creating opportunities for the proper introductions to the circle process and have been hesitant to address this issue because it is largely a distraction from our commitment to tending and strengthening our communities and as a way to transform the institutions that are supposed to serve them. However, we are now in the position of having to clarify that Kay Pranis’ claim to having been trained and subsequently given permission to do circles by Phil and Harold Gatensby is flatly false, because she now publicly makes those claims.
Many people ask what it takes to be trained and have permission to do circles. We at For a Loving Future do not believe training is possible. We believe that the idea of training is actually counterproductive to the practice of circles. We also know that training mistakes form for substance. We are encountering people who have spent time, money, and used their relationships to become circle keepers who actually have very little idea of what circles are and what they are for, and consequently, continue to carry harmful behaviors and attitudes about power, difference, and the meaning of community. We are saddened by their sense of loss and confusion when they are actually in the presence of the practice. We think what has been done to them is irresponsible and harmful.
The presence of unease itself is an indicator of how much work needs to be done to actually establish right relationship. Permission is the outcome of right relationship. Permission does not exist in the absence of relationship and accountability. Kay Pranis and others who are supporting and building on her interpretations of circle, work in the absence of relationship and accountability to the very people who gifted them this process and who have repeatedly directly confronted this theft. Phil and Harold Gatensby, along with many of us, have tried to address this fundamental misalignment and have been met with passive aggressiveness, resistance, erasure, punishment, criticism, exasperation, using other indigenous peoples who are unaware of this history as proxies for permission and credibility, White tears and dismissal. Never with the very capacities that they are busily writing, theorizing, and teaching other people about.
This is our only and last statement about what has happened and is happening with circles by that particular community. We have given two decades of our time and energy to try to get them to be upright with this process and we are done offering generously to support them. We are tired of addressing it. Now, we get to our work, on our terms and for our own communities.
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