When Institutions Mistake Extraction for Care: A Hemispheric Briefing on RJ/TJ/HJ, Lineage Breach, and the Responsibility Ahead
By sayra pinto
Dec 3, 2025
This morning, I supported a family whose child was nearly placed into a school-based “restorative” process that would have caused active harm. Their trust made visible again a pattern I have been tracking for more than twenty-five years across the hemisphere. For Indigenous, Terrenal, and Black communities, these harms have never been hidden. We have lived them. We continue living them.
For clarity:
RJ = Restorative Justice
TJ = Transformative Justice
HJ = Healing Justice
These fields are widely funded and widely institutionalized. Their harms are structural, not incidental.
1. A HEMISPHERIC PATTERN OF HARM
Across the Americas, RJ/TJ/HJ misuse follows a consistent pattern:
extraction of relational practices from Indigenous peoples without permission
severing those practices from cosmology, land, lineage, and responsibility
converting them into techniques, curricula, and trainings
scaling them across sectors through institutions
securing retrofit consent from a few Indigenous or Black practitioners
rebranding the extracted practices as healing or justice
assigning emotional labor to communities harmed by the extraction itself
This pattern is hemispheric and appears in education, nonprofits, philanthropy, healthcare, movement spaces, government, and academia.
2. WHO ARE TERRENALES?
Terrenal refers to Indigenous-descended, Afro-descended, land-rooted, mixed-lineage peoples of the Americas shaped by colonization, displacement, survival, and generational re-creation. Terrenales hold relational practices from this land and live with lineage interruption and endurance simultaneously. Terrenal is a hemispheric identity grounded in land, memory, and belonging.
3. FIELDS IMPACTED BY THE PATTERN OF HARM
RJ/TJ/HJ misuse appears across:
education
movement spaces
nonprofits
philanthropy
healthcare and mental health
social services
juvenile justice
government and policy
academia
arts and culture
Across every field, the sequence is the same: extract, sever, rebrand, scale, claim moral authority.
4. THE FOUNDATIONAL BREACH
The circle process at the heart of RJ/TJ/HJ was taken from Indigenous peoples without permission or consent. Once severed from cosmology and responsibility, it became a technique. The breach is not historic; it is ongoing. Every model built on this foundation carries the breach forward.
5. RETROFIT CONSENT
Institutions often rely on retrofit consent: recruiting a small number of Indigenous or Black practitioners to legitimize extracted models. This privatizes lineage harm, transfers responsibility to individuals, and enables institutions to continue harmful practices while appearing culturally aligned. Retrofit consent disguises harm; it does not repair it.
6. PARTICIPATION BECOMES SUBJUGATION
Families are pressured into participating in distorted versions of their own traditions. Participation becomes compliance framed as healing, emotional exposure under institutional gaze, cultural distortion labeled as care, and an expectation that communities will “heal” institutional harm. This is containment, not care.
7. CUMULATIVE HARM ON INDIGENOUS, TERRENAL, AND BLACK COMMUNITIES
The harm compounds across generations:
emotional harm to children
cultural harm as elders lose authority
spiritual harm as practices are mimicked without cosmology
relational harm as lineage transmission is weakened
psychological harm through distorted tradition
political harm as institutions gain moral authority without structural change
historical harm mirroring colonial extraction
hemispheric harm as relational memory is interrupted again
8. U.S.-SPECIFIC LAYERS OF HARM
In the U.S., RJ/TJ/HJ misuse intersects with racialized surveillance, punitive schooling, nonprofit deliverable culture, therapeutic models that pathologize culture, and philanthropy’s narrative needs. Retrofit consent allows institutions to claim cultural alignment without accountability while framing families as resistant.
9. WHO BENEFITS AND WHO PAYS
Beneficiaries: institutions, consultants, nonprofits, philanthropy, academia, and white practitioners.
Those who carry the cost: Indigenous peoples, Terrenales, and Black communities.
10. INEFFECTIVE INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES
Common responses include symbolic statements, cultural aesthetics, new trainings, hybrid models, technical assistance, and narrative management. None address lineage breach. They reorganize harm rather than transform the architecture that produces it.
11. IMPACT ON ME AFTER 25 YEARS
For a quarter century, I have warned institutions, practitioners, funders, and leaders across multiple sectors about this pattern of harm. I was not dismissed because the analysis was incorrect. I was dismissed because telling the truth would require institutions to relinquish control, shift resources, acknowledge harm, and rethink entire fields built on extraction.
This work has cost me deeply: emotionally, professionally, spiritually, and relationally. For 15 years I was inside the RJ/TJ/HJ fields trying to correct the breach. For the last 10 years, I have worked to set the record straight, inviting practitioners to face the history and change the practice. To no avail.
Naming this is not self-focused. It is necessary transparency. Communities deserve to know how long these truths have been raised — and ignored.
12. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR COMMUNITIES
(Indigenous, Terrenal, and Black Families, Elders, Practitioners, and Caregivers)
These are invitations toward clarity, dignity, and coherence.
A. Follow the inner clarity that signals misalignment; your discernment is lineage.
B. Bring questions that reveal truth: origin, authority, consent, benefit, risk.
C. Step away from practices that do not honor lineage or dignity; stepping away is direction.
D. Protect your children’s emotional interiors; their emotional lives are not curriculum.
E. Turn toward lineage, elders, and cultural memory for grounding and continuity.
F. Document harm for clarity and future protection.
G. Choose community-rooted relational support where it exists; healing lives in relationship.
H. Understand that choosing what aligns is responsibility, not resistance.
I. Share stories across the hemisphere to reveal pattern and strengthen coherence.
13. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR INSTITUTIONS AND FUNDERS
(Informed by Poetic Futurism)
Poetic Futurism (PF) is not a toolkit. It is a meaning-based orientation clarifying what belongs to institutions, what belongs to lineage, and what requires humility and responsibility.
A. End retrofit consent.
B. Pause the use of circles and restorative aesthetics.
C. Separate discipline from healing language.
D. Honor a family’s right to decline participation.
E. Fund lineage-grounded, community-led relational work.
F. Reevaluate RJ/TJ/HJ investments for harm and redirect resources.
G. Build institutional capacity for relational accuracy.
H. Use PF as a compass for meaning and responsibility, not as technique.
14. TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MEANING YOU MAKE
For institutions and funders, this is a matter of ethics, lineage, dignity, community trust, hemispheric responsibility, and the futures our communities will inherit. The harms were never hidden. The question has always been whether institutions will take responsibility for the meaning they make.
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