This is a Statement that Should Have Never Been Written
By Sayra Pinto
Because we are 531 years into settler colonial project that should be dying but it isn’t because White Settlers and Settlers of Color keep finding things to discover, conquer, subjugate, and own. I feel like a broken record. Like a person saying the same thing over and over again for 23 years. And now restorative justice, a made up thing said to have Indigenous roots and that some people even claim is a social science is a cross sectoral phenomena.
And I am now having to say the same thing across several sectors, and each sector acts like it’s discovered something new as if it didn’t learn it from another one. And the people. The people act like they found religion, the truth, the way and like they get it more than anyone. There are Master’s thesis, dissertations, college papers, coming through the academy and people think they are experts and geniuses. Experts and geniuses with consulting practices, liberatory practices, nonprofit organizations, radical new philanthropists, graduate programs, policies and government funding opportunities, executive jobs, front line jobs. All jockeying to be the best at this theft, the most funded, the most heard, the most published, the absolute most magnificent Circle Keeper…
And now philanthropy funding their work, and the state agencies, and the feds. The Office of Violence Against Women just put out an RFP for restorative justice training and this is their definition of restorative justice:
Restorative practices originated in various indigenous cultures centuries ago, and in recent years, have gained wider exposure as an alternative to systemic policies and practices that lead to excessive punishment and over- incarceration. (OVW RFP)
The appropriation of these practices happened in my lifetime about 20 years ago now. Circles are not restorative justice. So restorative practices begin with a white guy named Howard Zehr who coined the term. And before 2003, circles were not seen as part of restorative justice. There was a movement to have circles be accepted as a modality of that effort and they were forcibly interpreted through writing by largely White folks and the occasional colonized non White person for public consumption without consultation, consent, invitation or permission from Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States, now in Brazil and anywhere else this is being peddled as somehow a proper thing to do.
Circles feature prominently in the restorative/transformative/healing justice movements that all look at each other as sus, prison abolition efforts, community organizing on the left and progressive movements, organizational development, school reform, and now domestic violence and sexual assault work. Tribal communities, under duress, well, because they are tribal living in the colonial settler project, have had no bandwidth to address this pervasive and toxic appropriation. So people don’t even notice their absence or read it as permission, just like abusers read silence as consent.
However, in May 16-19 of 2016, at a meeting in Santa Fe put together by OVW and the Center for Court Innovation, the National Intertribal Judges Association present at this meeting flatly called the use of circles in restorative justice an egregious act of cultural appropriation and left the meeting. White restorative justice practitioners acted as if that never happened and people of color left behind split into two camps, one of them being grossly outnumbered: those who supported the use of circles in restorative justice and those who took issue with the fact that the tribal absence in the room was accepted as if nothing had happened and wanted further and greater accountability for the appropriation of circles in that space.
We lost there. As we have everywhere throughout the country to the hunger of colonizing settlers both White and BPOC (Black and People of Color) who would find it acceptable to operate without relationship, consent, invitation, accountability, reciprocity, responsibility, and redistribution with Indigenous peoples and tribal nations. This hunger gets triggered by the power of the medicine that is to be found and that springs forth from deeply nested kinship centered lifeways that allow for the optional expression of love and well being. The hunger that reads that sense of well being as what Phil Gatensby calls “a type of power that isn’t really power” fuels all the utopian justifications that have led people down a path of appropriation and perpetration of colonial settler violence.
Now we have this happening in the DV/SA space and people who are awed by this new type of gold do not take into account the impact of their action of tribal and Indigenous people who have experienced domestic and sexual violence. What it must be like to be in a shelter or to go to a program and be asked to sit down in a circle being performed by non-Indigneous people who are at best playing at being Indians and at words pretending to be Indians does not seem to be of concern to these types of individuals, program leaders, organizational leaders, funders and government officials.
Imagine what it must be like to take on that whole machine for good and then still have to take on the myriad colleges and universities credentialing people in these fake, offensive, unscientific, ungrounded, unrigorous pretense of a social type of science with so called indigenous roots that White people and BPOCs have created with no training or grounding in Native American Studies (as if that discipline didn’t exist at all) and that pose as truthful and honest and real. Imagine for a minute what that must be like. Imagine that. Imagine it.
And so it falls to me today to share the following statement that should have never had to be made but that nevertheless has had to be made from the Northeast Native Network of Kinship and Healing.
Healers please stop hurting the ones being disappeared. Stop giving in to your hunger for whatever it is that makes people think this is OK to do. OVW please consult with Indigenous tribal nations as you are mandated to do by law. DV/SA coalitions, do the same. Put the Pretendians enabling you out of business.
Abolitionists, please stop imposing your own type of cultural domination. Progressives and Leftist organizers, circles are not activities. They are not grounding exercises. Educators, circles are not a way out of your racism in the classroom. Criminal legal systems representatives, you are not supposed to be in charge. Also, circles are not supposed to be mandatory. Stop using circles to control people and secure the outcomes that you think you are achieving.
Brilliant genius BPOC’s, you are not innovators, you are expanding the theft. White people, I am sorry that your ancestors did not think of you enough to leave you a clear trail to follow because they were so afraid to die and go hungry. I am sorry that being proud of being White comes with a history of devastation and genocide. That cannot feel good. And it’s not for us to make OK for you by being OK with you satiating your hunger with us, again.
And for those of us who are Indigenous and nontribal, we are always on other peoples’ lands, even when we are on our own ancestral lands. We have been desiccated and our reconstitution cannot happen at the expense of tribal communities. Our journey home must be traveled in right relationship with tribal communities. In the building of those relationships we must be clear about our motivations and we must not take from our own unmet needs and our stultifying hunger.
We have our own path to walk and our own place to be within ourselves. And my hope is that we will love tribal communities so much that we will flank them, flex our power to support them and build a united front with them that is based on a shared commitment to well being and our future generations, so they do not have to walk alone ever.
After much deliberation between us, Phil and Harold Gatensby asked me to make it clear that they will never act against the will of local tribal communities. They share the teachings and do not take on students, so don’t call them teachers unless they’ve agreed to that type of relationship explicitly. Same with me. If you haven’t asked, they are not your teachers. Same with me. And with me in particular, being a part of the Academic programs I participate in at the University of Vermont does not make you my student. We share and hope that peoples’ minds will change. That sharing is not the same thing as teaching people to do circles.
The path of ceremony is a different situation altogether. And it doesn’t happen because individuals think it’s their right or because “teachers” think they are “teachers.” Elders do not self select as such and most certainly do not demand to be seen as such. “Students” don’t self-select either. That process is actually not created by individuals. It is elusive in the same way that actual community life is increasingly elusive. This is because that process is collective and so cannot be mandated, created or chosen by individuals.
And so in the end, it’s like this, what is being peddled as circles are activities. They are not ceremonies unless being done from a different place altogether that I will not name here. What is being taught throughout the world now is a gross and belittling interpretation of Indigenous community values that have been observed from a Western lens without consultation and accountability, and so I guess you are learning math from people who barely understand arithmetics. Astronomy from Flat Earth theorists.
It is a racket. And I am saddened for the young people of color who drank this kool aid and didn’t know how to spot the liars. I know you meant well. I don’t know how to fix it. All I know is that telling the truth is a start. For a Loving Future has been built to serve as a pathway to right relationship. However, we will not be instrumentalized and extracted from to have people feel good about their participation in this fundamentally dishonest endeavor.
We have seen all types of behaviors from White and BPOCs show up. Pretendians, guilty White folks who want to buy their way into right relationship, BPOCs who want to buy their right to own circles, White people and BPOCs who want to claim special relationships, etc. We have seen people show up and declare themselves experts because they say they have a Cherokee grandmother, or great grandmother. BPOCs monetizing cultural practices or leveraging them for social and economic status drop off like flies when confronted with the prospect of accountability with tribal communities.
In the end of all that, it’s just a few of us nontribals courageous enough to look in the mirror and know that there is a lot more to learn and even more to unlearn. It’s just a few of us White folks willing to stand in the fire of humility and contrition. It’s just a few of us tribal members who are courageous enough to believe that some of us can be true allies, and open your hearts knowing full well that any of us can be your enemy, like the agents in the Matrix.
At the core of us is a unifying love. A recognition of each other and our earnest hearts. And the fleeting and quickly disappearing word that used to stand for all that: circle. We shall not have a name for it now as even love is being cheapened by a hunger for its manufacturing. Let’s not call it anything. And now I know I will put my head down henceforth until this moment passes once philanthropy gets bored of it or the feds don’t see the results they want, or a new administration comes in.
Our ways of being will remain distinct and untouched, and so will the ceremony. Along this golden spiral, there will be another time when we will try again, because we try every time we see a glimmer of possibility, as we have for the past 530 years, and beyond.
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