Land Acknowledgment
Looking for the recording of our conversation about Chapter 18 in Colorizing Restorative Justice?
The Restorative Justice Practices we use today are adapted from the Indigenous peoples of North America, and are rooted in values and traditions that are a way of life for native people. Several First Nations Peoples have contributed to the use of circles among non-native people, including - The Hollow Water First Nation on Lake Winnipeg and members of the Carcross-Tagish and Dahka T’lingit First Nations in Yukon.
P2RC is located on the ancestral land of the Pawtucket and Massachusett Tribes. The territory of the Pawtucket stretches from the Piscataqua River in New Hampshire south to what is now called the Charles River in Boston. Nanepashemet was the Great Sac’hem of the Pawtucket peoples when the English colonizers arrived in the early 1600’s. The territory of the Massachusett Tribe stretches along the coast of Massachusetts from just south of the New Hampshire border to the border of Rhode Island. The Massachusett are the indigenous nation from whom the present-day Commonwealth of Massachusetts took its name. At the time of the English invasion, the Massachusett people were led by the Great Sac’hem, Chickataubut. Faries Sagamore Gray is the current Sac’hem of the Massachusett Nation. We acknowledge their elders both past and present, as well as future generations.
P2RC acknowledges that our organization benefits from a society founded upon exclusion, genocide and erasure of Indigenous peoples, including those on whose land we are located and whose practices we use. We acknowledge the forced removal and genocide that Indigenous people across this continent have faced, including the extraction of resources that threaten native people’s way of life, the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women (MMIW), and the ongoing disregard of treaty rights.
P2RC donates a portion of our proceeds to the Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness. We are committed to the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism in ourselves and in our communities. We invite you to name and acknowledge the land on which you live and work, and to support Indigenous People in the communities there.
Below are resources for learning more about and acknowledging the land on which you live:
Native Land Digital
U.S. Dept. of Arts and Culture: Honor Native Land
Native Governance Center: A Guide to Indigenous Land Acknowledgment
Part of Restorative Justice work is making sure that we’re constantly checking in with ourselves and our own biases and understanding them more deeply. To engage in this self-reflection, we read Chapter 18 of Colorizing Restorative Justice, edited by Edward C. Valandra of the Sicangu Titunwan Oyate nation. We then had a conversation on our takeaways from the reading.
We were challenged by Valandra to grapple with our place as White practitioners in RJ, and we think this quote from Valandra’s foreword to Part V, A Call to Settlers in RJ, highlights the imperative that we do this self-examination:
Alice Walker, African American, novelist, poet and activist writes, “Healing begins where the wound was made.” Restorative justice is about healing, but how can this healing happen or be real until those of us who are in the RJ movement attend to healing where the wound was made?...The US was birthed with genocide and slavery and the legacy of these massive harms remain in force today…as long as the restorative justice movement confines its focus to harms done by individuals today, the work will prove superficial…repairing these harms heals trauma on all sides so that children, especially the children of settlers, can learn the ways of self-transformation personally and as people.
We hope our 20-minute conversation can serve as model for conversations you might have as you examine your own role in Restorative Justice.
