Indigenous Restorative Justice

Abstract

This paper seeks to generate further understanding of Indigenous knowledge, methods, and laws relating to Indigenous restorative justice as a means to consider how we might better resolve various forms of disputes and reinvent versus revise Canada's criminal justice system. It also considers some of the ways in which funding and programming decisions of the state might obscure and perhaps even deepen the disparity in the relationship between Canada and Indigenous Peoples. Through various means, such as the use of indicators to support government agendas as well as theories of retribution and proportionality, the criminal justice system continues to be a site of ongoing colonialism. This paper considers how we might engage in decolonization by making more room for the holistic healing found within Indigenous models of restorative justice.