Definition: One of the 10
categories of Nature's Laws developed by the Nature's
Laws Project Team and defined as "Conflict resolution;
Medicine therapy; Sentencing circles; Restitution through
victim confrontations; Talking circles."
Aboriginal law started with the
assumption that all offences are against the community, just
like Western law, but it applied a different concept in
measuring the results of crime. It recognized that crime has
more than an indifferent impact on people…crime radiates out
from the victim to family to village to community, leaving a
trail of sorry and pain behind it. It insists that the
results of crime must be negotiated between the offender and
the victim if the larger community is to heal the damage
done. It expects that reparations will eventually be
negotiated between the offender and the victim so that
closure can be made to the event and the rent in the social
fabric can be mended. Restorative justice or restitutional
law is the outcome.
Restitutional law recognizes one aspect
that our Western criminal system has apparently
forgotten…the personal damage of crime. By taking
charge of the process of crime, from the arresting personnel
(police), to the place where the offender is dealt with (the
court) to way a case is described (R. vs. Criminal),
to the representative of us all (the crown prosecutor), to
the judge (Madame Justice X of the Supreme Court of Canada),
to the punishment meted out (the jail, the fine), it is all
administered and paid for by the government on behalf of
everyone in the state. This system suggests that the
personal element is not significant…that a thief who stole
my car is only beholden to the state, not to me. Not only
does this place crime in an impersonal setting, it removes
the personal damage that crime brings, and makes the
criminal responsible only to a faceless system. The thief
doesn’t have to admit to my face that he cost me a job,
endangered my family or caused my insurance rates to go up.
Worse still, the thief continues to live in my community,
and periodically I must deal with the thief in one way or
another.
Indigenous law had consistently utilized
the concept of peacemaker; in Cree, peace is
peyahtikeyimon, a word that includes within it the
notion of stillness, quietness and acceptance. The Tsuu
T’ina people southwest of Calgary have established a
Peacemaker Justice system, modeled on the Navajo and Apache
system in place in the United States since 1920. These
examples derive from the concept of peacemaker within Native
culture both here and around the world…Ross, commenting on
the maori system noted "… there was less concern with whether
or not there has actually been a breach of the law and more
concern with the restoration of harmony" (Returning,
19).
Upsetting The
Balance
Interviewer - Earle Waugh, PhD.
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