Pathways to Restorative Communities October Newsletter

A blue circle enclosing other smaller circles next to the words Pathways to Restorative Communities

Honoring the past, planning for the future

A group of North American Indigenous women march and hold signs declaring their ancestors as sacred.

Indigenous Roots

These North American Indigenous women remember their ancestors and dream of their descendants. Indigenous peoples around the world have survived genocide and cultural erasure. They are still here, teaching the greater world about living in relationship, and we are grateful for their generosity.

Southern African Bantu speakers teach Ubuntu: we are all profoundly interconnected. The Maori in New Zealand show us that Utu (restoring balance ) and Aroha (compassion) support repair when harm happens.

What do your ancestors teach about living in right relationship? How will your descendants know how you lived?

This October, we invite you to engage in:

The Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness
A blog about shifting away from Colonialism using Restorative Practices
A conversation between Beth and Rebecca grappling with the responsibility of being white RJ practitioners of Circles
An invitation to a free circle based on the Circle elements: the talking piece, guidelines, and centerpiece
Please contact us if there’s anything we can do to support your RP work.

The Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness (MCNAA)

Based in Saugus, MA, MCNAA works to support Native American residents with essential needs; empower youth through guidance, mentoring and educational assistance; create opportunities to express and preserve Native cultural traditions; advance public understanding that corrects misinformation about Native peoples; and work toward racial equity across the region (from their mission).

P2RC has been working and engaging with MCNAA since 2018. They partnered with us to write our land acknowledgment when we first incorporated as a business, and our relationship has continued since then.

Before we begin every workshop and presentation, P2RC takes a moment to acknowledge that our work is possible because member of Indigenous groups shared their knowledge with those who are living on their unceded land. We also donate a portion of our income directly to MCNAA to support their work.

Rebecca and Beth encourage you to engage with the MCNAA website, to attend one of their public events, join an MCNAA book club meeting, or donate to support this vital organization.

MCNAA.ORG

Our Latest Blog:

This one’s a doozy! If you’ve been wondering what you might do to make a change in “the system,” we offer this ultimately hopeful takedown of the hierarchical pyramid and an invitation to build circles of community and connection.

View from a mountaintop with a clear blue sky, green trees and a lake.

Shifting From Colonialism to Community Thriving: a Restorative Approach

Restorative Justice is often applied as a way to heal interpersonal harm; but Fania Davis in her Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice pushes further, suggesting that it requires a commitment to

Engaging as White Restorative Practitioners

Part of doing Restorative Justice work is consistently checking in with ourselves, identifying our own biases, and understanding them more deeply.

In doing that work, we read Chapter 18 of the book Colorizing Restorative Justice, edited by Edward C. Valandra (from the Sicangu Titunwan Oyate nation). We then had a conversation based on our takeaways from the reading.

We were challenged by Valandra to grapple with our place as White practitioners in the RJ realm, and we think this quote from the foreword to Part V, A Call to Settlers in RJ, highlights the imperative that we do this self-examination:

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 remains in force today…as long as the Restorative Justice movement confines its focus to harms done by individuals today, the work will prove superficial.

A selfie of two white women sitting at a table with books and notebooks in front of them

We hope our 20-minute conversation can serve as a model for discussions you might have as you examine your own role in Restorative Justice.

Listen to our Conversation

Invitation: Free Circle on Mon, Nov 9 from 7-8pm (eastern time)

P2RC is committed to strengthening the community of people who are doing RJ where they live and work. We offer periodic free Circles with this goal in mind. This month we’ll be talking about the power of the circle elements: the talking piece, guidelines, and the centerpiece.

What do you use for the Circle elements? What happens when you leave one of the elements out? What happens when they all work together?

We will send a ZOOM link one day prior to the meet up.

Join us for this exchange of ideas and opportunity to connect. Space is limited. We ask that you RSVP through this form to register and receive the link. See you there!