Restorative Justice: An Alternative Justice
Written by Paul Graif on 30 October 2020
One Kahnawa’kehró:non is looking to traditional ways to get the community to heal in the wake of people being ticketed for violating Task Force measures against private gatherings.
Dale Dione is a retired Alternative Justice Coordinator – who has been teaching restorative justice at Karihwanoron Mohawk Immersion school for the last 8 years. She wrote an open letter to the community:
“Well I wanted to just give my point of view, because it was very upsetting to hear. You know because I know when, you know when there’s a conflict in the the community it immediately starts to divide people and people take sides and you know all kinds of things happen on social media without even knowing the whole situation.”
Dione says this needs to begin in school so that the community can get back to traditional ways:
“So it’s a long process I mean it’s not something because it’s really, you know upsetting the apple cart because it’s…everything around you is systemic, as far as Westernized thinking, but it’s based on our original instructions as Onkwehonwe people, that’s the way in which we dealt with people, each other, that’s how we are still here today, though we’ve gone many different ways since then.”
Dione says the best thing to do when people make mistakes, is to use them as teaching moments:
“We know that in our life even in our children’s life, if someone, if your child does something wrong, you don’t hate them for the rest of their lives. It’s an opportunity to learn something and then from that learning you do things better and hopefully it doesn’t happen again.”
Dione says that this incident should be used as an opportunity for change.
