The Boutique Shamans of Restorative Justice

The following entry is based on a paper I presented at the 2019 American Society of Criminology conference held in San Francisco:

In his 2008 tome ‘Crime, Aboriginality and the Decolonisation of Justice’, Harry Blagg considers whether it is possible for restorative justice to assist Indigenous peoples to decolonise settler colonial criminal justice. Blagg ponders whether the structures that sustain the RJ movement are “sufficiently liminal to accommodate Aboriginal narratives”? Blagg’s searching question is pertinent to the broader question this commentary is concerned with, namely ‘of what use has RJ been to Indigenous peoples’? 

Considering this question forces us to address one of the significant gaps in the RJ lexicon, namely the lack of critical analysis of race, ethnicity and indigenous self-determination, as these factors intersect with RJ theory, the product marketing of RJ entrepreneurs, and the conduct of the movement’s practitioners. Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars such as Aldred and Deloria and others, on the concept of boutique shamanism, I will argue that the tendency for RJ advocates and practitioners to “indigenise” their programs through appropriation of Indigenous cultural artifacts, is the criminal justice equivalent of the ‘boutique shamans’ of the New Age Spiritualist movement that began in the late 1960s and developed into a full-blown, international market by the 1990s. 

And just like those who fraudulently pose as Native American traditional healers, the boutique shamans of the RJ movement have for decades been misappropriating Indigenous cultural artifacts for their own benefit, often to the detriment of Indigenous peoples striving to attain a measure of jurisdictional autonomy.

Furthermore, through the fraudulent marketing of their RJ wares as 'indigenous-based' or 'inspired', the boutique shamans of RJ, whether knowingly or otherwise, support the settler-colonial state's efforts to stymie Indigenous peoples attempts to practice self-determination.

In this commentary I will attempt to demonstrate an inherent paradox of the RJ movement, one previous identified by George Pavlich - that the more the movement aligns itself with the (settler-colonial) state and thus became increasingly institutionalised, the more it shed its transformative, communitarian roots. Furthermore, the alignment between RJ entrepreneurs and the state is in part founded on the extraction and appropriation of Indigenous cultural artifacts. Thus a further paradox exists, namely that the more the movement aligned itself with the formal system, the more it transformed from a communitarian movement, into a Colonial Project that supports the state as it grapples with the dual (hegemonic) threat of ongoing Indigenous over-representation in criminal justice, and Indigenous counter-hegemonic activity and critique of settler-colonial justice. 

Restorative Justice: A Case Study in Boutique Shamanism and Social Justice Hucksterism

The past 30 years have seen the birth of a new growth industry in the United States, known as ‘American Indian Spiritualism’, part of a broader New Age Spiritualist movement (NASM). This profitable enterprise allegedly began with a number of literary hoaxes carried out by non-Indians such as Carlos Castaneda and Jay Marks (a.k.a.: ‘Jamake Highwater’), along with Indigenous collaborators such as Alonzo Blacksmith, ‘Chief Red Fox’ and Hyemeyohsts Storm. According to Ward Churchill, each of these authors wrote bad distortions and outright lies about American Indigenous spirituality to enhance the marketability of their products on the growing, increasingly globalised NASM market.

This now brings us to the RJ movement and its own history of appropriation of Indigenous cultural artifacts. It is my contention that we can see many of the practices of appropriation and disempowerment by members of the NASM, in the conduct of RJ advocates, practitioners and academics. The parallels are obvious, from the exaggerated ‘histories’ linking RJ to Indigenous cultural artifacts and responses to social harm, to the unabashed hucksterism of RJ entrepreneurs marketing their eroticised, indigenised wares on the globalised crime control market, as the franchise company Real Justice did in the late 1990s and early 2000s across the US and Canada.; all the while ignoring the critique of their activities by Indigenous scholars and their critical allies that began in the late 1990s, and continues today.

Understanding the motivations of RJ advocates for their hucksterism lies perhaps in the paradoxical position of the ‘movement’ alluded to by Schiff who, in similar vein to Pavlich, wrote of the tension placed upon the RJ movement from its “strange paradoxical position of trying to breach the social order of governmental justice…. while also trying to simultaneously integrate within those same institutions”.  The attempts to breach the walls of governmental justice, to become acceptable to the policy sector, has arguably given rise to a peculiar response to RJ among both the policy and political classes of many western jurisdictions, whereby RJ has being accepted to one degree or another, with both conservative and progressive policy workers and government. 

Schiff contends further that in order to move from the periphery to the centre of contemporary justice practice, to navigate the discriminating machinery of neo-liberal crime control, RJ advocates had to confront and acknowledge the barrier it faced in terms of the perception that it was a ‘threat’ to the status quo. Thus advocates, practitioner and entrepreneurs one and all, had to learn to speak the language of the political class and the policy sector, and mold their restorative practice into forms suitable for neo-liberal, western crime control. 

In doing so they subverted the communitarian ethos of ‘restorative’ philosophy by reorienting their practice to placate the neo-liberal obsession with the deviant individual. For their approach and practices to be provided legislative and financial support, they had to demonstrate the viability of their approach to social harm and, arguably more importantly, what they could do for government in meeting its crime control needs. 

And so how was the industry to procure state support for their policies and products? One strategy was to develop products suited to specific criminal justice markets. Enter the Boutique Shamans of restorative justice and the use of Indigenous cultural artifacts to market RJ programs in jurisdictions that were experiencing significant over-representation of their Indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system.

Playing Indigenous: The Boutique Shamans of Restorative Justice

Elsewhere I and others, like Chris Cunneen and Harry Blagg, have demonstrated the extent to which the RJ industry has long moved on from the emancipatory, transformative rhetoric (and goals) that characterised many of its foundational texts. Instead, over a thirty-year period it rapidly transitioned from an emancipatory project to become an important cog in the machinery of settler-colonial crime control. Analysis of this transition, including the strategic appropriation of Indigenous life-worlds, demonstrates that the institutionalisation and bureaucratisation of RJ was based in part on exaggerated claims of its ‘Indigenousness’ and the suitability of its products for solving the wicked problem of Indigenous overrepresentation.  Boutique shamanism played a significant role in both the transition and the increasing globalisation of the movement; their conduct also underlines the movements condescending approach to Indigenous peoples and their responses to social harm.

In 2008, Harry Blagg (p. 79) presciently argued that “Indigenous processes can be appropriated, denuded of context and employed to meet the interests of the status quo”. The process of appropriation via the shamanistic activities of RJ practitioners benefits both the status quo, meaning the settler colonial state’s hegemony over crime control, and the RJ Industry itself, with the latter able to more effectively match its products to the pressing needs of government. And in the settler-colonial context, no policy issue is more pressing than the wicked problem of Indigenous over-representation, a problem we argue here, that opened crime control to the boutique shamanism previously observed in NASM.

By appropriating what it judges to be ‘acceptable’ elements of Indigenous culture, in the case of RJ, and especially of its vanguard initiative the FGC, while at the same time largely ignoring the structural violence that its institutionalisation supports, exposes the tokenistic nature of RJ programs. Restorative justice advocates and practitioners, whether knowingly or unknowingly involved in or supportive of indigenised programs, are in effect ‘playing Indigenous’ in much the same way as the plastic shaman of NASM are with their Europeanised sweat lodges and faux Sun Dance ceremonies.

To understand the importance of the activities of the boutique shaman of the RJ movement, we turn to Blagg (2008) who argues that “[t]he Indigenous dimension provided a wholesome adornment to the nourishing imagery of restorative justice: redolent with images of peace pipes, desiderata, the creator spirit and mother earth”. Through the experiences of Māori and other Indigenous peoples having had their life-worlds ‘indigenised’, or, like the Stó:lo of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, having experienced the importation of a supposedly indigenous crime control product that inhibit their own practices, we might conceptualise RJ products like the FGC and Sentencing Circles, in terms of Tsing’s ‘packages of political subjectivity’, meaning that they are:

[C]reated in a process of unmooring in which powerful carriers reformulate the stories they spread transnationally… These packages carry the inequalities of global geo-politics even as they promote the rhetoric of equality. Those who adopt and adapt them do not escape the colonial heritage, even as they explore its possibilities.

The exported /imported programmes in question are seen by some Indigenous practitioners as an extension of formal state justice processes beyond the Eurocentric bias of its traditional response to social harm; mostly because of claims that it enables ‘other ways of doing justice’ to be part of the formal system. And yet, we must always be mindful of what Aas calls the “geo-political imbalances of power between ‘exporters’ and ‘importers’ of penal policies and interventions”, meaning that we need to be wary of the parasitic relationship between certain exporters (government/think-tank/academics/corporation), importers (another nation state/government agency) and the customers who end up ‘receiving’ said products. We should also be cognoscente of these relations, because all too often a customer or community has been given little choice but to receive these culturally appropriated ‘gifts’, as occurred in Canada with the implementation of variants of the FGC forum throughout the 2000s.  

As Tsing further argues, we should always keep in mind “the particularity of globalist projects”, meaning that we should critically analyse who is constructing, exporting and importing artifacts, and who, or what (entity) stands to benefit most from the import/export. And Indigenous peoples in particular, given a long history of negative relations to setter colonial crime control, need to be especially vigilant of the appropriating activities of justice entrepreneurs, because it is evident that within criminal justice, and especially the RJ movement because as Leong contends “[n]onwhiteness has…. become something desirable — and for many, it has become a commodity to be pursued, captured, possessed, and used”. 

Concluding Comments: How Did it Come to This?

Almost twenty years has passed since Gloria Lee (1999) accurately predicted that the spread of the supposedly ‘Maori’ and ‘restorative’ FGC forum as the programmatic response to youth offending in Canada, most especially for Indigenous youth, would have little impact on Indigenous youth offending rates, ann nor would it support Indigenous peoples to attain the jurisdictional autonomy long sought for. And she was correct: Canada’s Indigenous peoples continue to struggle to gain state support to implement their own responses to social harm. The salience of Lee’s prediction brings us to the perhaps the central question about the powers attributed so often to RJ forums, namely ‘what roles does RJ play in today’s criminal justice landscape’? From an Indigenous perspective the answer might be as a significant colonial project in support of the settler-colonial states continued subjugation of Indigenes.

There is perhaps some reason to hope that things might soon change in the form of prominent RJ advocates beginning to critically reflect on the limitations of RJ, and the movements complicity in the marginalisation of disaffected communities, such as Indigenous peoples.  For example, in 2013 Mara Schiff wrote that:

My experience at the Symposium thus far had led me to ponder the possibility that the success of restorative justice in educational, juvenile or criminal justice institutional contexts may be intrinsically limited by the broader complex power structures within which such reform is situated. 

Self-reflection is always a good thing, but what if the focus, the questions contemplated are the wrong ones – or perhaps more accurately, the more convenient ones? What if instead, the question should be, as we have pondered elsewhere, ‘what part does RJ play in the replication of social division and social injustice’? And, we might also ask ‘why do settler colonial governments favour appropriated justice processes and policies to deal with the wicked problem of Indigenous over-representation’? 

One possible answer to these questions is because it enables state functionaries to develop politically expedient responses to the counter-hegemonic insurgencies of Indigenous and other disaffected peoples. I contend that RJ, as exemplified in FGC-like, stated-dominated forums, provides nourishment to the settler-colonial state through its support for the program of recuperation that state undertakes to nullify Indigenous critique of the criminal justice system.

The policy sectors adoption of RJ, especially as a response to the Indigenous problem, was never intended to open the door to Indigenous empowerment and self-governance in the realm of justice. Instead, the intent was to extend the provenance of state ownership over social conflict in order to (re)empower the state, to enable it to recuperate the ideological and programmatic high ground in the face of two decades or more of Indigenous political radicalism, and critique of settler-colonial governance. Arguably, the settler-colonial state recovered in part, by convincing us of its cultural sensitivity, in the simplistic hope that this move would overcome the socio-cultural gap between our ‘communitarian’ justice tendencies, and the supposedly sophisticated rationality of the ‘Western Way’ of justice.