The Evangelism of Indigenous Criminology

The following text laid the foundation of a presentation I gave at Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University, 2 November 2019, titled 'The Evangelism of Indigenous Criminology'

During a visit to New Zealand in June 2019 a friend of mine, a lecturer at an American University, told me he was 1 of 3 associate editors at an International publishing house that was considering a number of proposals for a series on criminology, one of which was the book - Indigenous Criminology - that Chris and I wrote. When considering the applications the two white criminologists questioned the need for 'another criminology like this one', and my friend responded by asking 'why not', partly in light of all the new criminologies that had been accepted into the club in recent years, including Peacemaking Criminology, Post-Colonial Criminology, Cultural Criminology, and the latest member, Criminology of the Global South (Southern Criminology). 

At first glance, mentioning all these new criminology's appears to support the argument of the 2 Pakeha (European) criminologists, but my colleague continued by making the point that all these 'new criminologies' had largely evolved from the same space, influenced by the same epistemological milieu as all previous criminologies, namely from the space created by the white, privileged academic community. And we can say with certainty that apart from  a few outliers, such as Chris Cunneen, Harry Blagg and Antje Deckert, that these criminology's had a lot to say about Indigenous peoples, about African American's and so forth, despite the fact that few of their adherents had lowered themselves to engage directly with us (with Cultural Criminology a notable exception), preferring instead to keep their distance and thus, their 'objectivity'. In other words, an Indigenous Criminology was necessary because of the lack of Indigenous input into the 'other criminologies' and the general reluctance of white criminologists to respectfully engage with us.

Thanks to the stance taken by my friend and colleague, the book Indigenous Criminology was published in 2016.

I submit that had the book proposal in question had been for 'a general theory of crime', or a 'post-modern criminology' and not one founded on Indigenous experiences, that the debate would have been very different, if indeed it would have occurred at all. At the very least the focus of discussion would have been very different; were the right authors and authorities present, did the perspective privilege white theorists and methodologies, that sort of thing. Of course, this is pure speculation on my part, but mainstream criminology, or perhaps more accurately whitestream criminology, has form in this regard, meaning a general disregard for the perspectives and experiences of Nga Morehu (the socially marginalised or unwanted), unless it is mediated and interpreted through their ideological and epistemological lens. Now, let me provide an example of what I mean when I say that mainstream criminology has 'form', by discussing the position of the English criminologist Pat Carlen on what makes for 'good criminology'.  

In a chapter entitled Against Evangelism in Academic Criminology: For Criminology as a Scientific Art, Carlen rails against what she sees as the proliferation of boutique criminologies, approaches she describes as "those academy-based criminologies which have variously self-branded as 'critical', 'cultural', or 'public'", accusing them of "at times revealing evangelistic tendencies that pose a threat to their capacity for the open debate that each of them espouses". And what exactly are these so-called evangelistic tendencies Carlen speaks of? It appears that Carlen's main issue is that these criminologies suffer from twin allegiances, to 'academic criminology' and all that requires in terms of supplication to the alter of the white theoretical Gods and the supposed rationality of empiricism, and 'criminology politics', by which she means adherence to the more leftist tendencies in ordert to critique state-centred/sponsored criminological work, and taking a proactive stance to talk with and then on behalf of Nga Morehu. Their socio-political commitments, so Carlen alleges, need to be reined in, meaning that "the evangelistic strains in these boutique criminologies need to be confronted" if criminology as a scientific art is to continue to have any social significance.

Carlen refers to these approaches as evangelistic because of a tendency to expect members to adhere to an orthodoxy, a set of principles that demand adherents demonstrate commitment to an orthodoxy, as opposed to one based on the practice of empiricism. In fact, of these supposed evangelistic criminological strains, Carlen contends:

"They are the least desirable and potentially most self-damaging, aspects of the best of contemporary academic criminology". 

As an Indigenous criminologist, nothing Carlen said about boutique criminologies is new. Her words mirror a common strain of epistemological bias and snobbery often directed from whitestream criminology, towards ‘other’ forms of knowledge, and in the settler-colonial context the ‘other’ is often Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous research. Which brings me back to Don Weatherburn’s flippant dismissal of Indigenous knowledge and experience, and therefore Indigenous scholarship, and that of our critical non-Indigenous collaborators, such as Chris Cunneen. In stating that there is nothing to be learnt from us about what causes crime, or how best or most effectively respond to it, Weatherburn is portraying non-Western knowledge as ‘subjective’, as ‘unscientific’.

Where have we heard this type of comment before?

Isn't that exactly how our knowledge, our epistemologies have been represented since first contact?

According to Canadian scholars Proulx and Woolford, every colonial epoch produces projects designed to support the settler-colonial states subjugation of Indigenous peoples. Therefore, let's refer to them as colonial projects. Woolford for one imagines the process of colonisation and subsequent settler-colonial government, as a highly sophisticated mesh made up of inter-locking meta, meso and micro levels.  Each level contains projects of varying complexity, interconnectedness and focus (meaning the specific role it plays in the colonial process, and therefore in the process of dispossession).

A whole series of inter-related projects were formulated across the mesh that were designed to extricate us from arable land, and to nullify our ability to impede the colonial enterprise. Key projects included Missionary, Research and/or Native schools, legislation banning our languages and specific cultural practices, such as the Tohunga Suppression Act in New Zealand. And then there were the nefarious colonial projects, such as the ideological destruction of the 'character' of Indigenous peoples, or what could be more accruately described as the 'Ideology of Race'. This was an important project for the establishment of colonial governance because it sought to discredit Indigenous language, knowledge, cultural practices and institutions. At the very heart of this project was the key ideological statement that underpinned so much of colonial policy, namely that 'Indigenous knowledge is folk-knowledge, based on myth and primitive religious belief and practice. Therefore, it is incomparable with western knowledge, which is derived from scientific inquiry and enlightenment thinking'. 

Now, at the macro, meso and micro levels we find key edifices that provide the superstructure upon which settler-colonialism was built and continues to thrive today. Here we find a project of especial potency, the criminal justice system, a ‘technology of oppression’ as Alison Young has described it, and Agozino, “a control freak discipline”, one that is ably supported by the academic discipline of criminology. The potency of this multi-level colonial project derives from the fact that it is the conduit through which the settler-colonial state can legitimately deploy violence against its citizens. 

As a sub-component of the law, criminal justice was, and still is, a powerful (civilising) colonial project in two significant ways:

i) it ensures that the definitions of what constitutes crime and social harm were based on Eurocentric understandings of those terms; and

ii) it provides a platform for the deployment of structural violence by the state against Indigenous peoples considered not to have adhered to Western standards of behaviour ala the ‘reasonable man of the law’, especially those who happened to be residing on good pastoral land or atop mineral deposits, or who dared directly challenge the hegemony of the colonial state, either through armed rebellion, or non-violence resistance.

And what of criminology? Social sciences like criminology placed in the hands of the settler-colonial state the tools to identify, name and (arguably) combat the moral sewage threatening to spill out from the geographic space of the (Indigenous) damned. And one of the key ‘sciences of morality’ was criminology, a discipline that’s conception, gestation and birth has been traced through the colonial epoch. Furthermore, criminology, joined at birth to the settler-colonial state, continues to thrive through a sustained focus on the behaviours and attitudes that fuelled its conception – emotionality, incontinence and contamination, and upon those sections of the community considered by the settler-colonial state to be most threatening to social order, the poor, the recalcitrant, and the Indigenous. 

How different are the views of Pat Carlen from those made by early Missionaries, or colonial agents denigrating Indigenous knowledge? Although to be fair, Carlen was not directly challenging the legitimacy of Indigenous Criminology, but nonetheless she disparages any new forms of the discipline that do not adhere to the precepts of scientific criminology, including objectivity and value neutrality. She intimates that the political posturing of said criminologies is 'damaging to the brand' that is (in my view) best understood as corporatised criminology. 

The Australian 'quantitative' social scientist, Don Weatherburn is a slightly different beast (or criminologist) than the Pat Carlen's of the white academy, appearing as he does - tiume and time again - less concerned with image politics and more with patch protection. He weaponises the veil of scientism, the ideological cloak that legitimises his knowledge and others like him, thus presenting their ‘science’ as the only legitimate source of criminological knowledge that can or should influence the development of crime control policies and interventions, especially when it comes to the ‘Indigenous Problem’.

The charge of evangelism brought against boutique criminologies like Cultural Criminology, or Indigenous Criminology, comes from the same well as the colonial project of ideology discussed earlier: it denotes a hierarchy of knowledge about crime and social harm. Those that cloak themselves in the cloak of scientism are therefore and thereafter, ‘scientific’ and thus legitimate; those that are not, are simply 'boutique'.  The former produces knowledge that is ‘solid’, factual and trustworthy’, the latter, knowledge that is unformed, subjective and untrustworthy. 

Let us return for a moment to Pat Carlen’s supposedly devastating critique of the new, boutique criminologies:

They are the least desirable and potentially most self-damaging, aspects of the best of contemporary criminology.

I argue quite the opposite - their focus on criminological politics, their willingness to take a stance, to speak to and of Nga Morehu, is the most desirable and powerful features of these contemporary, so-called 'boutique' criminologies. 

From the perspective of those who practice Carlen’s scientific criminology, it is the ‘science’ and the implicit objectivity and methods that establish ‘facts about crime’ that distinguishes it from these other, subjective approaches, and that should provide it a natural place at the policy table. But I say that these administrative, or perhaps more accurately, authoritarian criminologies, are distinguished by a number of other features other than their ‘science’, including:

i) their focus on research and social inquiry into actions the state defines as 'criminal';

ii) that they confine their critical gaze to issues related to those communities the state considers are 'problematic'; more often than not people of colour and working class youth, albeit minus any significant, meaningful engagement with these communities;

iii) confine their social inquiry to issues and questions that the policy sector deems important, for which they receive significant renumeration via the establishment of contractual, mutually beneficial relationships; 

iv) limit their critical analysis of state systems, policies and programmes to programmatic effectiveness via evaluations devoid of historical context, and the wider political economy of state domination of justice in the neo-liberal moment, and lastly

v) empower themselves through the veil of scientism I spoke of earlier, an ideological construct that privileges their approach to measuring the Indigenous life-world, whilst denigrating Indigenous (and other) forms of knowledge. 

And what has this criminology brought us?  More policing, and not of the communitarian kind sometimes enjoyed by white communities, but of the ‘hot spot’, militaristic tactics, violent style of policing that we have been subjected to for decades. Is it effective? Well, that depends on how you measure 'effectiveness'; if by effective we mean more Aboriginal people arrested and sent to prison, then yes.  If we mean more just and less violent, then no.

In comparison, Chris Cunneen and I envisioned an Indigenous approaches to criminological inquiry based on the following core principles:

1.   Taking a stance of committed objectivity.  This is as much a political stance as it is an epistemological one.

2. Carrying on the theme of ‘politics’, the second principle entails ‘speaking truth to power’

3. The third is to ‘give back to the communities who have privileged you with their knowledge and experience’, and not just in the form of sending them a copy of your journal article.

4. Indigenous criminological research should be ‘real’: Meaning it must come from within Indigenous peoples and their communities.

I would like now to propose a fifth principle: this principle will encapsulate all the others, an over-arching principle, if you like, and it is devised as a direct response to, rebuff the position taken by Carlen, Weatherburn and others like them; it is:

5.  That Indigenous Criminology should be evangelical; in the sense that it should strive to be subjective and biased; political, in that practitioners must take a stance that clearly aligns with the needs of Indigenous communities and not the state; and it should set firm boundaries regarding membership, by rejecting those unable or unwilling to adhere to the tikanga [philosophies] that form the basis of Indigenous knowledge. 

In response to Carlen I say that these are the most desirable and potentially most self-affirming aspects of the best of contemporary Indigenous academic criminology.

Lastly, one thing we must do is avoid wasting energy railing against the negative representations of Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous scholarship. The features that administrative and authoratarian criminologists offer as our weaknesses, are in fact what makes our work powerful, different and meaningful. In fact I would go further and argue that the reasons why our work is attacked for being 'too political' and 'too subjective', is because the richness of our research demonstrates the vacuous nature of the work of much of corporatist criminology. 

Presentation to the Griffith University Symposium: Bringing the 'Alternative' Back into Restorative Justice, Wednesday 25 November 2020

Kia ora all

Here is the link to my recorded keynote of the Griffith University Symposium Bringing the 'Alternative' Back into Restorative Justice, held on Wednesday 25 November 2020.

The title of the presentation was 'Restorative Justice in the Land of the Long White Lie'

Old Wine in an Old Bottle? An Indigenous Commentary on the Criminology of the Global South

The idea for the title of this presentation came from a discussion I had in early 2019 with a prominent Australian Aboriginal scholar regarding the Criminology of the Global South (from here-on-in Southern Criminology), during which he described engaging with material produced by Australian members of this ‘new’ criminological movement, as akin to drinking ‘old wine out of a dirty bottle’.  The old wine refers to the rehashed Eurocentric theories and focus of the new criminology, while the dirty bottle referred to the fact that Southern Criminology arose from the same bastion of white privilege, the neo-liberal university, as had most of the schools of criminology that have existed previously.

According to advocates, Southern Criminology is the latest criminological project seeking to ‘decolonise’ the discipline, removing it from its ‘Northern’, Eurocentric foundations and theoretical bias.

The esteemed British scholar Matthews, described Southern Criminology as “probably the most significant theoretical development in the recent period”, and just recently Fonseca described the movement as “a gush of fresh air in the debate involving studies of crime, crime control and punishment” (quoted in Moosava, 2019).

I agree with the gush of air part of that last quote, but I not as yet convinced of its freshness, given the conduct of some of its Australian adherents towards Indigenous scholars and scholarship over the past decade, and the lack of meaningful engagement with our work and with Indigenous peoples in general.  

Unlike Leon Moosavi’s paper published in the British Journal of Criminology in 2019, I will not be offering a ‘friendly critique’ of this supposedly ‘new’ criminological movement.  If you’ve read Moosavi’s paper you will recall that he chose to offer a friendly critique Southern Criminology because he wanted to enhance the project due in part, to a belief that it has a solidarity with the principles of decolonising criminology rather than scepticism about its necessity or potential worth to the cause of social (and especially to Indigenous) justice. Well right now I am sceptical not so much of the intent of Southern Criminologists, because thus far they are saying pretty much all the right things - racism bad, inequality bad, free us from the shackles of ‘Northern’ theory, ‘decolonise the discipline’, and speak for the disaffected - etc, etc.  However, demonstrating support for decolonisation required much more than a few statements included in an article here or there, or collected edition/handbook.  We, and by that I mean Indigenous peoples, have heard it all before, so we tend to judge those who claim to be our ‘allies’ on their actual conduct, or, as this is an academic exercise, on the content of their research (and their conduct during and after it), what they say about us, who they have invited to speak about us, and if they are engaging respectfully and meaningfully with us. 

The theorist who appears to have greatly influenced the idea for a Southern Criminology is Raewyn Connell, author of that well-known work Southern Theory (2007).  In that work Connell advanced the argument for the ‘South’ to create its own body of theory and knowledge.  Her reasoning for offering this proposition: because of the orientalist attitude that pervades the social sciences that views academic scholarship and knowledge emanating from the South as of poor quality and not worth consideration.

As an Indigenous person, and researcher, I do not entirely disagree with Connell’s assessment of the social sciences. In my experience this attitude is pervasive within the discipline of criminology; for example when a scholar like Don Weatherburn write as recently as 2014, that there is nothing for us to learn from Indigenous knowledge about the causes of crime, because all we need to know we can get from western science (a not uncommon sentiment amongst Australian criminologists in my experience), then Connell is clearly onto something.  But she, just like many of the scholars involved in Southern Criminology in my part of the world, are talking about a situation and an issue that we Indigenous people have long known about, have been researching, and actively seeking to address.  One must wonder to what extent Southern Criminology is yet another example of a bunch of (predominantly white) criminologists turning up extremely late to our party…. largely uninvited.

The idea that Australian criminology is part of the periphery – a central platform of the rationale for Southern Criminology - greatly amuses me.  Why?  Because of the long and ongoing history of bigotry within Australian Criminology and the paternalistic and colonialist attitudes towards Indigenous people and our knowledge.  I’ll return to this idea of Australian criminology as some backward, ignored, lonely bunch, looking with longing to the Great North just to be recognised, like some teenager at the school dance hoping someone, anyone, will ask him or her to dance, a little later.

So, let us briefly discuss this project, this Southern Criminology and in so doing I am going to skim briefly and broadly over the main arguments (for its existence), etc, for a detailed understanding read the extant literature:

It starts with the observation that criminological theories and concepts have largely been produced in ‘the West’, meaning Europe, the North America.  It is also assumed that the ‘knowledge of the North’ can be readily transported to the periphery, and that this knowledge will be relevant anywhere (Moosavi, 2019), whether psycho-therapeutic programs or policing tactics, or entire prison regimes, as in the case of New Zealand’s importation the Integrated Offender Management system from Canada in the early 2000’s. 

Let me just pause here for a moment because I need to say something about this portrayal of the ‘North’.  As an Indigenous scholar I need to say that when we hear or read the term criminology of North American and Western Europe, the moment it hits our brain it is translated into White Criminology: criminology by and for white people who then do us poor natives a huge favour by offering us their gift of criminological knowledge to fix crime problems generated mostly from the colonising behaviour of their ancestors, or indeed themselves, if my experience of Australian criminologists is anything to go by.

Moosava (2019) also reports that Southern criminologists are motivated by the need to challenge the largely one directional nature of knowledge flow (North to South) in order to attain a more rounded criminological knowledge of crime and social harm.  In this regard, much of what I have read thus far from the Australasian practitioners of Southern Criminology leads me to believe that what they are doing or intend to do is privilege the knowledge and experiences of marginalised communities.

Any attempt by members of Southern Criminology to prioritise the experiences of the marginalised, if this principle were to result in concrete action on their part, would indeed be welcomed by Indigenous communities.  But of course, some of us are already doing just that.  And so to presage one of my critiques of Southern Criminology - at least the Australian variant - nothing I’ve read so far about their motivations or the core focus of their work is in fact new, as I stated previously, Indigenous scholars have been doing it, and not just saying it, for decades.

I agree with Moosava’s point that so far Southern criminologists have not offered enough reflection on whether the decolonisation of criminology is even possible given the discipline’s Western origins, and its long and continuing parasitic relationship with the state.  The difficulty of that disentanglement from the colonialist and paternalistic mindset of criminology I will highlight with a couple of examples below.

Secondly, I also agree with Moosava’s contention that the Australian branch of Southern Criminology is highly Eurocentic in terms of theory and personnel.  He rightly points out that in the Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South released in 2018, almost half of the 79 contributors are based in Australian institutions, and the vast majority were white.  This is reflective of the way in which Southern Criminology is dominated by Australian criminologists to such an extent that Moosava writes that it may be more accurate to describe it as ‘Australian Criminology’.

At this point Southern Criminology is not representative of the disaffected communities who truly represent the South, such as the Indigenous peoples residing in settler-colonial jurisdictions. For this reason, its claims to be a decolonising project are groundless, unless of course they mean they are decolonising themselves, in which case we wish them all the best.

This brings us to the inevitable question: how far ‘South’ do you need to be, to be able to truly, accurately call yourself a ‘Southern Criminology’; how disaffected, ignored or marginalised?  Well, I put it to you that I needs to be a lot further south than the comfortable, privileged position of academics in the wealthy academic institutions of Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne.

Right now, I am extremely pessimistic about Southern Criminology, especially the leadership of its Australian branch, can engage with our experiences in a meaningful way.  For example, comments by one of the founders of Southern Criminology during a keynote speech at a recent, major criminology conference, draw attention to the continued prevalence of ‘old school’ attitudes towards Indigenous scholarship within the ‘movement’.  During question time they were asked what made this ‘new criminology’ different from others that seek to decolonise the discipline, such as post-colonial criminology, peacemaker criminology, counter-colonial and Indigenous criminology’s, to which they answered: ‘these criminology’s romanticise the other’, meaning they mythologise our old ways of doing justice and misrepresent the causes of Indigenous offending.  As I have said in an earlier blog, this portrayal of ‘our criminology’ does not reflect the research and publications we have produced about Indigenous peoples and crime.  How is this attitude any different from Don Weatherburn’s ignorant dismissal of Indigenous knowledge?  I put it to you all that it is not.

I want to finish on one last point: in a 2016 article, Carrington et al, all leaders in the development of Southern Criminology, stated that “[t]o be clear… our purpose is not to add to the growing catalogue of new criminology’s... [Southern Criminology] seeks to modify the criminological field to make it more inclusive of histories and patterns of crime, justice and security outside the global North... [It] seeks to work with and complement—to Southernize—other established and emerging fields in criminology: feminist, green, postcolonial, queer, rural, cultural and Asian. (2016: 11; emphasis mine).  The wording is unfortunately, because it leads one to ask, are they seeking to Southernise, or Colonise these other criminology’s?  It also gives the impression that something vital is missing from them, without clarifying exactly what ‘it’ is, and what they offer that is better.  And so, when Southern Criminologists call for ‘the periphery to invade the centre’ (Brown 2018: 96), some may recoil at what they might feel is imperialist language.  Again, I ask are they trying to decolonise or colonise?

Ok, so, how do we explain the strange conduct of some of the Australian contingent?  I think that Leon Moosavi, in his article from 2019, hits the nail on the head when he wrote that one of the most urgent matters for Southern Criminology to address is whether Australia should be considered as part of the Global South.  Mark Brown (2018: 93) has also identified this as a concern, stating that ‘Southern criminology faces its own existential question: what makes you Southern?’  This question divides opinion amongst proponents of Southern criminology. Some believe that Australia is one of the ‘selected enclaves of the symbolic north located south of the equator’ (Donnermeyer 2017: 128), whereas others emulate Raewyn Connell’s view that Australia is marginalized in similar ways to other Global South countries (Connell 2007: 212).

Australian scholarship may often be ignored by those in the United States and the United Kingdom, and Australia’s geographic location may make it harder for Australian scholars to participate in international academic events, but Australia is still a country that is developed, wealthy, stable, autonomous and privileged, meaning that suggesting that Australia is part of the Global South is problematic. At best, Australia may be part of the ‘semiperiphery’ (Medina 2011), but it still does not share the same hardship as the Asian, African and Latin American countries that are typically considered as part of the Global South, which is noteworthy because it has been suggested that a key component of ‘epistemologies of the South’ is that they comprise ‘knowledge born in struggle’ (Santos 2014: x).

The idea that Australian criminology is isolated from its Northern counterparts is nonsense.  Overall, their knowledge is not borne of struggle as Santos contends is a key marker of Southern Criminology, unless you define ‘struggle’ as receiving a lukewarm coffee from a café on the way to work.  If you want to see knowledge borne of struggle then go talk to Indigenous and African American scholars and we’ll tell you about our experiences of dealing with racists in the academy, of having our knowledge denigrated, our cultural practices and languages incorporated into departmental and institutional strategic plans (without meaningful funding attached); our people used as fodder as members of the academy work to credentilise themselves to move up in seniority.

The truth is we are already ‘Southern’ and we don’t need a bunch of white criminologists to show us what is required to decolonise the discipline; we’ve been doing it for a lot longer than this latest criminological fad was conceived.  Therefore, I do not advocate for the decolonisation of criminology; instead I call for the formulation of our own social justice-oriented discipline.  Why?  Because I believe our energy is best directed at the needs of our own communities, rather than wasting it on showing white academics how to behave more ethically.  In the end, it is not our job as Indigenous scholars to fix the problems of whitecentric criminology – let’s leave them to ‘southernise’ themselves.

References

Brown, M (2018) Southern Criminology in the Post-colony: More than a ‘Derivative Discourse?, in K. Carrington, R. Hogg, J. Scott and M. Sozzo (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan: 83-104.

Carrington, K; Sozzo, M and Hogg, R (2016) Southern Criminology, British Journal of Criminology, 56: 1–20.

Connell, R (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Donnermeyer, J (2017) The Place of Rural in a Southern Criminology, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 6: 118–32.

Medina, J (2011) Doing Criminology in the ‘Semi-Periphery’ and the ‘Periphery’, in C. Smith, S. Zhang and R. Barberet (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of International Criminology. New York: Routledge: 13-23.

Moosavi, L (2019) A Friendly Critique of ‘Asian Criminology’ and ‘Southern Criminology’, British Journal of Criminology, 59: 257-275.

Santos, B (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

Weatherburn, D (2014) Arresting Incarceration: Pathways Out of Indigenous Imprisonment. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Community Research Webinar: Challenges and Opportunites for addressing inequities of the NZ justice system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_bGsga9eaI&t=125

A Commentary on Indigenous Research Ethics

The following commentary offers an Indigenous perspective with institutionalised research ethics processes.

http://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2020/04/23/decolonising-research-through-emancipatory-indigenous-ethics/

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.

Publication of the First Edition of Decolonization of Criminology and Justice

Hi all

Please find here a link to the first publication of the journal Decolonization of Criminology and Justice, edited by Antje Deckert (AUT University, Auckland) and myself.  Please read, share and just as importantly, submit work for consideration!

https://ojs.aut.ac.nz/dcj/index.php/DCJ