A framework for addressing systemic historical wrongs perpetrated against categories of children—through indigenous boarding schools, slavery, colonization, medical exploitation—and restoring dignity.
Sor Juana lived under multiple colonial systems that harmed indigenous children by design: displacement, forced assimilation, erasure of knowledge systems, denial of intellectual worth. Her very existence was the product of colonial violence, yet she claimed intellectual life as resistance and reclamation. Children's rights must include reparative justice—acknowledging historical and ongoing harms perpetrated against specific groups of children and taking meaningful action to restore dignity and opportunity. This includes indigenous children separated from cultures through residential schools; Black children traumatized through slavery and ongoing racial violence; children exploited in medical experiments; LGBTQ+ children subjected to conversion practices. Reparative justice means more than apologies: it requires material restitution, curriculum changes centering marginalized knowledge, support for cultural and spiritual recovery, and structural transformation ensuring such harms cannot recur. Following Sor Juana's example of claiming intellectual authority despite colonization, reparative frameworks must center the voices and needs of affected communities in designing restoration. This is not backward-looking nostalgia but forward-oriented commitment to ensuring that children today are not subject to the same systems of harm. Children's rights include the right to live in societies that acknowledge their predecessors' suffering and work toward genuine repair.
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