Indigenous restorative traditions

Across the extraordinarily diverse landscape of Indigenous legal and justice traditions — Navajo Peacemaking, Māori hui, Haudenosaunee consensus processes, Andean buen vivir — a consistent set of principles recurs: that justice is communal rather than individual, that the goal is healing rather than punishment, that the relationship between harmed and harmer must be addressed and not simply adjudicated. These traditions were actively suppressed by colonial systems that recognized them, correctly, as alternative sources of authority. Their partial recovery and integration into contemporary legal systems represents one of the most promising developments in justice practice.