Reparative justice

Carmela Murdocca “Supreme Court of Canada in the 2012 decision of R v Ipeelee, in which the Court stated: ‘When sentencing an aboriginal offender … courts must take judicial notice of such matters as the history of colonialism, displacement, and residential schools and how that history continues to translate into lower economic educational attainment, lower incomes, higher unemployment, higher rates of substance abuse and suicide, and, of course, higher levels of incarceration for aboriginal people’” This is the type of justice that is being considered in some parts of the world, without getting into a particular case looking at the idea of reparational justice will be considered. Some white people ask, “what does slavery and discrimination have to do with me?” and “I am not discriminatory and I am not a slave owner” BUT this is not about you! THIS is about the years, decades, and centuries of poverty and over-representation in prisons and the like which are iterations of postcolonial problems. The goal of the reparations is not necessarily directly related to white people. This type of justice considers a people not a person, presumably. There is a level of concern that comes upon an individual when reading a statement like the following by Sherene Razack “There is little chance of disturbing relations of domination unless we considerchow they structure our subject positions” source Looking White People in the Eye, which seems to single out particular people, i.e. white people. “Over twenty years since the addition of this restorative justice sentencing principle (R v. Gladue), extensive case law and scholarship has shown that Gladue now encompasses a complex set of legal and bureaucratic interpretations, arrangements, and discourses”  Of course there is discourse alleging the lack of justice in the statute because the offender gets consideration of their life circumstances,  no matter what offence was committed, but whose “life history reveals the intergenerational effects of settler colonialism”

Murdocca claims that “Gladue process has done little to address the issue of over-incarceration for Indigenous people, and it has done little to disrupt the reification of racial stereotypes, which is an ontological schema of racial colonial difference, concerning Indigenous people”  As one would suspect the laws around reparation are very heatedly argued as either used to “in order to advance the progressive goal of solving the evil that is over incarceration” or to placate people with the illusion that the laws’ interpretations are helpful in some way. There are intents with such legal approaches to indigeneity, but there will continue to be work that needs to be done and ground to be given (sic) on both sides, legal ground that is . . . . . . . . .. .  .