As a child, I knew something horrible had happened to my grandparents, each of whom went to Canada as refugees of the Russian Revolution, and I wanted to understand more. At age thirteen I interviewed Margreta. She told of the beauty and abundance her family had enjoyed growing up but as her story approached her teenage years she began to cry and could not continue. She was a joyful person, full of laughter, so seeing her cry left an indelible impression, planting seeds of both curiosity and trepidation. Only later would I learn how many women of these generations suffered from PTSD and how the silence around their experiences of violation negatively impacted our community. Yet the power of my grandmother’s testimony and survival inspired my teenaged heart to keep asking questions.

In my final year of college I volunteered with the Big Sisters/Little Sisters program in Winnipeg, MB. My little sister was a thirteen-year-old Cree girl who had been released from lock-up after three years. She was living in a group home and pregnant for the second time. Her “crimes” were sniffing glue, stealing food and clothes, and beating people up (which I now understand as reactions to a colonial system that didn’t meet her basic human needs). Though I had no race or social analysis at the time, she helped me see that the criminal justice system (CJS) was unable to address her issues or provide healing. She described the pain of being forced to give up her first child and of not knowing where he was. She vowed she would never give up her twins; she wanted them raised on her reserve by an Indian family. On the cusp of adulthood myself, this encounter raised a new set of questions about how her ancestors had been displaced by my immigrant ancestors on the Canadian prairies. Her story was my first tutorial in the hard truth of colonization, and planted in me seeds of disillusionment with my comfortable middle-class white world.

Each of these stories propelled me to seek work that addresses injustices. This journey began in 1989, when I left Saskatoon, SK, for a Mennonite Voluntary Service assignment with the Victim Offender Reconciliation Program (VORP) in Fresno, CA. There I learned to facilitate victim-offender dialogues (more on this shortly) with juveniles involved in property crimes, often youth of color. When I saw five Latino boys plead guilty to a crime they did not commit, I began to see cracks and contradictions in the CJS. A drunk driving homicide case in 1992 led me to work with lifers in prison. I have a visceral memory of talking with men privately in a small janitor’s closet—the only private space! I recall one man weeping in bitter remorse as he described the woman he had raped and murdered—“She was about your size and had your hair.” I learned about his childhood and wounds he carried from race and class oppression. Every lifer I encountered had a story of significant victimization.

Victim-offender dialogues invite all of those impacted by an offense (victims and perpetrators, their families, communities, and other stakeholders) to identify harms, needs, and responsibilities. They then collectively seek how to make things as right as possible, which can include covenants of accountability, restitution, reparations, and (ideally) reconciliation. In one incident, a 17 year-old had physically threatened his teacher, but only the boy’s grandmother understood that the roots of his frustration stemmed from his inability to read—something neither his parents nor teachers were aware of! Grandma revealed that she taught herself to read at age 50; his mother added she was also illiterate. The group came up with an agreement that the boy would read to his younger siblings every night, his teacher choosing a book appropriate to his improving reading level; he was very proud of this plan. I saw the efficacy of methodologies that focus on listening people into speech rather than determining punishment.

But while the original intent of the restorative justice movement was to offer an alternative to the retributive CJS, I felt we, restorative justice practitioners, were succumbing to pressures to adapt to how the system adjudicates crime. Too often social context and dynamics were ignored by VORP facilitators, who dealt only with the presenting individual violation. In one case, a white boy had gotten into a fight with a Black youth. In the course of the dialogue, the facilitator noticed that the white boy’s baseball cap had racial epithets written under the bill. However, lacking anti-racism training, he didn’t know how to address the issue so the Black youth was re-victimized during the meeting by the very racial taunting that had led to the first altercation.

In 1998, while I was teaching at The University of Winnipeg, Indigenous leaders opened my eyes further to realities of systemic racism and blind spots in the contemporary restorative justice movement. In fact, I learned that practices of relational justice predate colonization. Indigenous people have long understood that all things are connected in a web of life; that misbehavior is a sign of sickness or disconnection; and that offenders need to be reminded of who they are in their community. Bringing victims, offenders, and their communities together for restorative dialogue is powerful work, but I learned that some techniques in which I trusted fell short. In my second decade in this work, therefore, I sought a different set of mentors: those who had experienced systemic injustice and made the arduous journey from victim to survivor to healer.  

My third decade in this work began with a long awaited pilgrimage to southern Ukraine with my sister to explore the complex history of our Russian Mennonite ancestors. On the auspicious date of 10/10/10 we arrived at Margreta’s home, where the aforementioned invasion had occurred. We made our way into the house, now abandoned and in disrepair. As I lay on my stomach on rickety stairs, viewing the remains of what had once been the heart of a Mennonite manor, I imagined my teenage grandmother listening through the attic floor boards as her mother met the demands of soldiers. I felt the weight of that story in my bones.

In preparation for this trip I had studied family and academic books, stirring up queries I am still working on. For example, the profound wealth disparity between some Mennonite gentry and Ukrainian peasants at the end of the 19th century made social upheaval inevitable, the violence of which must be understood in the context of that political history. That story was rooted in Catherine the Great’s forcible removal of Nogai and Cossack peoples, traditional inhabitants of the Ukrainian steppes, in order to make way for “colonists,” including my ancestors arriving from Prussia in the 1780s. A century and a half later, Russian Mennonites coming as refugees to the Canadian prairies were given or bought land that had recently been expropriated from Cree tribes by the Canadian government. In Ukraine I uncovered complicated layers of my grandmother’s story. In subsequent doctoral studies, I interviewed over thirty Settler Canadian Mennonite women, exploring questions about intergenerational trauma. 

My journey has been deeply personal and political. Early on our conviction as restorative justice practioners was that restorative justice was a way of life—and so it has been! I have aspired to broaden and deepen the field to address historical and systemic oppression, despite being criticized by some colleagues for pushing the paradigm too far. Today more than ever restorative justice should push boundaries, name injustices, and seek both individual and collective healing. As I begin to lose some of my mentors and elders in this movement, I desire to become a more faithful “re-mem-bearer” of these experiments in trust, truth, and power.