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Copyright 2002 Wilderness Peacemaking The Peacemaking Perspective Diane LeResche is a university lecturer in conflict resolution and a tribal peacemaking consultant. In a special issue of The Mediation Quarterly devoted to peacemaking among indigenous peoples, she writes that peacemaking is not so much concerned with distributive or retributive justice as it is with sacred justice. “[S]acred justice is found,” she says, “when the importance of restoring understanding and balance to relationships has been acknowledged.” A peacemaking process is thus a “guiding process,” a relationship-healing journey to assist people in returning to harmony (LeResche, 1993, quoted in Ross, 1996, p. 27).3 In the same issue, Philmer Bluehouse, a Navajo and coordinator of the Navajo Peacemaker Court, and James Zion, a solicitor to the Courts of the Navajo Nation, write: “The Peacemaker wonders, ‘Is it hashhkeeji (moving towards disharmony) or is it hozhooji (moving towards harmony)?” (Bluehouse & Zion, 1993, quoted in Ross, 1996, pp. 123, 146). The Diné word hozhoo connotes a complex of meanings – healing, harmony, balance, beauty, right relationship (Griffin-Pierce, 1992, pp. 23, 35, 195, 198; Zion, 1998).4 The idea of balance, of being in the right relation to the world, and especially to one’s family, kin, and significant others, is of central importance in most Indian cultures. This includes being in balance with the natural and spiritual worlds. To be “well” means keeping the right balance in all things (Swinomish Tribal Mental Health Project, 1991, p. 138). The goal of peacemaking is to bring relationships into harmony and balance.5 A group in the wilderness shares many significant characteristics with the indigenous cultures that developed this peacemaking perspective. A small band in the wilderness is interdependent, with few outside resources. Individuals need the group in order to survive, just as the group needs all the skills of its members in order to survive. When a member of a small band in the woods becomes disruptive, violent, or out of control, there has to be less concern with retributive justice – revenge, punishment, control, determining who is right – than with the eventual reintegration of that person into the group. To survive in the wilderness, a small group needs the contribution of all its members – both those with high levels of self-control and those without. To survive, every wilderness group must practice peacemaking. Notes 3 For example, among the Kiowa, a keeper of a sacred medicine bundle had the function of intervening in and resolving a dispute. “The relatives of anyone who is accused or guilty of an act against the common good or another individual or who is involved in matters of life and death can seek the intervention of a keeper to offer a pipe of peace to the person or persons charging the defendant with wrongdoing. When the pipe is offered it is almost never refused. The use of the peace pipe involves no judgment about who is right and who might be considered to be wrong; consequently there is no loss of face by anyone involved” (Meredith, 1995, p. 50; emphasis added). 4 Zion, 1998, provides an excellent summary of the Navajo hozhooji naat’aanii or peacemaking court. As he summarizes, “The parties talk out their problem and how they feel about it to gain empathy and, at the end, consensus on how to realign their relationships in a meaningful way.” 5 As James Zion succinctly puts it, “Western law is based on punishment, and Indian law is based on healing” (Zion, 1997). However, I do not want this discussion to suggest an unrealistic and ultimately demeaning view of native North American life, a romantic picture of innocent people living in harmony and peace with each other and with nature. As scholar Sam Gill points out, this is not a realistic view of human life for peoples whose entire histories have been filled with hardship, disease, death, discomfort, and difficulties. “Native American world views are especially dynamic,” he writes, “in terms of their including, and even identifying as sacred, the disturbing disruptive elements that are inseparable from life. They may hold an image of beauty and harmony, but it is a goal, while the path toward it is tempered with the hard facts of reality: that beauty and harmony are never fully achieved, except perhaps in death at an old age won by a long life of struggle” (Gill, 1982, p. 36). | ||
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