ABSTRACT

Indigenous peoples’ experience of the restorative justice industry has been marked by a number of strategic decisions and practices that have made the relationship uncomfortable for both parties, including (a) that members of the industry purposely utilise elements of Indigenous life-worlds to enhance the marketability of their restorative justice products, and (b) that the industry has become a significant colonial project within the settler colonial state’s ongoing regulation of Indigenous peoples. Utilising the findings of recent research projects on Indigenous experiences of the imposition of restorative justice programmes in Canada and New Zealand, this chapter offers an Indigenous critique of the settler colonial state’s current reliance on the importation and dissemination of restorative justice policies and conferencing forums as its preferred response to the related intractable problems of Indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system and a critique of settler colonial crime control. This chapter aims to contribute to the Handbook’s key objectives by arguing that recent Indigenous experience of the globalised restorative justice industry and its parasitic relationship with the settler colonial state challenges oft-made claims about the transformative properties of restorative justice policies and interventions, most especially the myth that restorative justice is capable of meeting the justice needs of Indigenous peoples.