ABSTRACT
Restorative justice is a global movement that has its origins in North American efforts to build a community-based justice to steal conflict back from the state. Restorative justice borrows the language and resources of the criminal justice system, leading it to mimic and reproduce the logic of this system in crucial ways, such as when it accepts unproblematically the language of victim and offender. Through language, an easier pathway to reconciling the past is imagined; in particular, this is a path on which one need not grapple with material reality of transformative redress. The chapter explores limits of the concepts of cultural genocide and restorative justice for redressing the ontological destruction experienced by Indigenous peoples under North American settler colonialism. Justice is divided into a series of symbolic and superficial material forms of redress. Settler colonial nations such as the US and Canada played a self-interested role in having cultural genocide removed from the United Nations Genocide Convention.
