by Rosemary Brown
Harold R. Johnson’s Peace and Good Order: the Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada makes a compelling argument for why Indigenous peoples in Canada need to reassert their jurisdiction over justice.
A member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation in northern Saskatchewan, Johnson served a stint in the Navy and worked as a logger, miner, and trapper before going to law school and earning an M.A. at Harvard. He worked as both a defence lawyer and as a crown prosecutor in Saskatchewan and was also a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction. He died in 2022 from cancer, at the age of 64.
Peace and Good Order, based on his experiences in law school and as a practicing lawyer, is a critique of the justice system in Canada, which he described as “rooted in white western thought and property rights.”
He characterizes law school as a mechanism for “keeping undesirables out”, designed for “wealthy white men”, and that it changed him, making him “think like a settler”.
The justice system in Canada is designed on the basis of punishment as deterrence—but it doesn’t work. Incarceration rates of Indigenous peoples, including Indigenous women, have been on the rise since the 1960s, a process he referred to as “incarceration contagion”. Yet studies have shown that increased incarceration does not reduce crime.
Johnson argues that this incarceration/punishment model does not work. Many crimes committed by Indigenous peoples are related to alcohol, which in most cases serves to medicate intergenerational trauma. Until the underlying trauma is addressed, crime and incarceration rates will not improve. Furthermore, families and communities are not healed in this process.
Johnson points out that before colonization Indigenous peoples had their own justice systems and methods for dealing with offenders. These systems were based on redemption, with communities deciding how an offender could “earn their way back into the community”, thus taking accountability for their behaviour and leading to more healing for the community and the offender.
Johnson believes that a justice system based on redemption, one in which the community is involved, and one which is sufficiently resourced to address underlying trauma, is the solution. He offers as a model his experiences with the Northern Alcohol Strategy. This strategy involved going to the community to ask for ideas on how to reduce alcohol abuse and sought the endorsement of Indigenous communities and leaders before being implemented. Changes were made in how alcohol is sold in the North and in turn this has led to a decrease in alcoholism, crime, and hospitalization rates.
Johnson argues that Indigenous peoples and communities cannot wait for things to change, but that Indigenous Nations need to reassert their jurisdiction over justice and implement systems based on redemption not punishment.
I wonder whether Canadian society as a whole could learn from a redemption model. For those interested in what traditional justice systems looked like I would recommend Doing Things the Right Way: Dene Traditional Justice in Lac La Martre, NWT, by Joan Ryan.
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