There are Different Suns: Learning, Restorative History, and Finding Ground

ABSTRACT

This article draws on my time as a classroom teacher and my experience as a museum educator affiliated with the Center for Restorative History to argue for learning that centers relationships over education that centers measurement. The world we live in is shaped by a logic that prioritizes categorization, regulation, and metrics measured against a western liberal ideal. Restorative history, building on practices of peacemaking and restorative justice, offers maps to different ways to be together and think about the world. Places and moments of learning informed by critical pedagogy are the ground on which we can use restorative history practices to build a different world that centers relationship building, mending, and maintaining right relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Peacemaking
• restorative justice
• restorative history
• critical pedagogy
• black study
• critical geography

Introduction: on mistaking the map for the territory

Imagining a world creates it, if it isn’t already there. Every human being on this planet spins off thousands between birth and death, although there’s something about the way our minds work that keeps us from noticing. In every moment, we’re constantly moving in multiple dimensions – we think we’re sitting still, but we’re actually falling from one universe to the next to the next … 

-- N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became¹

Prior to joining the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as Manager for PK-12 Learning and the Center for Restorative History (CRH) as Co-Lead of the Decolonization Working Group and member of the Research & Action Team, I was a ninth grade Language Arts teacher in Washington, D.C. My thinking and practice as a museum educator are shaped deeply by my experience in the classroom. I enjoyed every moment. I miss learning with and from young people. Our classroom was a place we made daily through relationships. Year to year, class period to class period, we made our classroom the place we needed it to be for us to learn together – not for me to educate them. This distinction is important and informed by thinking that confronts coloniality (as described by Sylvia Wynter) and critical pedagogy, which foreground learning and process through relationships over the hold of metrics and data on education, both formal and informal.² This is not to say that evaluation does not matter; rather, that embracing learning and process as the ends, and not the means, requires different methods, metrics, and data.

Sylvia Wynter is a Jamaican philosopher and writer who focuses on thinking and practicing what it means to be human and free. According to her, people who are committed to justice and freedom are lost in today’s world because we have mistaken the map for the territory, the representation of the thing for the thing itself. She argues that we mistake gains – defined by data points such as the stocking of more books by BIPOC authors on the shelves in bookstores, the existence of Ethnic Studies and related fields in universities, increasing the visibility of BIPOC people on television or in the movies, and/or the election of persons who identify as BIPOC to the offices of President and Vice-President – as movement towards freedom or liberation. In each of these instances, change or progress appeal to notions of freedom as defined by a western liberal logic that privileges order, organization, and taxonomy. That is to say, metrics that it creates and can understand. By definition, this logic situates non-white and non-western as inferior. That is the territory we must recognize, the logic of western liberal humanism. We do not feel free, because we are still in the same place that centers a particular form of categorization and regulation by metrics. This territory obscures alternative, always already-existing possibilities of what it means to be human, to know, and to be free that are grounded elsewhere. These elsewheres are not new, but these alternative territories exist under different suns.³ We need different maps to find them and be human outside the framework of western liberal humanism.⁴

Critical pedagogy is a field of inquiry, rooted in historical materialism, that does the creative labor of imagining a different territory on which to stand when in a classroom. Thinkers and practitioners including bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Antonia Darder, Henry Giroux, Sandy Grande, and Peter McLaren, among others, parse the difference between education and learning.⁵ They argue our education system is structured by the same logic that centers an ideal against which students and teachers are measured. Education as a system is corralled by standardized test scores, enrollment rates, and returns on investment, due to the increase and proliferation of private-public partnerships. A major critique from this field is the downward destructive pressure that outcomes-driven education (grades, literacy and numeracy markers, standardized test scores, teacher performance metrics, and growth) exerts on relationships between students and teachers. It alienates them from themselves and each other, and schools them into accepting and normalizing these measurements.⁶ On the other hand, knitting ideas together from across critical pedagogy, I synthesize learning to mean the process of being together, building relationships, understanding the world around us, noticing inconsistencies, and analyzing causes and effects in order to make and change the world towards justice and equity. Learning is a territory on which we can build worlds through relationships.

This article argues that restorative history, a concept building on the theory and practice of restorative justice, provides a map to a territory of learning imagined by critical pedagogy. Through restorative history, we can make environments conducive to the kind of learning that brings and keeps people together through relationships that are ends in and of themselves. These places of learning structured by restorative history are vital, no matter how durable or fleeting. They function and remain as evidence that another way of being human together exists that another world is not only possible, but that we have been there and are eager to return. They are proof that we inhabit multiple dimensions at once.

The next section outlines some peacemaking and restorative justice practices that influenced the Center for Restorative History (CRH). After that, there are examples of how restorative history creates learning environments that reveal a different terrain. One comes from my time in the classroom, the others from the museum. The article closes with recommendations for folks interested in traveling with us.⁷

Origin stories: a theory and a place

Where life is precious, life is precious.

-- Ruth Wilson Gilmore⁸

Restorative justice (RJ) is a framework for addressing harm and/or conflict between and among people that has roots in Native American peacemaking practices. It is also a way to structure relationships between people. RJ seeks justice, resolution, repair, and/or redress without perpetuating harm by foregrounding horizontal organization, problem solving, solidarity, and contingency. It must be stated at the outset that the thinking, writing, and practice in RJ is rich and deep. The four themes outlined below are not the totality of thinking on RJ, but a beginning.⁹

Horizontal organization

Chief Justice Robert Yazzie explains horizontal organization by contrasting Anglo-European “vertical” justice and Navajo “horizontal” justice.

In a vertical structure, rank and position matter: some people are situated above others, while other people are situated below. Namely, judges are able to make more power based on their structural position over lawyers who are able to make more power over plaintiffs and defendants.¹⁰

In a vertical model, harm and/or conflict is adjudicated through lawyers and judges, not person to person. Sujatha Baliga, a former public defender and RJ practitioner, states that the U.S. system of law obscures and fetishizes the profoundly relational nature of harm and conflict by routing it through intermediaries. In other words, when someone is harmed, they do not confront and/or meet with the person who harmed them, but with lawyers and judges who make decisions for the parties.¹¹ In a horizontal organizational structure, no person is above another. According to Yazzie, a circle best exemplifies how to imagine this structure and its impact on relationships. “In a circle, there is no right or left … it conveys the image of people gathering for discussion.”¹² The circle can be as small as three people or as large as needed for support. This relational and interpersonal aspect of seeking justice transforms its meaning and practice.

Problem-solving

Understanding why an act of harm occurred – problem-solving – is at the core of peacemaking. In the U.S. system of law, problem-solving is rarely foregrounded. A judge presides over a case and

… makes one party the ‘bad guy’ and the other ‘the good guy;’ one of them is ‘wrong’ and the other is ‘right.’ The vertical justice system is so concerned with winning and losing that when the parties come to the end of the case, little or nothing is done to solve the underlying problems which caused the dispute in the first place. For centuries, the focus of English and American law has been punishment by the ‘state.’¹³

In contrast, Navajo justice is driven by problem-solving, “peacemaking,” a process of talking things out. Yazzie explains, “[t]he absence of coercion or punishment is important in Navajo justice concept because there are differences in the way people are treated when force is a consideration.” He adds, “If, however, the focus of a decision is problem-solving and not punishment, then parties are free to discuss problems.”¹⁴ Furthermore, whereas in a U.S. juridical system perceived harm is isolated to a one-on-one situation, in peacemaking processes, any and all stakeholders who are impacted by harm may be brought into the circle. Most stark in contrast with adjudication is the goal of restorative justice: restoring right relations between and among people: “This is restorative justice. Returning people to good relations with each other in a community.”¹⁵

Solidarity

Systems of adjudication and systems of problem-solving impact communities differently. It cannot be denied that the U.S. juridical system fractures community, intentionally or not. Drawing on personal experience, when my brother was incarcerated, in the immediate moment, he was removed from our family. In the longer term, when he was released from prison, he found it impossible to secure employment – more permanently removing him from and limiting his participation in our community. Neither he, nor we as his family, were able to meet with the person he harmed to problem-solve and restore right relations.

In Navajo justice, solidarity is vital to understanding restorative justice. As Yazzie explains,

… [t]he Navajo understanding of ‘solidarity’ is difficult to translate into English, but it carries connotations which help the individual to reconcile self with family, community, nature, and the cosmos – all reality. The sense of oneness with one’s surroundings, and the reconciliation of the individual with everyone and everything, makes an alternative to vertical justice work.¹⁶

Sujatha Baliga translates this into RJ parlance by stating simply, “we belong to each other.”¹⁷ When it is assumed the harmed and the one who has harmed will remain together, it fundamentally shifts the relationships between both parties and folks around them.

Contingency

Horizontal organizing, problem-solving, and solidarity sketch a world that is contingent. When the world is organized and made through relationships structured horizontally, there is no one person leading or pushing in one direction. When problem-solving is at the center of repairing harm and/or conflict resolution rather than law or precedent, outcomes are wide open. The present and future are unknown. When solidarity, restoring right relations, and social continuity are assumed, an understanding of community, belonging, and relationship maintenance that is supple and flexible enough to hold space for mending and reincorporation is necessary. All this is to say, the world made through Navajo restorative justice is always changing depending on each situation; relationships shaped by emotion and affect are at the center. Peacemaking is generative, it makes a place for people to build worlds together.

These four ideas – horizontal organizing, problem-solving, solidarity, and contingency – are foundational knowledges embodied in the world. Howard Zehr, Fania Davis, and Sujatha Baliga are examples of thinkers and practitioners who transliterate peacemaking into RJ for use outside of the Navajo tradition.¹⁸ In order to make these knowledges legible for folks who have learned and come into being in what Yazzie calls the “Anglo law,” Zehr in particular develops a process to guide repairing harm and resolving conflict. Zehr juxtaposes the differences between criminal justice (“Anglo law”) and restorative justice: criminal justice focuses on offenders getting what they deserve; RJ focuses on a victim’s needs and an offender’s responsibility to repair harm.¹⁹ A path built on relationship mending, affective care, and justice is aided by asking these questions of harm and conflict:

• Who has been harmed?

• What are their needs?

• Whose obligation are these?²⁰

The Center for Restorative History builds on peacemaking practices and RJ scholarship. It asks similar questions and applies them to the study of historical narratives, knowledge production and learning to repair harms created and perpetuated by museums, cultural sites, and heritage institutions; to practice restorative history.

The Center for Restorative History (CRH) was founded in 2019 by Tsione Wolde-Micheal and Nancy Bercaw, predicated on the idea that historical inquiry, research, and practice could be leveraged for justice. The center “emerged out of the National Museum of American History (NMAH) to address a critical gap in how museums tell stories about the past.”²¹ That the CRH came out of a national museum is important, because “it is an institution that has perpetuated harm through its collecting and display.”²² The CRH is comprised predominantly of BIPOC staff across all departments of the museum, with expertise in myriad aspects of public history and museum work.

Restorative history (RH) is a theory, method, and practice that honors and privileges knowledge made at the community level that has been obscured and/or silenced by historical narratives crafted by historically oppressive institutions, e.g. museums. RH is an outgrowth of the work of restorative justice practitioners and scholars, learning from Native American peacemaking practices that ask:

• What harm has been done?

• What are the community’s stated needs?

• What are the institution’s responsibilities?

• What are the root causes of that harm?²³

Peacemaking, RJ, and RH all are working at the most local of scales, human to human. Peacemaking, RJ, and RH also recognize the importance of affect, emotion, and the immeasurable. Harm is felt, crimes are measured. Repair is made between people, punishment is served alone. Working at the scales of person and community removes barriers between people created by quantitative data, time–space elongation, and “Anglo law.” It is at the most local that repair can occur most earnestly and push outward to spur repair across larger scales.²⁴ The next section draws on my experience as a classroom teacher and museum educator affiliated with the CRH, surfacing examples of learning shaped by and striving for principles of RJ and RH.

Theory is a guide to action²⁵

(description is not liberation).

-- Katherine McKittrick²⁶

Horizontal organization

At the beginning of each academic year, the students in each of my class periods and I engaged in a ritual familiar to any classroom teacher and any student: the distribution of syllabi at the start of each term. Without fail, after we finished going over content and major assignments, a student raised their hand to ask: “Mr., What are the rules for your class?” I answered, “We are a community of learners. We are here to learn from each other and work together. We need to figure out how we want to learn from and work together, together. This is not my classroom. This is our classroom.”

Over the course of a day, each class decided on the norms and expectations we would hold each other to during the year. The result was usually three anchor charts hanging on our classroom wall:²⁷

Table

Be respectful	Be generous	Be present
Show up to class on time. Raise your hand if you have a question or want to share. Turn in your work on time. Keep your body in your personal space. What we share with each other during circle time stays with us.	Let classmates finish their thought before entering discussion. Give help and receive help during independent and group work. Take turns with different jobs during group work.	Put cell phones away while in class. Use expected websites and resources when working online. Do work for this class when in this class.

Each class section developed its own norms. At first, I redirected students to our norms as needed; eventually, they held each other accountable. This did not go perfectly every time or in each class. However, holding each other accountable to these norms was easier because they were ours – not mine.²⁸

Building trust in a learning environment structured by RJ is key. Practicing horizontal organization from the outset is a way to get this started. The three components of RJ in education as outlined by Katherine Evans and Dorothy Vaandering are respect, dignity, and mutual concern.²⁹ The exercise of building norms for a shared learning environment together is a way to honor these components.³⁰

Problem-solving

A central value of the CRH is repairing and/or redressing harm. Stopping harm and not reproducing harm follow closely. The Undocumented Organizing Collecting Initiative is a founding project of the CRH. The team is working to learn from undocumented young people across the U.S. about how they were politicized, how they are changing policy, how they are working at intersections, and how they are pushing notions of belonging within the U.S. nation-state. The Undocumented Initiative makes explicit what museums often keep silent: that we learn with and from communities and share that knowledge with our publics and audiences. The knowledge is not ours; we did not make it, but we often present it as such. When museums do this, we are causing harm under the cover of educational programming and resource development. We are reproducing the harm of extraction. Faced with this problem, the team is asking questions about how to solve it and practice RH. These are some of its solutions to date.

• Co-curation: How do we collaborate? Programming and resource development have taken different processes and shapes throughout the project. Community organizers are recognized as contributors and co-authors, not sources. Program development has been shaped to serve the needs and honor the labor of the organizers themselves. For example, the series “Tell Me What Democracy Looks Like” centers organizers as theorists and practitioners from whom folks can learn without our mediation.

• Mutual capacity building: How can we help each other? It is imperative not to continue extracting. In this particular instance, the team asks communities it is learning with “What can we do for you?” During the height of the COVID pandemic, this meant providing analog educational activities and resources for children at home without consistent or reliable access to the Internet.

• How We Collect In addition to collecting objects and artifacts in consultation with organizers to ensure accurate and emblematic representation, oral history collection is a process that the team is working to repair. At present, oral history release forms are designed to best serve the needs of the collecting institution. What if the person sharing their oral history could be at legal jeopardy and/or physical danger if their story is heard and they are recognized? The team started to ask itself this question and realized this is a problem that needs solving. The team is currently waiting for approval of a new release form for interviewees that centers their needs, most notably the practice of ongoing consent throughout the collection process: before, during, and after collection. The team is also working to develop an oral history collection guide that uses RH principles.³¹

Solidarity

An internship is a mutual opportunity for student intern and mentor. Each year, NMAH welcomes many interns. The Goucher Prison Education Partnership – Alumni Internship Program (GPEP-AIP) is a program within the CRH that connects GPEP alumni who are systems-impacted scholars with yearlong paid internships at NMAH. The GPEP-AIP is the result of the combination of the relationship CRH founding director Tsione Wolde-Michael established as a professor with the GPEP, (NMAH Intern and Fellows Program Manager) Caroline Fiertz's commitment to DEIA and social justice principles, and a commitment to RH practice. In the U.S., incarceration rates are unevenly distributed, with communities of color disproportionately impacted by the U.S. criminal justice system. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, people who identify as Black comprise 13% of the total U.S. population, but 38% of all people in jail or prison. Furthermore, 48% of all people serving life or “virtual life” sentences and 30% of all people on parole are Black.³² This is one reason to work with system-impacted scholars – it advances DEIA and social justice principles. However, the GPEP-AIP also works to redress the exploitative relationship between prison labor, federal agencies, and institutions of higher education.³³ The internship is a way to practice, to demonstrate solidarity, and redress. “Through this internship, the Center for Restorative History hopes to serve as a model for the ways other public history institutions can approach work at the intersection of social justice, mass incarceration, and educational access.”³⁴

Contingency

Our education team at NMAH has a partnership with a local all-girls school in an area of the city that has been historically, and continues to be, harmed and disproportionately systems-impacted. From year to year, we are unsure of the shape of this collaboration. We started this work as a redressive practice. We at NMAH have often asked schools to come to us, usually for a one-time program. We have not been the best neighbors and have been extractive. With this partnership, we are going to our neighbor school and committing to understanding what they need from us, rather than entering with a pre-established objective we need to meet as an institution. During our first year, this resulted in an after-school club where students practiced digital literacy and research skills by creating Learning Lab collections that highlight a person who identifies as a woman whom the students regard as a leader and role model.³⁵

The second year, the partnership meant showing up to events, celebrations, and other activities as well as a trip to NMAH at the year’s end. Teachers and students coming back from COVID, and struggling with being in school full time during heightened stress over standardized tests, needed support, conversation, and presence more than they needed a club. We are not sure what this partnership will look like this coming year. The relationship is the objective; the means are the end. We are there to support and make this relationship right as best we can.³⁶

In this example, the structure of the relationship as well as the widget made through the relationship bent and bowed. Modeling and experiencing this contingency in learning environments is proof of concept for the fact that,

The world exists as it does because of the myriad relationships and structures constructed by human beings, to which we all contribute. If this is so, then the dream of transforming society is not only plausible, but also totally possible.³⁷

Miseducation: lessons and recommendations³⁸

There is no life that is not geographic. (Ruth Wilson Gilmore)

RH, building on RJ and critical pedagogy, provides a theory and practice for how to see outside the logic that builds worlds through categorization, measurement, and outcome-driven evaluation. Horizontal organization, problem-solving, solidarity, made at the relational scale are blueprints for building a different world. The theory and practice of RH and critical pedagogy push against the rule of metrics and data that exert downward pressure on relationships between people. Learning, in a classroom or in a museum, can create maps to alternative terrains. However, this work is difficult, and often fleeting. The incalculable, the illegible, the affective, the relational are at odds with the order and discipline required by the metrics and data often asked of us to demonstrate success and secure (continued) funding. Here are four recommendations for any parties interested in learning under a different sun.³⁹

Reflect

Is this work that you and/or your institution are able to do in earnest? Most local educational agencies offer guidance on how to assess a school site’s ability and willingness to engage in RJ.⁴⁰ The CRH encourages an institutional assessment to gauge capacity to do RH work. Key questions to begin with include but are not limited to:

• Am I or the team I am a part of able to commit to a sustained relationship with a community?

• Is my institution willing to support staff needs for sustained engagement with a community, provide professional development to practice RH methods, and recognize relationship building in performance evaluation?

• Will my institution prioritize co-authorship and co-creation and work towards consensus with a community when making decisions?

• Is my institution able to identify and willing to cede authority to communities?⁴¹

Be sincere

This is paramount in order to not perpetuate harm. If one is going to claim to do RH work, one needs to do RH work. In the realm of museums, issues around decolonization provide an opportunity to learn. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that although decolonization may have “play cousins,” it stands alone and apart as an “only child.” According to them, in the U.S. settler colonial context, decolonization “must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is all of the land and not just symbolically.”⁴² Decolonization is incommensurable with civil rights, social justice, and/or DEIA because it requires a full-scale re-ordering of the world through political, economic, and social processes that have material expressions.⁴³ If one is not doing RH, one should not say they are doing RH.⁴⁴

Archive

Write it down. Record it. Document it. Reasons for engaging in these practices are twofold. First, it is important to go to the work when looking for inspiration to keep going. Especially when the work is a pilot program that might not get renewed. You need to see that it happened and do it again. The second reason is that we all depend on each other to make the world we want and need. Archives that document lands under different suns are the marauder’s maps to the territory we seek.⁴⁵

Reimagine evaluation

This is the most difficult recommendation to implement. In the world of museums, evaluations and reports drive the work that we are able to do: grant proposals demand logic models, proposed outcomes, and metrics for evaluation to determine viability, success, and continued funding. One cannot fall into the trap of using the language of “growth,” “increased reach,” and/or “ROI.” Doing this only entrenches and reifies the borders of possibility, stifling learning and pushing towards education, i.e. maintaining our current terms of order. An emphasis on (actually impossible) ever-increasing growth is a dangerous wedge neoliberal capitalism uses to undo learning environments.

The only way to make our world differently is to change how we think about what constitutes success. If we work at a relational scale, questions on program and/or partnership evaluations might read:

• Are all parties maintaining right relations?

• Are all parties making decisions together?

• Are all parties mutually contributing to projects agreed to by consensus?

• How are problems solved when they arise?

• How is solidarity ensured?

• What are examples of change in plans driven by varying needs of the parties?

In other words, the process of relationship-building and the health of the relationships made in the process would be at the core of evaluation. Ensuring process and health among relationships in evaluation is how we scale out and make institutions, whether social or material, that sit in right relations.

What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments, and possibilities. (Ruth Wilson Gilmore)

Acknowledgments

There are many folks whom I need to thank for their support and co-labor. The members of the Decolonizing Working Group and Research & Action Team at the Center for Restorative History created a place to think through material that formed the core of this article. Thank you Patty Arteaga, Nancy Bercaw, José Centeno-Meléndez, Alicia Cutler, Caroline Fiertz, Ellen Feingold, Jane Fortune, Modupe Labode, Dani Merriman, Magdalena Mieri, Alana Staiti, Sam Vong, and Tsione Wolde-Michael. From the Education and Experience team at NMAH I need to thank Carrie Kotcho for the time and space to do this work and Eden Cho for being an incredible steward of our community partners. At JME, thank you Emily Potter-Ndiaye for your sage guidance during revisions and editing. In addition, I need to express my deep gratitude to Simeon, Angel, and Maya for sharing me with others, coming with me to soccer games for students on weekends, and opening up our home to them when they needed it for years on years – even now. Em, thank you for teaching and learning with me, for building a world with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Orlando R. Serrano

Orlando R. Serrano, Jr. is Manager for PK-12 Learning at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. He manages the museum’s programs and resources for PK-12 audiences. He supports and develops informal educational and leadership experiences for students, professional development workshops for educators, and curriculum content. He is also a member of The Center for Restorative History as Project Director of the Decolonization Working Group and member of the Research & Action Team. Dr. Serrano holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. He is an educator and public academic with expertise in human geography, environmental justice, social movements, and pedagogy. Dr. Serrano’s research and writing have been funded by a Ford Foundation Fellowship and National Science Foundation EDGE-SBE Grants.

Notes

1 Jemisin, The City We Became.

2 “Coloniality” is a term used by thinkers throughout the Caribbean and the Américas. A key theoretical argument is that the modern is defined against the colonial; that coloniality is the other side of modernity. In addition to Sylvia Wynter, see Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs.

3 This is a rephrasing of Octavia Butler’s epigraph for the never-published Parable of the Trickster, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” Folks often evoke this quote to get at the fact that alternatives exist all around us, we just do not see them or look for them.

4 Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory,” 107–169.

5 For more in depth readings into critical pedagogy, see hooks, Teaching to Transgress; Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed; Darder, Reinventing Paulo Freire; Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy; Grande, Red Pedagogy; and McLaren, Critical Pedagogy.

6 A related critique of education ruled by metrics and outcomes is that it brings neoliberal capitalism into a realm of the social that was previously safeguarded. Kathryne Mitchell points out that this abandonment often results in what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession: “[a]s schools are closed and the land or building sold, public assets belonging to the community are lost.” Making Workers, 129. For more on accumulation by dispossession see Harvey, The New Imperialism.

7 This article engages with but is distinct from a body of literature that fosters a critical and necessary examination of what it means to create resources and programming that are educational in a museum setting. In the interest of space, the bibliography surfaces articles from Journal of Museum Education and a few book projects.

8 Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and Professor of Earth and Environmental Studies as well as American Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Abolition Geography is a collection of her essays and is highly recommended reading for folks interested in abolition, building relationships for change, and the spatiality of our world.

9 A closely related community of thinking and practice, transformative justice (TJ), Is growing. For a primer on TJ visit the Barnard Center for the Study of Women for a series of videos titled Building Accountable Communities that introduces TJ principles and practices.

10 Yazzie, “Life Comes from It,” 177. Importantly, Yazzie states that this practice has existed since “time immemorial.” In other words, peacemaking is outside the time and place of western liberal humanism.

11 Baliga, The Ezra Klein Show.

12 Yazzie, “Life Comes from It,” 180. The circle, or keeping a circle, is often the most readily recognized practices of RJ.

13 Ibid., 174. Gilmore also addresses this phenomenon in the exponential growth of the prison-industrial complex in California beginning in the 1970s. She argues that prisons and criminalization, that is the process of making criminals through “tough on crime” legislation, are geographic solutions to social problems. See Golden Gulag.

14 Yazzie, “Life Comes from It,” 184.

15 Ibid., 185. It is interesting and epistemologically important that the Chief Justice Yazzie writes the term as problem-solving and not problem solving. It is not insignificant that the two terms are bound together. In doing so, Navajo practice seems to assume that the appearance of a problem precipitates/immediately starts moving towards a solution – not removing a problem from sight in order to not solve it.

16 Ibid., 181.

17 Baliga, The Ezra Klein Show.

18 See Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice; Davis, The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice; and Sujatha Baliga, https://www.sujathabaliga.com/talks-and-media. In addition, for RJ in formal school environments, see Evans and Vaandering, The Little Book of Restorative Justice in Education.

19 Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice, 30.

20 Ibid., 31.

21 Center for Restorative History, “Restorative History [explained].”

22 Ibid.

23 Center for Restorative History, 6. Reimagining learning practices and knowledge production is our attempt to address some of the root causes of wrong relations between museums and communities. For an example of how root cause analysis of how community histories can be silenced and racist violence obscured in national narratives, see “Reckoning with Remembrance” Center for Restorative History, accessed June 20, 2023, https://americanhistory.si.edu/reckoning-with-remembrance. We are still learning how to do all of this – we are by no means done. We are constantly learning and iterating.

24 Neil Smith writes about “nested scales” and how ideas can originate at one and move across, or “jump,” scale. See, “Contours of a Spatialized Politics, 54–81.

25 Gilmore often reminded us in class that we read and think about how the world works in order to change it. In other words, she stated, theory is a guide to action.

26 McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories, 128.

27 The classroom experience I share comes from my time as a ninth grade Language Arts teacher in Washington, D.C.

28 Developing norms together, rather than prescribing rules at the outset, is a foundational practice recommended by most local education agencies (LEAs) in shifting culture from teacher/educator-centered to community-driven, vital for restorative practices. A key reason for this is the belief that students should have as much to say about their learning environment and culture as the teacher because (a) they are also a part of it and (b) students have much to contribute. See, Oakland Unified School District, “Restorative Justice Implementation Guide.” Fania Davis, RJ scholar, is an advisor to Oakland USD om RJ programming and support.

29 Evans and Vaandering, The Little Book of Restorative Justice in Education, 37.

30 Evans and Vaandering challenge the use of terms often used in learning environments, “Listen for the phrases classroom management, classroom control, or behavior management in your particular context. Ask the following: What is the intention of the terminology? Does is encourage you to engage with your students or control them?” Ibid., 67.

31 Much of this information is found here, “Undocumented Organizing Collective Initiative,” Center for Restorative History. The rest of the information comes from CRH meetings in which the team presented its work and reflections as well as in direct communication with team members. The work of the Undocumented team on a more reflective and community-centered oral history collection process has also produced a Classroom Guide to Oral History Pamphlet that the NMAH education team has used and will use going forward. It replaced previous guides for using oral history in classrooms that we used and distributed in workshops.

32 Prison Policy Initiative, “Race and Ethnicity.” The pandemic only exacerbated these inequities. Between 2020-2022, the daily incarceration rate for Black people increased by 8%, it increased by 0.4% for white people. See Pew, “Racial Disparities Persist in Many U.S. Jails.”

33 UNICOR, or Federal Prison Industries (FPI), was established by an executive order issued by President Franklin Roosevelt, “About UNICOR,” UNICOR, accessed June 20, 2023, https://www.unicor.gov/About.aspx. Today, UNICOR continues to be a preferred vendor for federal units and agencies. Federal Acquisition Regulation “Part 8 – Required sources of supplies and services,” accessed June 20, 2023, https://www.acquisition.gov/far/part-8?searchTerms=unicor#FAR_Subpart_8_6.

34 Center for Restorative History, “GPEP Alumni Internship Program.”

35 Learning Lab is a software platform offered by Smithsonian free of charge that allows users to create collections of artifacts, object records, media, PDFs, websites, etc. They are usually created around a particular theme or used for instructional purposes. For more information about Learning Lab visit: https://learninglab.si.edu.

36 Just this fall, this school agreed to partner with us on a grant program that uses photography and oral history to document local history. During the initial meeting, our education team made it clear that although some of the student work would be shared as part of a larger project where communities share their local histories, we want to make sure we are contributing to their capacity at the school site. We are explicitly bringing portraiture, photography, and oral history workshops to them to share collecting and archiving practices to the school so that they can build and be custodians of their stories. We should not be interpreting their experiences. Again, we want to move out of the way and cede authorship and authority to community knowledges.

37 Darder, Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, 62.

38 Hill’s describes her solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, as her thinking and writing about what she learned beyond the lessons her teachers delivered. Sometimes this learning occurred in the classroom, sometimes outside it. All of it was learning, none of it was education, hence miseducation. In many regards, Miseducation is Ms. Hill excavating the territory, disentangling it from the map.

39 These lessons are drawn from my experience in the classroom and with CRH. They are not done, and there are more. These are just a start.

40 See any of the LEA materials reference in the works cited for more specific examples.

41 Center for Restorative History, “Restorative History [explained].”

42 Tuck and Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” 3.

43 For more on incommensurability, decolonization, and the need for a new ordering of the world see Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

44 Puawai Cairns, Head of taonga Maori collection at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, surfaces the possibilities of the practice of reMaorification argued for by Moana Jackson. reMaorification recenters Maori voices and rightly acknowledges Maori epistemologies and ontologies. Cairns suggests that this might be a way forward for museums who are interested in decolonization, reindigenisation. See, Cairns, “Decolonisation: We are Not Going to Save You.” These moves towards reMaorification or reindigenosation would be in line with how Wayne Modest encouraged members of the CRH Decolonization Working Group to think of decolonization. In a conversation we had with him on June 17, 2022. He suggested that we think of decolonization as a horizon: We may not reach it, but we must move towards it.

45 Ayena Jamies on writes of Octavia Butler’s collection of paper at the Huntington Library, “Her collection reminds us what we have, what we’ve lost, and what can be gained by leaving behind self-curated libraries.” “Far Beyond the Stars,” 103. On 104, Jamieson outlines how to create your own archive. The CRH recently recorded its own oral history to add to our archive. The marauder’s map referenced in the text is part of the fictional Harry Potter universe, created by a previous student at Hogwarts’ School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and used by Harry Potter to see the secret passages hidden in walls. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.