Considering Haudenosaunee justice

Gabriel Maracle and Kanatase Horn, two Onkwehón:we scholars working in the justice field, have long considered how Indigenous legal traditions, values, and principles play out in the Canadian carceral system.

“We tend to think of Indigenous laws as historic practices, they only happened in the past, and then we stopped doing it,” said Horn, who is from Kahnawake and works as a professor at the University of Ottawa. “These things are still relevant to our people, to what we do when we’re helping people, especially in the justice world.”

Horn recently co-authored a paper with Maracle, who is from Tyendinaga and works as a professor at Carleton University, exploring how Indigenous conceptions of justice play into abolitionist discourse.

Through specifically considering Haudenosaunee understandings of justice, the two consider what a non-carceral future can look like.

The article, titled “Meet Them Where They’re At: The intersection of Haudenosaunee knowledge and community justice reform,” is published in the January 2026 edition of the Social Science and Medicine Journal.

“I had a whole bunch of conversations about Indigenous justice and what that looks like at the community level, and how there’s this tension between supporting Indigenous justice initiatives as well as this idea of abolition as trying to deconstruct the carceral state,” Maracle said.

He and Horn wanted to use their own lived experience as Kanien’kehá:ka people to shed light on Haudenosaunee perspectives in the justice field.

“A lot of work that’s been done, from my perspective, when it comes to Indigenous justice hasn’t focused on a Haudenosaunee context, and it kind of comes at it from this imagined idea of Indigenous people having a song and a smile in our hearts for all of the creatures of the land,” Maracle said.

“There’s this idea that we were in such a perfect state of nature that we didn’t need a justice system before contact, and that’s not true, it’s literally called the Great Law of Peace, it’s called the Kaianere’kó:wa.”

In the article, Horn and Maracle explain how the Kaianere’kó:wa offers a radically different framework for justice to the Canadian carceral system and position the Great Law of Peace as an alternative model for non-carceral justice.

They write about how the Great Law prioritizes the restoration of peace in individuals and in communities, giving a solid structure for how a future, decolonized justice system could be oriented towards restoring peace instead of enforcing punishment.

Thinking about the way in which justice has been embedded in Haudenosaunee culture historically and contemporarily is crucial for finding a way forward, Horn said, and it’s crucial these conversations are had within general conversations about abolition, so that Indigenous concepts of justice aren’t discarded along with colonial ones.

“What ends up happening is that these scholars tend to throw out the baby with the bath water, they think we need to throw out everything, including this knowledge,” Horn said.

“I want to say, ‘Who are you to have this kind of position on this?’ especially when they’re non-Indigenous scholars, they’re kind of parachuting into these worlds, and they have a critical lens which is good but they don’t know the cultures and the knowledge that they’re talking about.”

The article is available to read for free in Volume 388 of the Social Science and Medicine Journal, published as part of a special issue on criminalization and abolition.

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