We are happy to share the groundbreaking work of Cynthia Prosek at Restorative Justice Community Action (RJCA), based in the heart of downtown Minneapolis. Restorative justice (RJ) is a transformative process that empowers those who have been harmed and humanizes those who have caused harm. A paradigm shift from the traditional punitive legal system, RJ provides an opportunity for those who caused harm to engage with the community by accepting responsibility and repairing the harm directly. 
 
Cynthia Prosek has been RJCA’s Executive Director since 2012 and she has been involved in practicing restorative justice in various capacities for over 20 years. She started with RJCA as a volunteer, then joined the board when it became a nonprofit before becoming a staff member. She has been instrumental in RJCA’s focus on providing avenues for practitioners of color to be leaders in restorative justice work.
 
According to Cynthia, RJ focuses primarily on fulfilling the “victim’s” needs to have the harm repaired directly in a meaningful way.  Restorative justice also focuses on removing the label of “offender” by giving people involved in the criminal legal system a second chance when they are willing to take responsibility for the harm they have caused. RJ examines underlying root causes, such as cultural context, poverty, racial inequities, and socioeconomic disparities. RJ offers a way forward for all stakeholders to reconnect as a community while holding each other accountable. 
 
Right now, RJCA is preparing for the trials of the four Minneapolis police officers involved in the murder of Mr. George Floyd. As an organization, RJCA has been named as the node, or holder of information, for the TRUST Network in Minnesota. Together with the TRUST Network, RJCA is bringing together a multitude of community organizations to lead efforts in addressing community violence through early warning and early response with strategic nonviolent power. They are coordinating resources and information to respond to political violence in the community. RJCA’s goals include providing spaces for the community to talk about the trauma caused by law enforcement and the criminal legal process. Through collaboration, they are helping community members to understand aspects such as what is happening in the courtroom, what the trial involves, and what impact these processes have on the wider community. 
 
Dr. Erica Chenoweth, Harvard University nonviolent movement scholar and researcher indicates that it only takes 5% of a cross-section of a population who are active in a nonviolent peacebuilding campaign to create a tipping point. When this happens, unjust oppressive societal structures begin to disintegrate and transformation is set in motion. We are grateful to have RJCA as a catalyst for Minneapolis’ nonviolent transformation tipping point. 
 
Do you want to be part of this movement to transform Minneapolis’ community trauma into nonviolent power? Join us to learn strategies, skills, and concepts for positive social change at one of our upcoming virtual Introduction to Restorative Justice trainings. 
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 Learn more here! 

George Floyd's murder added to the ongoing instances of systemic police brutality across the U.S., injecting further trauma into our community. Read more about how Dr. Antony Stately is thinking about providing trauma-informed resources after the Minneapolis Uprising.

Dr. Antony Stately, CEO of Native American Community Clinic (NACC), has been involved with the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) Training in Minnesota from the very beginning. Dr. Stately was drawn to the way STAR teaches about trauma as an intersectional spectrum, as well as how it addresses the way trauma shows up in our bodies. Having done a number of historical trauma healing workshops when he returned to Minnesota, he was intrigued by the effective and applicable methods for building resilience and healing trauma that STAR offers. He works with a community that doesn’t always have access to fancier, more expensive approaches that can be used to address trauma, such as therapy. He was impressed by the way STAR was complex and clear in its method for unpacking and understanding trauma and also straightforward in its strategies for helping. 
 
According to Dr. Stately, we have seen a lot of aspects of the cycles of violence in our communities lately. With the intense civil uprising this past summer in response to the murder of George Floyd, as well as the spotlight on broader, systemic level inequity and violence, Dr. Stately believes we need a thoughtful, trauma-informed response for law enforcement as well as the entire community. Without deliberate, neuroscience-based resources and strategies to address mass trauma, people often engage in seemingly unreasonable behaviors. STAR concepts have the capacity to help people understand what is happening “upstream” for them personally before anyone reaches for a gun or explodes outward with violence. Dr. Stately says that “we cannot psycho-educate people out of crises.” Instead, we need to ask the more challenging questions: “What does trauma look like, and how do we embody it?” “Why do we rush for control of others instead of talk and de-escalate?” “Where are the opportunities for a resilience framework to be implemented?” We need to show up differently, because when people don’t have effective tools to manage trauma, difficult, and often tragic, situations emerge. We need to build skills, acquire tools, and practice strategies that open up space for personal and community reflection and self-awareness for better decision-making in emotionally loaded situations. The virtual 5-day STAR Training and the condensed versions--STAR-Lite and Introduction to STAR--offer opportunities to reflect and to learn how to manage challenging circumstances differently. If we choose to, we can transform trauma into nonviolent power for personal and collective healing and social justice change.
 
Furthermore, Dr. Stately appreciates not only the strong focus on understanding trauma that is present in STAR, but also the strong focus on resilience, and what we each can do in our own spheres of influence. We can never completely remove traumatic events from our lives, but we can be better informed in how we deal with them. NACC’s focus is on reducing health disparities in the Native American community—spiritually, physically, emotionally, and mentally. Dr. Stately speaks of a deeply imbedded history of trauma and violence perpetrated on and within the community. In his view, one pathway out of this situation is teaching tools of resilience. STAR strategies teach people how to address trauma, understand the cycles of violence, heal, and build resilience with healthy power to bounce back and become even stronger after bad experiences. This process strengthens individuals and communities to work together for positive social justice change for all. This is Peacebuilding. 

Click here to learn more about offerings at Native American Community Clinic.

Historically, community organizing and trauma healing have not always been seen as going hand-in-hand. In this article, learn more about how one Minneapolis community organizer uses a trauma-informed approach in his work.

Tommy McBrayer has lived and worked in the Central neighborhood of south Minneapolis for 22 years. While working for the Central Area Neighborhood Development Organization (CANDO), he was forwarded an email containing MN Peacebuilding’s upcoming trainings. According to Tommy, he didn’t know a lot about trauma, its effects, or how to heal from it when he received that email. However, after becoming a victim of gun violence in early July, he soon found himself attending the STAR-Lite training. That training would play a major role in his recovery, how he viewed his situation, and how he could help others in the community that found themselves in a similar situation.
 
Tommy has experienced trauma in both his childhood and adult life, as have many of those around him. Although he had briefly opened up to others, he wasn’t sure how to process what had happened to him. He found the concepts of STAR-Lite both transformational and applicable. Being guided through the process of healing from trauma changed his understanding of his situation and helped him build resilience and prevent further violence in his life and community. He found the content and format—lecture style mixed with breakout groups—both enlightening and engaging. In particular, Tommy found the galaxy model helpful for conceptualizing the trauma healing process and helping to guide him through that process.
 
“As long as you’re human, you’ll experience trauma in your life”, Tommy said. However, although trauma is inevitable, we have power over how we respond to it. He says that since participating in the STAR-Lite training, he is able to look at situations from a different angle. Knowledge of trauma, resilience, and restorative justice have helped him develop the patience and compassion to look at the “person behind the problem”. 
 
Thank you for sharing a piece of your story with us, Tommy! ​

Pay-what-you-can spots are available for upcoming Online Introduction to Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience trainings! Click here to learn more.

We at Minnesota Peacebuilding Leadership Institute lament and denounce the murder of George Floyd due to police brutality in Minneapolis, MN on May 25, 2020. We mourn the loss of his life and celebrate the unique place that he held in the fabric of our South Minneapolis neighborhoods. We acknowledge that George Floyd's death is a symptom of a society that has privileged the lives of White people over others. We recognize and condemn the role that white supremacy and racism play in the perpetuation of violence directed at Black individuals. All of this has led to individual and collective psychological trauma that cries for healing. Together, we must transform this trauma into nonviolent power for just systems change.

As a community in mourning, we must practice truth-telling for justice so peace does not elude us. As we demand change and work to transform our communities, we will navigate these difficulties with mercy and active compassion.

We believe this is a time to demand change in structural systems and to promote peacebuilding in our neighborhoods, in greater Minnesota, across the country, and around the globe. We must implore our leaders who have hearts of stone to turn their hearts to flesh. We also respect the fact that we as individuals must take actions to dismantle white supremacy and create an environment that protects, supports, and uplifts Black members of our communities.

We reject racism in all overt and covert manifestations. We are creating healthy power in our communities by building peace. As Coretta Scott King said, “Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.” We invite you to join us at Minnesota Peacebuilding Leadership Institute as we transform Minnesota into the peacebuilding power state for all.
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Amanda Allen, Board Secretary
Earnest Belton, Board Director
Bruce Brunner, Board Treasurer
Nathan Jeide-Detweiler, Board Director
Sarah King, Board Director
Emily Myers Hunt, Board Chair
Gemma Eissa, Communications Coordinator
Donna Minter, Founder and Executive Director
Crixell Shell, Assistant Executive Director

On the heels of the 2018 midterms, many of us are relieved for the Thanksgiving holiday, when we practice gratitude and find respite in our family and friends. Creating community over food creates a sense of safety, trust, and resilience in our lives. Yet, in the name of truth, mercy, justice, and peace, it’s also essential that we reflect on the history of this holiday and how it continues to shape our relationships with our Indigenous communities.

The first Thanksgiving is typically depicted as white settlers coming together with Native peoples – this is an oversimplified narrative. It’s also a narrative that makes it easy for non-Native people, especially white people, to overlook the atrocities committed against Native communities, even ones unfolding today.

While we celebrate Thanksgiving, it’s important to recognize that we live among continually marginalized Indigenous communities who are excluded from our tables, and consider ways in which we can practice true generosity and reparations to lift up Native communities.

President Lincoln first declared a Thanksgiving holiday in 1863 as a celebration of Civil War victories in Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Mississippi. It was then that white New Englanders applied their retrospective lens on the feast gathering of 1621 at the end of the first settlers’ harvest and called it the first Thanksgiving. This feast day was indeed remarkable in that it brought white settlers and Indigenous people together over a meal, but this is not to say that the relationship was easy. It’s possible that the Wampanoag people weren’t explicitly invited. It's also possible that the holiday was in celebration of violence against Indigenous peoples; another account marks the first Thanksgiving in 1637, after the massacre of the Pequot people at the end of the Pequot War. 

Minnesotans have much to account for. This accountability is slow, but it is coming. Perhaps the biggest atrocities stem from the hanging of the Dakota 38. After 38 Dakota men were hanged for alleged crimes against white settlers on December 26, 1862, their bodies were cut down and moved to a mass grave. W.W. Mayo, father of the founders of the Mayo Clinic, robbed the mass grave for a cadaver for his sons’ medical studies. Mayo stole the body of Dakota leader Marpiya te najin, dissected his body with colleagues and kept his bones in a kettle; the skeleton was displayed at the Mayo Clinic before being placed in storage and essentially forgotten.

But in September 2018, a representative of the Mayo Clinic presented a letter of apology to Marpiya te najin’s descendants for the desecration of their ancestor’s body and established a scholarship in his name. This apology and gesture of financial reparations was part of a dedication ceremony for the restoration of the original Dakota name of Minneapolis’ largest lake, Bde Maka Ska.

These apologies, these gestures, have meaning. By dismantling disrespectful memorials, by restoring the rightful names of the markers of the stolen land we live on, we honor the dignity of the people whose lives were lost to genocide, and we begin to balance the narrative that’s been whitewashed for the comfort of the dominant white culture.

This Thanksgiving, let’s not only practice gratitude for what we have: let’s consider the ongoing historical trauma and injustices against Indigenous communities. Let’s consider the Franklin/Hiawatha Encampment and understand the need for safety in community that the camp represents. Let’s reflect on the ways in which American culture and structures ignore Native communities and how we can work together to build peace. What can we do to help restore safety? What can we do to address the ongoing need for reparations?

We can ask Indigenous communities: What do they want to restore safety for their families? What do they want to repair the harm done to their communities? Let’s give them the resources they ask for and let them create change with wisdom, ingenuity, and brilliance.

As we seek to hold ourselves accountable, a good place to start is to become more informed. We invite you to learn more and make donations in the spirit of reparations to organizations working for justice in Native communities here in the Twin Cities:

• The Franklin/Hiawatha Encampment website gives an informative history of the encampment’s land and provides news and updates about the camp.
• MN Indian Women’s Resource Center (MIWRC) uses funds to provide families and individuals with basic clothes and household goods.
• Native American Community Clinic (NACC) provides medical-related services to residents of the camp.
• Indigenous Peoples Task Force (IPTF). Donations are used for HIV, HCV and other testing/screening of residents at the camp.
• American Indian Community Development Corporation. Donations will help secure permanent housing for residents of the camp.
• American Indian OIC provides job training to Native residents.
• Natives Against Heroin uses donated funds to provide daily frontline support to the residents of the encampment. 
• The Ogitchidakwe Council fiscal agent of Mending The Sacred Hoop uses funds to create a circle of safety to end sexual violence against Native women. 
  
  

As we enter the season of gratitude and giving, let’s shower our Native sisters and brothers with financial resources so they can use their talents to build peace within their spheres of influence. And together, we will transform our community peace by peace. This is peacebuilding, and it is worth being grateful for.