~ The Legacy of Hollow Water ~

Theirs is a remarkable journey, unlike anything you have heard before. They went on a mission to change themselves and in so doing, they created a bonafide, well-defined template of healing and change.

This is a story about how an entire community came together and raised themselves up from the unimaginable depths of despair to a place of redemption, and restoration.

The world quickly took notice.

Unless you are one of the 1,100 people that actually live there, few people have ever heard of Hollow Water, a 4010 acre area located on the shores of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada, home to the Metis settlements where the Ojibwa people live. As of 2016, Chief Larry Barker is the current Chief and Council of this I.R. No. 10 Reserve where Anishinabe and Cree are the predominant languages. Hollow Water is one of 634 recognized bands of First Nations people, the predominant Aboriginal peoples of Canada. In the US, the Ojibwa are referred to as the Chippewa. 

This small, close knit indigenous society had a closely held secret that had singlehandedly decimated multiple generations and infected the entire community, both on and off of the reservation. The secret was so devastating and wide-spread, they decided to band together and do whatever it took, no matter the consequence, to make a change.

In 1984 they came to a crossroad.

​They did the unthinkable, they brought in 'outsiders', non-indigenous, non Canadian experts in their respective areas of expertise. They field tested their findings among their own, and then they did the unimaginable; they went public, worldwide in fact. They laid themselves bare to the world for all of their intergenerational and shameful tragedy, and they said 'we found a way', we found a way to heal an entire community, and here is the blueprint, and here is how it happened, and here is why it happened, and here is how it isn't going to ever happen again in our community. And if you follow what we have done, you too can change your self, your family, your community, and heal even the most entrenched and unspeakable wounds. And further, you can apply this blueprint to an entire system of justice from retributive to restorative, anywhere in the world, and here are the stats demonstrating its effectiveness.

Things began to change in towns and cities, and communities and entire countries. Thus was born The Four Circles of Hollow Water and an entirely new system of corrections and policy; Restorative Justice (RJ).

Here is their story...

For the Ojibwa, one persons joy is joy felt by the entire community, as is one person's pain, shame, or transgression. One would be hard-pressed to come upon a community around the globe that is devoid of sexual abuse and incest. What made the Ojibwa peoples of Hollow Water unique from the rest of the world is the staggering, unfathomable percentage of incest and sexual abuse within the entire community. Once the truth began to trickle out in the mid 80s, that more than two-thirds of the entire community was directly effected by sexual abuse by the time they reached adulthood, they knew they had to find a way to turn this mind-boggling statistic around. And so they did. They also knew that incarceration was not the answer. Those that were sent to jail or prison returned to the community with their prior behavior intact, and practiced with a vengeance. 

After considerable deliberation over the course of several years, they developed what is now known as The Four Circles of Hollow Water, and the Community Holistic Circle Healing (CHCH) practice, and from which sprang the world-wide practice of Restorative Justice. The Obijwa community of Hollow Water found a way to simultaneously heal victim and perpetrator, not just at the same time, but in the same room, sitting across from one another and backed by the entire community. 

The first video Hollow Water,  provides you with the problem and the process and told by some of the initial people that went through the process, how it came about and how it changed their lives.

The second video, Reconciliation Through Restorative Justice, provides an actual application of the Restorative Justice model, the model that was originally developed from the Hollow Water community as part of their Community Holistic Circle Healing.