From Lateral Violence to Lateral Kindness: What I've Learned and Why I Won't Stop Talking About It

We've all experienced lateral violence. I want to continue the conversation and move toward lateral kindness.

The first time I heard the term "lateral violence," I recognized it immediately. It was something I had lived through and witnessed across my career serving Indigenous peoples in the non-profit sector. The gossip. The exclusion. The tearing down of people who are trying to do good work. The way communities that have every reason to hold each other up sometimes turn inward instead. I knew the feeling long before I had the language, and I suspect many of you reading this do, too. There's something powerful about having a name for a pattern you've been carrying. It gives you permission to say: this is real, it has roots, and there's a way through it.

I want to talk about where this pattern comes from, what I've seen in my own work, and why I believe the shift from lateral violence to lateral kindness is some of the most important work we can do right now.

Where It Comes From

The roots of lateral violence go deeper than most people realize. The phenomenon was first described by Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist working during the Algerian war of independence, in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon observed that colonized peoples, unable to direct their anger toward their oppressors, often turned that aggression inward, toward members of their own communities. Paulo Freire built on that observation and coined the term "horizontal violence" in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), arguing that oppressed people internalize the values of the dominant group and begin directing harm sideways, at each other, rather than upward at the systems causing the harm. The specific term "lateral violence" emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, gradually making its way into Indigenous discourse. By 2011, the Native Women's Association of Canada had published a formal fact sheet naming it in the Canadian Indigenous context. The term resonated because it gave language to something communities had been carrying for generations.

When we trace lateral violence in Indigenous communities to its source, the path leads directly to the residential school system. Research from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation found that roughly 20% of Independent Assessment Process claims involved student-to-student abuse. The system created conditions where children harmed one another, and those patterns of relating carried forward into families, workplaces, and communities. A 2022 systematic review by Jaber and colleagues, published in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, searched five databases and found only 10 peer-reviewed studies worldwide on lateral violence in Indigenous communities. Ten. Communities have understood this reality for a long time, and the research is only now beginning to reflect the depth of that knowledge.

How I Got Into This Work

I participated in a Lateral Violence to Lateral Kindness workshop in 2022, and it was one of those experiences that rearranges something inside you. What stayed with me most was the relief in the room when people realized they had shared experiences, and the energy that came with discovering a framework for moving through it, for building something different together.

That experience sparked something in me. With a background in psychology and years of experience serving Indigenous communities in the non-profit sector, I could see how much people were hungry for this work. I wanted to bring it to communities that were already recognizing the need. I did my own research, developed content that drew on existing frameworks and my own lived experience, and began facilitating. I shared my own encounters with lateral violence openly, with professionalism, because I believe that vulnerability from the facilitator opens up the room for everyone else.

What surprised me was how pervasive lateral violence was in every area of participants' lives: the workplace, governance, family, community, everywhere. I was struck by how ready people were for tools: how to respond when lateral violence was happening to them, how to resist getting pulled into gossip, how to name what they were experiencing and start doing something about it. One participant, a residential school survivor, shared that it was his first time ever talking about his experiences. That moment stays with me. It told me something about what becomes possible when people are given a safe space and a shared language. It also told me something about how long people have been carrying this, and how much they deserve spaces where they can finally put it down.

The Shift to Lateral Kindness

Lateral kindness is a deliberate, ongoing practice of choosing to relate to one another differently, rooted in Indigenous values that existed long before colonization disrupted them. It's about remembering who we were and actively choosing to live that way again.

British Columbia has been leading this work in a way that I think is underappreciated nationally. In 2014, the First Nations Health Directors Association (FNHDA) approved a Call to Action Towards a Zero Tolerance of Lateral Violence, a 13-point decree honouring the 13 phases of the moon. In 2017, the FNHDA, First Nations Health Authority, and First Nations Health Council signed a Joint Declaration of Commitment on Lateral Kindness, embedding the principle across governance, policy, and professional development. It's a structural commitment, backed by train-the-trainer programs reaching every health region in the province. People like Dr. Denise Findlay (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh), who has worked with over 120 Indigenous communities, and Marilyn Jensen (Inland Tlingit and Tagish), who co-founded Lateral Kindness in 2013, have been championing this work for years. Jensen has called it "a reclamation of our true Indigenous identity," and I think that framing matters deeply. When we practice lateral kindness, we are drawing on something that has always been ours.

Why I Won't Stop Talking About It

I tried promoting my workshop more broadly after that first delivery, and it hasn't gained the traction I hoped for yet. The need, though, is everywhere. Lateral violence shows up across communities and organizations, and it shapes the environments people work and live in. It shapes who trusts the information, who feels safe engaging publicly, who stays silent, and why. It affects how teams function, how organizations retain staff, and how communities relate to their own governance structures. People deserve the tools to name it, respond to it, and move through it together.

I'm sharing this because I believe the conversation needs more voices, especially practitioner voices. The people who sit in the rooms, who facilitate the hard conversations, who see what this looks like on the ground, hold knowledge that matters. The wisdom that exists in communities, in band offices, in health centres, and in non-profit organizations carries weight, and it deserves to be part of this conversation.

If this resonates with you, I want to hear from you. And if you're interested in exploring lateral kindness training for your organization or community, this is work I am honoured to be part of.

We were not always like this. And we don't have to stay this way.