The Uncomfortable Truth About Lateral Kindness

By Gabby Hillis

In my last post, I wrote about how Indigenous governance starts with feeling safe. I believe that with my whole chest. But I want to be honest about something I didn't say then: building safety requires us to look at ourselves in ways that most of us would rather avoid.

If you work in or alongside Indigenous communities, you've likely heard the term lateral violence. You may have witnessed it. You may have experienced it. And if you sit with that honestly, which is the part that makes most of us shift in our seats, you may have also contributed to it in ways you didn't recognize at the time. I know I have had to sit with that recognition myself.

That dual awareness is where the real work begins.

What the Research Tells Us

Lateral violence describes the ways people within oppressed groups direct frustration, anger, and hurt sideways, toward one another, rather than toward the systems that created those conditions. In Indigenous communities, it shows up as gossip, exclusion, shaming, workplace conflict, and challenges to one another's identity and belonging. It is a direct consequence of colonization, residential schools, and intergenerational trauma. It is a symptom of systemic harm carried across generations.

Research by Clark and colleagues found that when Indigenous participants went through educational workshops on lateral violence, one of the most significant outcomes was the recognition of what researchers called "dual roles." Participants came to see themselves as both people who had been harmed by lateral violence and people who had, at times, perpetuated it (Clark et al., 2017). That finding is uncomfortable. It's also essential, because you cannot shift a pattern you refuse to name in yourself.

Paulo Freire wrote about this decades ago. He described how people who have been oppressed can internalize the logic of their oppressors, creating what he called a "dual consciousness." Liberation, he argued, requires turning inward, examining what we've absorbed, and choosing differently. Freire called that process "conscientização," a critical awakening. He also called liberation a painful process, and he was being accurate.

Why the Shift to Lateral Kindness Is Harder Than It Sounds

Lateral kindness is a framework that has been embraced by Indigenous health organizations, governance bodies, and community leaders across Canada. The First Nations Health Directors Association has called for zero tolerance of lateral violence and the active cultivation of lateral kindness, grounded in cultural values of respect, empathy, and kinship. The National Indigenous Women's Resource Centre outlines three key steps toward lateral kindness: naming and labelling lateral violence, supporting community self-determination, and taking individual action rooted in empathy and dignity (Root, 2023).

These frameworks are clear and they are good. What they sometimes understate is that lateral kindness is a discipline. And disciplines require practice, discomfort, and the willingness to stay in the room when everything in you wants to leave.

When someone in your community says something that triggers a deep, familiar sting, lateral kindness asks you to pause before reacting. When gossip comes to you dressed up as concern, lateral kindness asks you to redirect rather than participate. When you notice yourself judging someone's choices, their appearance, their right to belong, lateral kindness asks you to trace that impulse back to its source and ask whether it is yours, or whether it was handed to you by a system designed to make you suspicious of your own people.

That tracing-back is the part that takes humility. Because sometimes what you find is that the harm didn't start with you, but it didn't stop with you either.

The Discomfort Is the Doorway

A participant in a recent Australian study on lateral violence coping strategies said something that has stayed with me. She reflected that when someone's lateral violence comes from their own hurt and anger, they may need to go on their own healing path rather than putting that pain on others. That observation is both compassionate and unflinching. It holds space for the origins of the behaviour while still naming the responsibility to address it.

This is what I mean when I say the shift to lateral kindness requires self-awareness and potential discomfort. Awareness alone is a starting point. Freire was clear that reflection without action changes nothing. And the research confirms that communities where lateral violence has become normalized often develop defensive patterns (avoidance, denial, withdrawal) that make it even harder to name what's happening. Breaking those patterns means choosing vulnerability in environments where vulnerability has historically been punished.

It means sitting with the question: "Have I contributed to a culture where people don't feel safe to speak, to belong, to lead?"

If the answer is uncomfortable, that discomfort is information. It is your invitation to choose differently. To step into the kind of leadership that our ancestors modelled: relational, accountable, and rooted in the understanding that how we treat one another is governance. That kindness, when practiced with intention and courage, is itself a form of resistance.

Where I'm Sitting With This

I write about this as someone who has facilitated lateral kindness conversations, who has done the reading, and who still catches herself in moments of reaction, judgment, and old patterns. The work of decolonizing how we relate to one another is lifelong. It is humbling. And it is, I believe, the most important communications work happening in Indigenous governance right now. Because you can have the best strategic plan, the most compelling grant proposal, the sharpest public messaging, and if the people doing the work don't feel safe with each other, none of it holds.

Lateral kindness starts with you. It starts with me. And it starts with the willingness to be honest about what we carry, so we can choose what we pass forward.

References

Clark, Y., Augoustinos, M., & Malin, M. (2017). Coping strategies among Aboriginal Australians in response to lateral violence. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Worker Journal, 41, 34–39.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum.

Root, K. M. (2023). Research Note: Lateral Kindness: Moving Away from Lateral Violence to Lateral Kindness. National Indigenous Women's Resource Center.

First Nations Health Directors Association. (2014). Position Statement: A Call to Action towards a Zero Tolerance of Lateral Violence. FNHDA.