Antiviolence Ritual From a Faraway Land

South African organizer Beatrice Truter touches the face of a statue inside the Maori meeting house at the Field Museum. Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative

After years of frustration, Cheryl Graves was ready to consider a different solution to Chicago’s problem of youth violence.

Ms. Graves, a community organizer, had spent more than 10 years training representatives of the intervention group CeaseFire and administrators of violence-ridden Fenger High School in conflict-resolution techniques at the Community Justice for Youth Institute. But she felt that her efforts were meeting with more failures than successes. Many Chicago Public School students were still going to jail as a result of violent outbreaks in school. It was time to try something else.

So on Monday, Ms. Graves and her colleagues took the unusual step of going to the Maori House at the Field Museum, a sacred wood structure that the museum bought from New Zealand in 1905. There they joined South African activists working to prevent street violence in Cape Town to perform a peacekeeping ritual inspired by the Maori tradition.

The organizers said they hoped the Maori ritual, which requires opposing groups to sing and hug after exchanging speeches, could provide new insight into changing the attitudes of at-risk youths who are sometimes reluctant to resolve disputes verbally.

Ms. Graves said the point of the meeting was to address a simple question. “What can we do to not just reduce the violence, but create relationships in the communities that can withstand and prevent violence from within?” she said.

Ryan Hollon, who organized the meeting, works with CeaseFire and the Community Justice for Youth Institute and serves as an anthropologist at the museum.

“People shouldn’t have to come to a museum to have a safe space to talk about tough issues,” Mr. Hollon said. “That should exist in every neighborhood across the city, especially in those neighborhoods where conflict resolutions don’t exist.”