Lateral Violence Without a Villain

By Gabby Hillis

When most people hear the term lateral violence, they picture something interpersonal. Someone gossiping. Someone excluded from a meeting. A sharp comment in a hallway. And those things are real, and they cause real harm.

What I want to talk about is the lateral violence that has no face. The kind that lives in systems, in silences, in the way governance communicates (or does not communicate) with the people it serves. This is the lateral violence that nobody gets blamed for, because it does not look like anyone is doing anything wrong. It looks like business as usual.

In Indigenous governance, lateral violence is often discussed as a relational problem. Someone is being unkind. Someone is gatekeeping. Someone is playing favourites. And yes, all of that happens. The research confirms it: lateral violence in Indigenous communities shows up as gossip, shaming, exclusion, bullying, and the quiet, corrosive conflicts that erode trust from the inside (Jaber et al., 2022; Clark et al., 2025). These behaviours are painful, and they deserve attention.

What receives far less attention is the way lateral violence gets reproduced through the structures and practices of governance itself. When information is withheld, when decisions happen behind closed doors without explanation, when community members have no consistent way to find out what their government is doing or why, the conditions for lateral violence are being created at an institutional level. No one needs to be unkind for this to cause harm.

Think about what happens when governance goes quiet. When a decision is made and no rationale is shared, community members fill that silence with speculation. Rumour replaces reporting. Gossip replaces dialogue. People begin to distrust each other, because without reliable information, proximity to leadership becomes the only way to know what is happening. In-groups and out-groups form around access to information, and community members who ask questions learn quickly that asking is not welcome. This is information hoarding, and it is one of the most common and least recognized forms of lateral violence in governance contexts.

The microaggressions literature documents how these dynamics accumulate. Cho, Corkett, and Steele (2018) found that individually minor acts of exclusion and selective disclosure compound over time, eroding trust and undermining the legitimacy of those left out. Each instance may appear small. The pattern is structural.

Selective communication creates the same harm. When some families hear news before others, when certain members are consulted and others are not, when governance shows up for some concerns and is absent for others, the message is clear: belonging in this community is conditional. It depends on who you are and who you know. The research identifies challenges to cultural identity and belonging as sitting at the core of lateral violence (Clark et al., 2025; Jaber et al., 2022). Governance communications that signal belonging selectively reproduce that harm at a systemic level, even when no individual intends it.

I want to be careful here, because I am not describing bad leaders. Most people in Indigenous governance are doing their best within an impossible structure. The Indian Act governance model concentrates authority without building in the transparency, accountability, or communications infrastructure that any organization needs to function well. Communities file roughly 168 reports per year to the federal government, roughly three per week, and accountability flows upward to Ottawa rather than outward to membership. The system was designed to serve federal oversight, not community trust. When governance communication breaks down, it is often because the structure never required it to work in the first place.

That does not make the impact any less real. When community members cannot access clear information about decisions that affect their lives, the trust gap widens. When the gap widens, people turn on each other, because the structure has given them nowhere else to turn. Lateral violence flourishes in that space, in the absence of transparent communication, in the silence between governance and community.

This is why I centre communications practice in the Lateral Trust Framework. Transparent communication is the first of four practices the framework identifies, and it is the most immediately actionable. A Band Council can decide tomorrow to publish meeting summaries in plain language, to share the rationale behind decisions, to create consistent channels where members know where to find information. None of this requires governance reform, new funding, or structural change. It requires a decision and follow-through.

Communications practice does not fix the colonial structure. It changes what happens inside it, every day. And that is where people actually live.

The shift from lateral violence to lateral trust begins with recognizing that lateral violence is not always a person. Sometimes it is a system. Sometimes it is a silence. And sometimes the most powerful thing governance can do is simply show up in the conversation.

Gabby Hillis is an Indigenous communications specialist, consultant, and writer based in Gitxsan territory. She is the creator of the Lateral Trust Framework. Learn more at gabbyhillis.ca.