American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Because the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians formalized and codified the criminalization and carcerality of California Indians on federal, state, and local government and community levels, it serves as a critical analytical tool to connect the missionization of California Indians to the legacies that contribute to their mass incarceration today. This specific time period marks a shift from Mission and Spanish control to one of conquest by law and criminalization. This article begins by examining the specific conditions of the monjerío, the room in every mission that locked young girls and women up until marriage, and how it functions as a site of gendering and racialization. Then, culling from newspaper sources and analyzing the logics of containment and elimination that these archival sources produce, I examine the following questions: How did the gendering and racialization of California Indians through missionization allow for the legality of the act? How does it formalize those ideologies of Native criminality? And how did the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians actually encourage and legitimize violence against California Indians?

In California the rapid expansion of the prison-industrial complex has led to the widespread use of incarceration as a solution to complex social problems. Incarceration undermines the sovereignty of California Indian tribes and limits the reproductive capacity of individual Native people by removing them from their lands, children, and ceremonies. This intrusion on Native peoples’ collective ability to determine a future for themselves is an infringement of their reproductive rights. In order to defend Native peoples’ reproductive capacity and the future of Native nations, prison abolition should be understood as essential to tribal sovereignty.

This article addresses constructions of victimhood and the invisibility of American Indian women and adolescents in the sex trade. Although sex trafficking as social problem has generated a great deal of media and policy attention on both nationally and internationally, much of this response highlights the sex-trafficking of female adolescents abroad. The media’s skewed international portrayal of this issue ignores the saliency of the problem, especially considering that in the United States, 83 percent of the sex-trafficking incidents in 2008–2010 involved victims who are US citizens. Moreover, the United States has failed to recognize the disproportionate increase in the sex trafficking of American Indian women and adolescents; reservation communities in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Minnesota have reported higher rates of American Indian women and adolescents being recruited into the sex trade. Focusing on how historical context, social context, and social institutions are instrumental in framing narratives of victimhood, this article employs theories from both criminology and victimology in order to effectively deconstruct the factors that continue to determine victimhood.

Native youth are disproportionately incarcerated, often for relatively minor offenses. One potential solution is to move more Native youth out of federal and state courts and invest in tribal juvenile justice systems. Tribal systems are assumed to be less punitive than nontribal ones, so greater tribal control should mean less incarceration. Little is known, however, about the role of incarceration in tribally run systems. This article examines available information on Native youth in tribal juvenile justice systems from 1998 to 2013. At least sixteen new secure juvenile facilities were built to house youth under tribal court jurisdiction, with federal investment in incarceration far outpacing investment in alternative programs. The total number of juveniles housed in these facilities remained constant or declined, suggesting that new construction was not driven by a need for more bed space. Of the juveniles incarcerated in these facilities, a minority had committed violent offenses, suggesting that incarceration was used by tribes as a tool to address drug, alcohol, property, and other nonviolent offenses. By critically examining the central role played by incarceration in tribal juvenile systems and situating it against the backdrop of the national trend toward mass incarceration, this article seeks to help tribes avoid replicating mistakes made by other jurisdictions.

Robert Horse has been incarcerated since the age of sixteen. Now thirty-one, he is currently at the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls. Early in his incarceration, Robert became aware of the traditional teachings of his ancestors. He has utilized this knowledge to protect himself against harassment and retaliation from prison officials for his stance on prison violations and the religious violations that occur within the prison walls. This paper explores how Robert has been able to use religious freedom laws to plan and implement spiritual conference through inmate-run nonprofits.

The goal of this study was to gather information from Aboriginal offenders and describe the factors that help and hinder them from maintaining a crime-free life after incarceration. The information obtained provides an increased understanding of the needs of Aboriginal offenders and offers guidance concerning useful strategies to incorporate into their wellness plans when entering the community, most notably respecting Aboriginal culture and traditional practices. The critical-incident technique was utilized to examine forty-two Aboriginal offenders’ journeys from prison to the community, revealing nine major themes that were helpful in maintaining a crime-free life: transformation of self, cultural and traditional experiences, healthy relationships, having routine and structure in daily living, freedom from prison, purpose and fulfillment in life, attempting to live alcohol- and drug-free, professional support and programming, and learning to identify and express oneself. Also represented were four themes of obstacles that interfere with maintaining a crime-free life: self, unhealthy relationships, substance use, and lack of opportunity and professional support. The findings also add awareness of those circumstances, issues, and problems that arise during transition that may be harmful or create obstacles to a successful transition.

In June 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decided Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, a case involving an American Indian child and the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Despite the uncontested fact that Baby Veronica is indeed an “Indian child” as defined by both ICWA and the Cherokee Nation, the Supreme Court decision reveals deep, historical anxieties regarding race and political status as it summarizes Baby Veronica’s Indian status by means of a quantitative value of Cherokee blood. This article argues that as it imposes colonial notions of blood quantum on a tribal nation’s right to determine citizenship, SCOTUS uses law as a tool of formal social control when it dangerously distorts ICWA in order to police American Indian authenticity. In the process, it seriously threatens tribal sovereignty by creating a narrow class of protected Indian families.

This essay argues for the importance of Native literature’s insights to discussions of contemporary carceral conditions and, more importantly, the need for an indigenous feminist approach, one that sees the sexist and heteronormative impacts of settler colonialism as not only an outcome of, but also integral to, ongoing dispossession and neoliberal capitalist regimes of state and empire. While many scholarly discussions of carceral power leave little room for discussions of resistance, I argue both McNickle’s The Surrounded and Hale’s “Claire” imagine and articulate spaces and practices of freedom even though their texts are set in the most overtly assimilationist eras of the twentieth century: allotment and termination. In these spaces of freedom, for a fleeting moment, the protagonists are able to regroup, strategize, and simply “be indigenous,” shedding the shackles of the “criminal breed” or the uniform of the runaway ward. In ambiguous, if not pessimistic endings, both writers suggest that hope lies in the next generation’s ability to seize these moments, find these spaces, and reembody cultural practices of freedom that honor life and the land. Articulating an indigenous feminist analysis of carceral conditions in settler-colonial contexts, both texts thus see as an answer to those conditions an indigenous feminist resurgence that recenters kinship obligations and indigenous legal orders.

Combining literary and social analyses, this article focuses on an overlooked text, Janet Campbell Hale’s The Jailing of Cecelia Capture (1985), which stands out in contemporary Native American literature because of its focus on the imprisonment of a Native woman. The issues that The Jailing of Cecelia Capture raises remain relevant and critical. The 2015 death of a Lakota woman imprisoned for a bond violation, Sarah Lee Circle Bear, who was found unconscious in a cell in South Dakota, echoes central themes in Hale’s novel. Native writers have made connections between the untimely demise of Circle Bear and that of another young woman the week following: Sandra Bland, an African American woman discovered hanging lifeless in her Texas cell. This article asks, what does this constellation of confinement—characters in Hale’s novel, Sarah Lee Circle Bear, and Sandra Bland—reveal about the continuities and discontinuities, as well as the politics and forces, that influence the incarceration and oppression of Native and African Americans?