Beyond System Solutions: Indigenous Motherhoods and Canadian Prison Abolition

by Amelia Eaton, 2023 winner of the Writing Them In Essay Contest

Abstract: While the overincarceration of Indigenous women in Canada has received increasing, and much needed, attention, few reports acknowledge that the majority of women sent to prison are mothers, and often the primary or sole caregiver of their child or children prior to their incarceration. This paper argues that the separation of Indigenous women from their children is not an accidental effect but is an essential function of the mass imprisonment of Indigenous women. As such, efforts to reform the prison system have not, and cannot, meaningfully change the way that the prison system currently separates Indigenous families. Indeed, it is critical that we focus energy away from reformist solutions and toward imagining a world where prisons themselves cease to exist. First, this paper will provide a brief overview of Indigenous feminisms as an emerging critical legal theory. Second, this paper will analyze the documented history of the incarceration of Indigenous women in Canada, drawing parallels to the history of residential schools. Third, this paper will analyze the current ‘solutions’ offered to the ‘problem’ of overincarcerated Indigenous women and resulting family separation. Finally, this paper will analyze Indigenous motherhood as a site of resistance and revitalization.

Centering Indigenous Women’s Voices: Renee’s Story

On October 20, 2000, when she was just 21, Renee Acoby gave birth to her daughter Anika – in jail.¹ She had started her first federal prison sentence in February of that year – it was supposed to be three and half-years, for drug-trafficking and assault with a weapon. Renee is Métis. She was born and raised in Manitoba. As a preteen, she was given the traumatizing news that the woman who raised her, whom she believed was her mother, was actually her grandmother. Her real mother had been beaten to death by her father with a tire iron when Renee was just six months old. Her life was unstable as a teenager, bouncing between foster care homes. She turned to alcohol to cope, leading to juvenile detention.² In an undated poem sent to a journalist in 2010, Renee reflects:

There are times when I covet so much
The comfort inherent in a mother’s touch…
Infinite memory, suspended yet rushed;
Fleeting vulnerability… whispered, clutched.
Freedom slips away every time I get near it,
Deprived of intimacy so long, I almost fear it;
The song of North Wind, I long to hear it…
I search for peace to still my transient spirit.³

Renee has now been incarcerated for more than two decades.⁴ The majority of Renee’s crimes have taken place while in prison. Two months after arriving, she participated in a hostage-taking. When her daughter Anika was born, Renee was transferred to a healing lodge in southern Saskatchewan. There, she built a connection with an Ojibway elder who “reminded her of her grandmother.” ⁵ For a year living at the healing lodge, Renee seemed to be doing well. Then, she refused a drug test – while her daughter was being cared for in the prison daycare, she had smoked marijuana and taken Valium pills. The next day, corrections officials took Anika away from Renee, sending her to live with family. ⁶ Renee describes that last moment:

I spent those five minutes memorizing every detail of her beautiful little face, holding her and telling her how much I loved her. It was the hardest thing I had to do in my life – to turn my baby over to the care of someone else. I spent hours crying and praying for [her] health and happiness, and I hoped that one day I would have her back with me.⁷

The punitive approach Renee experienced stands in stark contrast to the ostensible purpose of the healing lodge. As she pointed out, “They could have tried to mediate with me…the whole point of being there is that it’s supposed to be about holistic healing”.⁸ With another inmate, Renee escaped the remote reserve to go see her child; she was arrested the next day. During sentencing for this escape, she told the judge, “Because they took her away from me, that’s why I did it”. When the judge replied that her daughter will probably be permanently taken away, Renee said “I know, and that’s probably the worst kind of sentence…So what you give me is not going to make a difference.” ⁹ In the following years, Renee participated in a number of hostage-takings of prison staff in an effort to secure better prison conditions and get access to her daughter.¹⁰

In 2011, Renee was labelled a “dangerous offender,” meaning there is no end date to her incarceration. Renee has lived out most of her sentence in “segregation” – essentially, solitary confinement. In an article that Renee authored on the use of segregation in Canada, she wrote:

Perhaps the public should contemplate the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky before electing to have more punitive rather than rehabilitative penal policies:

The standard of a nation’s civilization can be judged by opening the doors of its prisons. – Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)¹¹

Introduction

In starting with Renee’s story, and in particular, by quoting from her own work, I hope to combat the flattening of Indigenous women’s experiences to mere statistics, and to affirm that the voices of Indigenous women themselves must guide any conversation related to them.¹² While Renee’s story is, in some ways, unique – she is Canada’s only female dangerous offender – the heart of her story is painfully common in Canada’s prison system: the grief of being separated from her child and the patent injustice of this separation. While the overincarceration of Indigenous women in Canada has received increasing, and much-needed, attention, few reports acknowledge that the majority of women sent to prison are mothers, and often the primary or sole caregiver of their child or children prior to their incarceration.¹³ Indigenous women in particular are disproportionately separated from their children as a result of incarceration.¹⁴ This is not only due to the overrepresentation of Indigenous women in prisons, but also to the fact that Indigenous women are more likely to serve longer sentences, at maximum security prisons, further away from their families.¹⁵

This paper argues that the separation of Indigenous women from their children is not an accidental effect but is an essential function of the mass imprisonment of Indigenous women. As such, efforts to reform the prison system have not, and cannot, meaningfully change the way that the prison system currently separates Indigenous families. Indeed, it is critical that we focus energy away from reformist solutions and toward imagining a world where prisons themselves cease to exist. First, this paper will provide a brief overview of Indigenous feminisms as an emerging critical legal theory. Second, this paper will analyze the documented history of the incarceration of Indigenous women in Canada, drawing parallels to the history of residential schools. Third, this paper will analyze the current “solutions" offered to the “problem” of overincarcerated Indigenous women and resulting family separation. Finally, this paper will analyze Indigenous motherhood as a site of resistance and revitalization.

Analytical Approach: Indigenous Feminism(s) and Indigenous Motherhood

After centuries of persecution and oppression, the simple fact that we are still here, as proud Indigenous mothers, at the heart of our families, communities, and nations, signifies the strength of our resistance…Indeed, like the waves that eventually wear the rocks on our shores, the strength of our women is subtle but relentless.

Kim Anderson and Dawn Memee Lavell-Harvard, Mothers of the Nations: Indigenous Mothering as Global Resistance, Reclaiming and Recovery, page 17.¹⁶

This paper adopts an analytical approach rooted in Indigenous feminisms. Indigenous feminisms can be seen as a set of political movements with the object of achieving gender justice.¹⁷ As Cheryl Suzack describes, Indigenous feminisms offer an intersectional analysis that critique the overlapping structures of racism, colonialism, and patriarchy.¹⁸ At base, according to Sarah Nickels, Indigenous feminisms point to the “multiple ways in which gender and race, and therefore the systems of power related to these – sexism, racism, and colonialism – shape Indigenous peoples’ lives”.¹⁹ Importantly, Indigenous feminisms are not a sub-topic within an overarching white feminist tradition – they are a rejection of this very tradition. Author and critic Lee Maracle explained this almost three decades ago, stating: “I am not interested in gaining entry to the doors of the ‘white women’s movement.’ I would look just a little ridiculous sitting in their living rooms saying ‘we this and we that’”.²⁰

Indigenous feminisms highlight the ways that colonialism is inherently gendered, in both its purpose and effects. Colonization is not an event, but an ongoing structure, marked by both “the physical dispossession of Indigenous peoples” and the “denial of Indigenous political authority and the erasure of Indigenous cultural and social life”.²¹ Under this structure, the vulnerability of Indigenous women is purposefully produced through violence in order to impede the “ability of Indigenous women to reproduce Indigenous peoples and political orders”.²² As Audra Simpson notes, “due to their reproduction of social and political orders, Indigenous women are signifiers of Indigenous sovereignty and as such threaten the settler colonial regime”.²³ Dian Million adds, “it is actually gender violence that marks the evisceration of Indigenous nations”.²⁴

A key focus of colonial oppression has always been the reproductive and child-rearing capacities of Indigenous women. While Indigenous women faced state-sanctioned and documented forced sterilization from at least 1928-1973, they also had their children forcibly stolen through residential schools.²⁵ Both, Elizabeth Rule argues, “relied on the underlying notion that Indigenous were incapable”, with parental capability being defined using standards “cut from the same ideological cloth responsible for wholesale military campaigns against Indigenous people”.²⁶ Thus, a key function of colonialism has been, and continues to be, to “den[y], regulat[e], and degrad[e] Indigenous motherhood and reproduction” with the ultimate goal of “undermin[ing] and eliminat[ing] Indigenous people – and therefore, Indigenous peoples’ governance systems – and claims to their lands”.²⁷ It is therefore essential that attacks on Indigenous motherhood be understood “as a form of gendered violence in service of settler colonialism”.²⁸

Indigenous Motherhood and Carceral Control – Historical Analysis

In 1988, the Committee of the Canadian Bar Association concluded that “[p]laced in a historical context, the prison has become for many young [N]ative people the contemporary equivalent of what the Indian residential school represented for their parents”.²⁹ This often-cited comment reveals how the overincarceration of Indigenous peoples in Canada has been framed as occurring after, rather than contemporaneous with, the rise of residential schools. However, the overincarceration of Indigenous peoples is not a result of residential schools, nor did it follow them – instead it shares the same history and goals. As Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land points out, to talk about overincarceration as the “legacy” of the harms of residential schools is to “decide not to name present-day systems of oppression and exclusion ‘colonialism’”.³⁰ As this section intends to demonstrate, the overincarceration of Indigenous women and the resulting separation of Indigenous women from their children is not a recent phenomenon, nor is it one that has ever ceased to exist in Canada.

Canada’s first prison, the Kingston Penitentiary, opened in 1835. While we know that women were incarcerated in small numbers almost immediately, it is unclear if any of these women were Indigenous.³¹ The call for a separate prison for women eventually led to the Mercer Reformatory being opened in Ontario as a women’s alternative to the penitentiary.³² From 1880-1900, it is unclear if any Indigenous women were incarcerated there, though a Census does show 20 women (2% of the population) listed as “other" for nationality.³³ In the 1920s, there were 39 women listed as “Indian" on the registers, and ten years later that number had more than doubled.³⁴ By the 1950s, Indigenous women represented over 10% of the prison population, though Indigenous people continued to represent just 1% of the general population during the same time period.³⁵ The vast majority of these women were incarcerated for non-violent crimes linked to poverty and alcohol consumption, despite evidence available at the time already demonstrating that penal sanctions were not an effective remedy to these issues.³⁶

Regulating Indigenous women’s “sexual morality” has always been at the centre of the incarceration of Indigenous women, as evidenced by the use of the Female Refuges Act (FRA).³⁷ The FRA was a “draconian law” passed in Ontario in 1897 which allowed for the incarceration of women under 35 who had violated any Criminal Code provision or bylaw for “idle and dissolute” behaviour.³⁸ While the use of the FRA declined overall toward the middle of the 20^th century, the number of Indigenous women incarcerated under the Act continued to rise. The attitudes underlying the FRA decisions demonstrate that the incarceration of Indigenous women has always been tied to the same attitudes that are used to justify violence against them. Under FRA decisions, Indigenous women were constructed as inherently promiscuous,³⁹ a stereotype that continues to be employed to discount Indigenous women when they are the victims of violence.⁴⁰ Magistrate decisions of the time also demonstrate early examples of the victim-blaming that Indigenous women continue to face, as the concept of protecting Indigenous women from white men was a recurring theme underlying reasons for their incarceration.⁴¹ As Joan Sangster argues, “[a]lthough FRA convictions were clothed in protectionist language, in medical rationales, or even in reform rhetoric, they also worked, ideologically, to construct race and racism through the practice of the law.”⁴²

From the origins of their incarceration, historical records demonstrate that mothering by Indigenous women was harshly scrutinized, with a rising number of charges levelled against them for “neglecting, abandoning, or ‘corrupting’ their children”.⁴³ It is clear that overwhelmingly these convictions were used to blame Indigenous women for their own circumstances of poverty and vulnerability. Sangster’s analysis contains many stories of women being separated from their children either before or as a result of their incarceration, and who after the loss of their children refused to be ‘rehabilitated’ by the penal process.⁴⁴ Moreover, past attendance at residential schools was used to justify harsher punishments against Indigenous women. Hearing that one woman had been in an Anglican residential school, a magistrate commented “you went to Indian school for ten years, so you should know right from wrong”. ⁴⁵

Examining the parallel histories of incarceration and residential schools in Canada reveals the same underlying colonial logic of assimilation. Although residential schools go as far back as the earliest missionary work in North America, the 1840s saw the idea of education as a primary means of assimilation and eradication of Indigenous peoples in the colonies take hold.⁴⁶ One of the earliest official documents adopting this stance was the Bagot Commission report of 1842-1844, which proposed a system of agriculture-based boarding schools to ‘teach’ Indigenous children English, manual labour, Christian values, and to separate them from the influence of their parents. In 1846 and 1847, the idea of forced assimilation through a residential school system was taken up by two influential government architects of the time: the Indian Affairs Superintendent, T.G. Anderson, and the Chief Superintendent of Education in Upper Canada, Egerton Ryerson. In 1892, Canada officially began its colonial residential school system.⁴⁷ In 1920, Duncan Campbell Scott, at the time in charge of Canada’s policy on Indigenous peoples, revised the Indian Act to mandate residential school attendance up to the age of 15. The end goal of residential schools, and Canada’s approach to Indigenous peoples as a whole, was what Scott called “the elimination of the Indian question.”⁴⁸

Residential schools and prisons in Canada were both structured by the rise of industrial capitalism and an attitude that saw capitalist labour as a path toward “moral reform”. The very design of the Canadian penitentiary came from the penitentiaries of New York and Pennsylvania, which were in turn modelled after large-scale industrial factories. Like the United States, the origin of legal punishment in Canada “was tied to the model of industrial development”.⁴⁹ In much the same way, the residential school system was built upon an ideology of “saving” Indigenous children through labour – the integration of Indigenous children into a capitalist system, where they would “serve” the bourgeoisie, was the ultimate goal.⁵⁰ The Archbishop of St. Boniface articulated this underlying rationale when he stated in 1912 that Indigenous people needed to be “caught young to be saved from what is on the whole the degenerating influence of their home environment”.⁵¹

In addition to their shared ideological basis, and arguably as a function of it, the prison and the residential school share similar histories of violence, sexual abuse, and medical neglect. In 1849, just fourteen years after its opening, the Brown Commission heard from witnesses of the pervasive sexual abuse of female inmates at the Kingston Penitentiary by staff.⁵² While the Brown report suggested a separate prison for women, women continued to be “housed in various cramped locations within the penitentiary, being moved as the needs of the men altered”.⁵³ However, the suggestion for a separate prison for women was not entirely motivated by a desire to protect women from abuse but by “the inability to occupy women with profitable labour”.⁵⁴ While in 1913, a separate wing was created for federally sentenced women, the 1921 Nickle Commission highlighted that sexual abuse by male employees, and even male prisoners, remained pervasive. In 1934, Canada’s first federal Prison for Women formally opened. In comparison to men, who could be sent to a greater number of penitentiaries, women were the subject of “geographic dislocation” as a result of it being the only federal prison for women: “a woman from Edmonton, for example, would be 2,898 kilometers from her home, and a woman from Vancouver would be 3,542 kilometers from hers”.⁵⁵ As Indigenous women received longer sentences on average, they were disproportionately represented in the Prison for Women, and thus disproportionately removed from the provinces and communities of their children. Throughout its history, conditions of the Prison for Women were ones of overcrowding and abuse. A 1977 report called the prison “unfit for bears, much less for women”.⁵⁶ Finally, amid new attention as a result of a number of reported suicides, the prison finally closed in 2000, and was replaced with seven new prisons for women across Canada.⁵⁷

Much like the adoption of residential schools, criminal law and incarceration have been historically targeted at explicitly eradicating Indigenous languages and cultures. In 1884, shortly after the Indian Act was passed, the Act was amended to ban Potlatch and Tamanawas ceremonies, with those involved subject to between two- and six-months’ imprisonment.⁵⁸ Sun Dances were banned ten years later. In 1925, the Indian Act was further amended to ban “Indian dancing” at prairie agricultural exhibitions. At the same time as these discriminatory laws were enacted, Indigenous peoples were subject to greater surveillance and control by Indian agents, who were endowed with broad powers under the Indian Act to act as a Justice of the Peace and were relied upon by police and magistrates to offer evidence during parole hearings. These “authoritarian powers” were designed to assimilate Indigenous societies into “the more ‘progressive’ patriarchal, Christian, Euro-Canadian culture”.⁵⁹

At the same time, the history of the criminalization and incarceration of Indigenous peoples has always been one of resistance towards these efforts. Records demonstrate that Indigenous people continued to practice ceremonies banned by the Indian Act and accepted the risk of penal consequences.⁶⁰ Others spoke out against the incarceration of their family members. As Sangster describes:

Native women seldom found aid in the reformatory and, tragically, many returned to prison repeatedly. First Nations women often responded to their estrangement from the law and the reformatory with silence and stoicism – perhaps in itself a subtle form of non-compliance – though a very few, along with their families, voiced unequivocal renunciations of this system, their voices a preview to the current sustained critique of the inadequacy of the Euro-Canadian ‘justice’ for Aboriginal peoples.⁶¹

Examining Current Solutions to Indigenous Maternal Incarceration

Since at least the 1980s, the overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples, and Indigenous women in particular, has been identified as a pressing concern by the federal government.⁶² While report after report has analyzed potential “causes” and proposed solutions, the proportion of Indigenous women in prisons has failed to abate – in fact, it has grown drastically over the same time period. The next section critiques current responses to the overincarceration of Indigenous women and resulting separation from their children.

Gladue and Section 718.2(e)

In 1996, in response to the rising overincarceration of Indigenous peoples in Canada, Parliament amended the Criminal Code to require that alternatives be considered to imprisonment in the circumstances of “Aboriginal offenders.” The same year, Parliament created a new “tool” for sentencing judges in looking for alternatives to incarceration: conditional sentences.⁶³ A conditional sentence is a jail sentence, but one served “in the community” under certain conditions. These conditions can include the sentenced person attending drug or alcohol treatment programs, following curfews, being under house arrest, being subject electronic monitoring, and/or completing prescribed community service.⁶⁴ In Gladue,⁶⁵ the Supreme Court of Canada first interpreted the new section 718.2(e), affirming that it was a distinct approach to sentencing, which, along with the introduction of conditional sentences, gave new force to the general principle that imprisonment be resorted to only where no other sentencing option is reasonable.⁶⁶ In particular, when sentencing an “Aboriginal offender” under 718.2(e), judges must consider: (1) the unique background factors which may have played a part in bringing the particular aboriginal offender before the courts, and (2) the types of procedures and sanctions which may be appropriate because of his or her aboriginal heritage or connection. Thirteen years later the Supreme Court in Ipeelee67 repeated that these factors are mandatory considerations for sentencing judges, even in cases of violent offences.

While a full review of the strengths and limitations of Gladue sentencing and conditional sentences is outside the scope of this paper, the research is clear: their introduction has not meaningfully addressed the still rising percentage of Indigenous women incarcerated in Canada. Despite Ipeelee clearly calling on trial judges to follow the approach laid out in Gladue, an analysis of 635 cases between 2012 and 2015 revealed that a satisfactory analysis of the factors set out in Gladue appeared in less that 20% of cases.⁶⁸ Sentencing judges can benefit from personalized reports in considering the Gladue factors, but resources for those being sentenced to obtain these reports are scarce and thus Gladue reports are too often missing in sentencing.⁶⁹

The introduction of conditional sentences has not led to a decrease in the prison population generally, or the percentage of Indigenous people incarcerated specifically. There is therefore a risk that conditional sentences are being used in circumstances where, had conditional sentences not existed, the person would have received a suspended sentence or probation.⁷⁰ Conditional sentences may also be longer than traditional prison sentences – which appears acceptable when the sentence is actually used in place of incarceration. However, because Indigenous people are disproportionately likely to be found in breach of their conditions, if they serve the rest of their sentence in prison, they may end up being incarcerated for more time than if they had just received a traditional prison sentence in the first place.⁷¹

The burdens of a conditional sentence may be exacerbated for women. One study from Newfoundland on the use of electronic monitoring found that while men serving their sentences at home had support from women in their lives to deliver groceries and otherwise assist with activities outside the home, women had fewer supports but faced the same restrictions as part of their sentence.⁷² The study also found that the children of the monitored women suffered because of the restrictions, for example, by not being able to go on outings, whereas all men with children in the home had the support of a female partner who took responsibility for child care.⁷³ Despite the fact that gender is clearly pertinent to the background of Indigenous women, as well as the appropriateness of different sentencing procedures to their circumstances, studies demonstrate that Gladue sentencing decisions rarely consider gender.⁷⁴ More often, sentencing decisions continue to minimize the violence that Indigenous women face and engage in stereotyping against them.⁷⁵

Cultural Programs and Healing Lodges

Since 1995, Correctional Services of Canada has operated the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge located on the Necaneet First Nation in Sasketchewan. The Lodge offers “a range of culturally appropriate programming for Aboriginal women”.⁷⁶ The Lodge has single and family units. It can accommodate around 30 women at a time, though it does not accept women classified at the maximum-security level. From its inception, the healing lodge has been the source of critique. As a 1999 masters thesis expresses: “one must view the construction of a correctional institution structured on the views of First Nations peoples with cautious optimism”…“unless systematic attention is given to the underlying social problems experienced by First Nations peoples, it can only be a cosmetic solution to an overwhelming problem”.⁷⁷ Although the Lodge employs Indigenous women and Elders, these women remain responsible to the Commissioner of Corrections. In addition to the Lodge, CSC operates a number of cultural programs within traditional prisons aimed at helping Indigenous women “heal” while incarcerated.⁷⁸

While there is some indication that Indigenous women have had positive experiences at the Healing Lodge and within cultural programs, the “Indigenization” of prisons has been widely criticized as only serving to further hide, rather than address, the harms of incarceration.⁷⁹ As Elspeth Kaiser-Derrick points out, irrespective of the programming offered, “imprisonment is incompatible with any kind of healing process for Indigenous women because it often aggravates pre-existing trauma and engenders additional trauma”.⁸⁰ This can be seen in Renee Acoby’s experience with the Healing Lodge. In contrast to its image as a site of understanding and compassion for Indigenous women, the Healing Lodge’s strict rules meant that Renee was further traumatized by the removal of her daughter. The removal of her daughter was clearly an excessively punitive response to her choosing to use recreational substances while not in the presence of her daughter, a choice that many outside the prison context make without consequence. Ultimately, “no amount of appropriated items and practices – eagle feathers, circles, or red roads – embedded in pan-Indigenized correctional programming will do anything to heal Indigenous women”.⁸¹

Moreover, an approach which puts responsibility on Indigenous women to “heal” themselves while incarcerated has the potential to inflict more harm through perpetuating the myth that Indigenous women are responsible for their ongoing oppression. As Kelly Struthers Montford & Dawn Moore comment:

It might be the case that as it currently practiced, a carcerally mediated, pan-Indigenized approach to rehabilitation requires the individual to heal/rehabilitate without concomitant structural shifts in social, economic, political, and cultural inequality related to their marginalization and criminalization. Individual prisoners then become tasked with healing from the effects of colonialism, despite the fact that settler colonialism remains an ongoing process.⁸²

Mother-Child Program

In 2001, the Mother-Child Program was established to allow some young children to stay with their mothers while the mothers were incarcerated.⁸³ Prior to 2008, as many as 24 women across the country participated in the program each year. However, this number dropped significantly in the face of sweeping policy changes. Eligibility was restricted to exclude women convicted of serious crimes involving violence, children, or of a sexual nature, to reduce the maximum age for part-time child participants from 12 to 6 years old, and to impose additional requirements from Child and Family Services.⁸⁴ These changes have meant that Indigenous mothers are disproportionately excluded from the program for three reasons. First, Indigenous women are over-represented in terms of violent offences, which disproportionately disqualifies them from applying. Second, the added involvement of child welfare services will likely have the effect of deterring Indigenous women from applying because of the way that child welfare agencies have historically and continued to target Indigenous families for separation, and the trauma that many incarcerated women carry from these interactions.⁸⁵ Finally, the cost of transporting the child to the program is left entirely on families, which disadvantages Indigenous women who tend to have fewer economic resources and be incarcerated further away from their communities.⁸⁶ A 2012 report mentioned only one woman, who was not Indigenous, was participating in the Mother-Child Program at the time.⁸⁷ CSC does not publish enrolment information on the Mother-Child Program, so it is unclear how many families are currently participating.⁸⁸ However, a recent studied identified 133 mothers as having participated in the program from its inception to 2018, with Indigenous women being under-represented as predicted by previous research.⁸⁹

In addition to the examining the exclusionary requirements of the Mother-Child Program, it should be questioned whether placing children in prisons is truly a solution to the issue of the incarceration of Indigenous mothers. “Equal access” to the Mother-Child Program for Indigenous women would essentially mean the incarceration of Indigenous children – a consequence that only expands, rather than shrinks, the scope of incarceration in the lives of Indigenous families.

Conclusion on Current Solutions

Even by their own metrics, current attempts at addressing the overincarceration of Indigenous women and disproportionate family separation have failed. Many have existed for multiple decades and have failed to lead to appreciable change – the rate of incarceration for Indigenous women continues to climb year after year, as does the resulting family separation. Moreover, an expansion of the current “solutions” requires further investment in the prison system, diverting resources away from communities themselves. On another level, this investment only serves to endorse and legitimize the prison system as capable of helping Indigenous women and their children to begin with.⁹⁰ As Fran Sugar and Lana Fox aptly commented in 1989:

Prison cannot remedy the problem of the poverty of the reserves. It cannot deal with immediate or historical memories of the genocide that Europeans worked upon our people. It cannot remedy violence, alcohol abuse, sexual assault during childhood, rape and other violence Aboriginal women experience at the hands of men. Prison cannot heal the past abuse of foster homes, or the indifference and racism of Canada’s justice system in its dealings with Aboriginal people.⁹¹

Conceptualizing the Separation of Indigenous Mothers from their Children as an Inherent Feature of the Prison System

Looking at the origins and present conditions of the Canadian prison system allows us to ask “what if the reason Indigenous women have not been ‘aided’ by incarceration is because it was never set up to function in that way?” And if the Canadian prison system is not intended to rehabilitate Indigenous women or prevent harm to them, then what is its function?

A growing number of scholars in Canada argue that function of the prison is, in the words of Laura Landertinger, Joanne Minaker and Bryan Hogeveen, to “perpetuate the heteropatriarchal colonial logic of elimination.”⁹² The prison system does so not only by physically dispossessing Indigenous peoples from their lands and communities, but also by narratively constructing Indigenous peoples as “wrongdoers,” justifying their surveillance and repression.⁹³

Thus, prison cannot end gendered violence because it is, in itself, a system of gendered violence. This is true in two respects. First, in a direct sense, prisons reproduce gendered violence in that they impose conditions of vulnerability on Indigenous women while punishing them for this vulnerability. The vast majority of incarcerated Indigenous women are survivors of male violence prior to their incarceration.⁹⁴ For many, this victimhood has a direct tie into their interactions with the criminal justice system.⁹⁵ Incarceration deprives women of agency, bodily autonomy, connection to their families and to their communities – in many cases leading to increased trauma and perpetuating a cycle of poverty, instability, and violence for Indigenous women.⁹⁶

The prison is also a system of gendered violence in a less tangible, and more pernicious, way. As Angela Davis argues, the ideological work that the prison performs is that “it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”⁹⁷ This connects to what Glen Coulthard terms “symbolic violence”.⁹⁸ Coulthard argues that Indigenous women face both symbolic and systemic violence. In this analysis, while systemic violence lies in the incarceration itself, as both structured and material, the symbolic violence is the force “that renders the crushing materiality of systemic violence invisible, appear natural, acceptable”.⁹⁹ In other words, as McGuire and Murdoch argue, mass imprisonment operates to dehumanize Indigenous women and in doing so “alleviate the state from any responsibility for [their] well-being”.¹⁰⁰ Overincarceration thus not only serves to justify itself but serves to perpetuate and naturalize the other forms of violence that Indigenous women face.¹⁰¹

Thus, the function of Canadian prisons is to make the violence that Indigenous women face appear natural and inevitable while physically removing them from their families and communities. As Kelly Lyle Hernandez argues, “incarceration operates as a means of purging, removing, and eliminating targeted populations from land, life, and society”.¹⁰² In this way, the separation of Indigenous women from their children is not a “glitch” but a feature of Canada’s prison system. As Isabel Scheuneman Scott argues, the prison system serves to “constitute and reinforce colonial and patriarchal beliefs, stereotypes, and practices that actively function to dispossess Indigenous mothers of their children (and Indigenous children of their mothers), cultures, and abilities to reproduce healthy and vibrant Indigenous communities.”¹⁰³

Indigenous Motherhood as a Source of Abolitionist Imagination

It remains a “a great feat of the imagination”, as Angela Davis wrote almost two decades ago, “to envision life beyond the prison”.¹⁰⁴ The beginning of this task is accepting that there is no single alternative to the prison. Prisons are just one manifestation of an oppressive structure, that is, colonial heteropatriarchy, which manifests in many other ways, including entrenched poverty, housing instability, violence, and intergenerational trauma. This is succinctly described in the following poem written by a young incarcerated Maori woman who writes under the pseudonym Maia:

The one thing that you will never see
Is to be captured having never been free

Thus, liberation from this oppressive structure, at an individual or societal level, cannot be achieved “solely” by eliminating prisons.¹⁰⁵ Instead, imagining a world without prisons requires focusing on “all the social relations that support the permanence of the prison”.¹⁰⁶

A focus on Indigenous motherhood(s) offers a rich starting point in this task of imagination. While Indigenous motherhoods have been the site of state coercion, regulation, and oppression, they are also the site of resistance and reclamation.¹⁰⁷ A focus on Indigenous motherhoods is one that brings the reality of colonialism to the forefront, but also one that is inherently gendered, relational, and future-oriented. The concept of Indigenous motherhoods captures an incredibly diverse set of traditions and practices from different unique nations. However, as Dawn Memee Lavell-Harvard & Kim Anderson note, some similarities exist across Indigenous approaches to motherhood, including a tendency to focus on relationships and community.¹⁰⁸

Under a Western feminist approach, empowering motherhood is constructed in opposition to patriarchal ideals which construct motherhood as an inherently natural and unskilled role.¹⁰⁹ However, Lavell-Harvard and Anderson propose that Indigenous feminist mothering need not be a response to patriarchy as “generations of resistance and resilience means those Indigenous women do not necessarily face the same dilemma as we work instead to reclaim and revitalize the more empowering cultural beliefs, traditions, and practices of our ancestors”.¹¹⁰ One example of this lies in Lisa Sunseri’s description of her aunt and grandmother as empowering mothers in her article “Sky Woman Lives On: Contemporary Examples of Mothering the Nation”. Both women were strong advocates in their communities and retained multifaceted identities outside of their role as mothers. As Sunseri describes:

Motherhood did not imply a subservient or submissive role, rather it gave [my aunt] strength to be a type of women that her children, grandchildren, and all other Oneida people could look up to…This empowered mothering recognizes that when mothers practice mothering from a position of agency rather than of passivity, of authority rather than submission, and of autonomy rather than dependency, all, mothers and children alike, become empowered.¹¹¹

In this way, motherhood is an important site of resistance to colonial patriarchy, while also an area where empowering traditions can be revitalized.

A focus on motherhood is also essentially future-oriented. It imagines not only children as future adults but the world that they will live in. Leanne Simpson’s work is particularly relevant here. Simpson describes that within a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe epistemology, “coming into wisdom... takes place in the context of family, community and relations”.¹¹² In her retelling of a traditional Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg story, “Kwezens makes a lovely discovery” Simpson demonstrates empowered Indigenous motherhood in action. When the Kwezens take the “sweet water” they have discovered home to show their mama, the doodoom¹¹³ “is excited and has three hundred questions”.¹¹⁴ When her child tells her the story, the doodoom “believes every word, because she is her Kwezens and they love each other very much”.¹¹⁵ In her own analysis, Simpson reiterates that the Kwezens’ learning takes place in a “loving web of Nishnaabeg networks.”¹¹⁶ Through this story, colonialism is understood as impermanent, and a future beyond it – even a timeline altogether separate from it – is imagined.

Focusing on Indigenous motherhood(s), in all their diversities, calls on us to make such a future possible. It also highlights the multiple overlapping structures in society which must be rebuilt. As Simpson highlights, what if Kwezens had been at a desk all day, in a school that did not value or give her access to land-based knowledge? While Simpson’s work is not explicitly focused on the prison system, her critique of the education system connects to abolitionist ideas. Angela Davis writes that “when children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison”.¹¹⁷

It is, in large part, through the enduring resistance of Indigenous women that the revitalization of Indigenous ways of knowing is possible. As Simpson describes:

I would not exist, writing this paper today, if it were not for the physical survival of several generations of Nishnaabeg women in my family and the heartbreaking sacrifices of my Elders who resisted colonial educational practices and live out their commitment to teaching others, the vast majority of the time in the absence of compensation or deep reciprocity, and outside of the provincial education and the post-secondary education system.¹¹⁸

When we try to imagine a world without prisons, what we are really imagining is a society that has deconstructed colonial patriarchy – and healed from its wounds. This raises the question: how do we heal? Simpson effectively answers this question in her argument for land as pedagogy: radical re-connection to land and community. In other words, at the centre of our abolition imagination ought to be relationships:

While each individual must have the skills and knowledge to ensure their own safety, survival and prosperity in both the physical and spiritual real, their existence is ultimately dependent upon intimate relationships of reciprocity, humility, honesty and respect with all elements of creation, including plants and animals.¹¹⁹

Such a focus on relationships gives us not only a map to prevent harm and violence in our communities, but also an idea for how to respond to harm. As Simpson discusses, individuals are responsible for their own lives but also accountable to those around them.¹²⁰

In revitalizing these legal traditions, an explicitly gendered approach is essential. As Joyce Green insists, Indigenous feminisms highlight that “not all pre-colonial Indigenous social practices were innocent of oppression, including sex oppression”.¹²¹ Ultimately, as McGuire & Murdoch assert, moving beyond prisons requires reclaiming the power to “move forward towards asserting our Nation-hood, reviving our own justice systems and laws, rejecting imposed systems, and re-centralizing women”¹²²

Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that a focus on Indigenous motherhood(s) highlights both the harms of mass incarceration and aids us in envisioning a world beyond it. When we are reminded that the majority of incarcerated Indigenous women in Canada are also mothers, we are reminded of the ripple effects of incarceration. Remembering this disrupts the stereotypical construction of Indigenous women as perpetual victims; and forces a recognition that Indigenous women have agency and strength and are valued and loved by others. When we are confronted with the fact that prison separates Indigenous women from their children, our understanding of its “rehabililatory” or even “healing” potential is fundamentally disrupted. When we are further confronted with the fact that the separation of Indigenous families and forced assimilation has always been at the core of the prison system in Canada, we are ready to ask whether this system is truly capable of reform. I argue that Indigenous motherhood(s) give us a unique starting point – one that is decolonial, relational, gendered, and future-oriented – to imagine a future beyond reform and towards abolition.

Endnotes