The Spider’s Web
Mass Incarceration and Settler Custodialism in Indian Country
DOUGLAS K. MILLER
And he said in the future all over the universe there shall be a spider’s web woven all around the Sioux and then when it shall happen you shall live in gray houses, but that will not be the way of your life and religion and so when this happens, alongside of those gray houses you shall starve to death.… The Long Knives [Americans] have woven the gray blanket over us and we are now prisoners of war.
—Black Elk (Oglala Lakota)
Smoke from twelve burned buildings still plumed through the air above the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester—“Big Mac”—on July 28, 1973, when prisoners negotiated a conclusion to one of the most catastrophic prison riots in United States history. After three days, three deaths, dozens of injuries, and $20 million in damage, the besieged prisoners surrendered their hostages in exchange for meetings with news reporters. If they were granted only one wish, then they spent it wisely. Their story was their only leverage. The overcrowded prison had committed a lengthy list of criminal offenses: racial segregation; prisoner punishment absent of official hearings; unconstitutional conditions of confinement; use of chemical agents in punishment; denial of publications; and the denial of religious services. “We didn’t want it to come to this, but the way we were treated warranted that we do something,” explained a prisoner chosen to represent his fellow prisoners. “We couldn’t continue living in these conditions.”1
The young state of Oklahoma constructed the prison at McAlester on 2,000 acres of Choctaw Nation land in 1909, two years after achieving statehood.2 Some of the three hundred Native American people—a majority of whom were nonviolent offenders—incarcerated during the 1973 riot therefore might have argued that they were imprisoned by a foreign nation on their own nation’s land.3 Ponca Nation citizen, American Indian Movement representative, and former Oklahoma prisoner Carter Camp suggested as much when commenting on the riot: “We don’t think Indians should be in a white man’s prison. They aren’t in there for violating Indian laws.” With that, Camp asserted tribal sovereignty while rejecting the legality of incarcerating Indians in United States prisons after trying and convicting them in what many “Red Power” advocates considered foreign courts.4
For Native people rendered invisible by incarceration, the myth of the disappearing Indian has not been a myth at all. Indeed, in areas of the United States with relatively high numbers of Native American people, the carceral state destroys Indigenous lives at an alarmingly disproportionate rate. In South Dakota, for example, Native people amount to only 9 percent of the total state population. Yet 29 percent of South Dakota’s incarcerated adult male population is Indian. That figure is even higher for Native women, who constitute 35 percent of the state’s adult female prison population. Native American people comprise 57 percent of South Dakota’s total prisoner caseload. Similarly, in 1991, Native people formed 16 percent of Montana’s prison population, despite only making up 5 percent of the state’s total population. By 2014, that number had grown to 33 percent of Montana’s prison population, despite the fact that Native people constituted only 7 percent of the total state population. From the early 1990s to the present, Alaska, Hawai’i, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, too, have featured comparably alarming rates of Indian incarceration within their prisons.5 Nationally, there were 65,000 Native American people under correctional supervision in 2013. They composed 4 percent of the total United States adult prison population, despite constituting only 1 percent of the total United States population.6
According to a study conducted by the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice, between 1999 and 2011, police killed Native American people at a higher per capita rate than any other racial group in the United States. Data that the United States Sentencing Commission compiled between 1999 and 2014 indicate that Native American people are three times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police. During that period, the incarceration rate of Native American people increased by 18 percent. In 2014, 46 percent were first-time offenders. In sum, Native people receive longer sentences, serve longer sentences, and experience a higher prison suicide rate than the national average. Moreover, paroled and released Native prisoners have long suffered from cyclical recidivism and homelessness in cities such as Minneapolis–St. Paul, Phoenix, and Seattle.7
Native American prisoners also toil within the wider prison labor system.8 During the 1990s, for example, the Nebraska State Penitentiary contracted with area private corporations to bring work programs to the prison. After passing a training program conducted by a nearby community college, Indigenous prisoners filled positions making everything from soap to plastic Christmas decorations to steel beds for future fellow prisoners.9 Likewise, according to the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), one police department in South Dakota recently operated a program in which Native people who owed money for random fines could work off their debts on area ranches, conducting what USCCR Rocky Mountain area director Malee Craft termed “slave labor.” In Billings, Montana, a reservation border town with infamously fraught relations between white and Native American people, a member of the Montana Advisory Committee to the USCCR suggested that, “From my observation, a lot of what [Native Americans] go through now is what we African Americans dealt with in the 1960s.”10
Motivated by these reasons to explain why mass incarceration matters11 in Indian Country, this chapter examines how this persistent crisis can be linked to Indigenous peoples’ pasts, first as defenders of their ancestral homelands and enemies of Euro-American settler states, and then as subjects of the American custodial state. Taking Carter Camp’s claim to its logical conclusion, the ultimate negation of Indigenous sovereignty, especially among those who have renounced the unilateral, for many unsolicited, extension of United States citizenship, is imprisonment within the United States’ custodial system.
Within the larger field of carceral histories, however, scholars have mostly overlooked Native American people. Although it is of course not a competition to rank historical traumas, inclusion of Native people within our rapidly maturing discourses reveals an even more expansive, systemic, and critical carceral crisis, with deeper and more tangled roots, than we have previously acknowledged. Kelly Lytle Hernández’s study of the history of incarceration in Los Angeles provides one notable exception to the dearth of historical scholarship on Indigenous incarceration in the United States. According to Lytle Hernández, incarceration is both rooted in and advances white supremacy. It is also an inherently settler-colonial project, she explains, as it exploits disposable labor in order to eliminate Indigenous people from its landscape. “Incarceration is elimination,” she argues. “Why? Because incarceration is a pillar in the structure of conquest and, in particular, settler colonialism.”12
I seek to build on Lytle Hernández’s foundational work by expanding the spatial and temporal terms of her analysis of Indigenous incarceration beyond nineteenth-century California. In doing so, this chapter attempts a historical narrative that explores not only concrete prisons but also other forms of custody and control in Native American history. In resolute agreement with Lytle Hernández’s innovative analysis, I suggest that scholars of settler colonialism have mostly overlooked the essential role incarceration has played in advancing the American settler state. I therefore encourage a commitment to further exploration of what we might call settler custodialism, for what it can reveal about Native American history, United States history, and the vast landscapes where those inherently inseparable fields meet.13
The incarceration crisis in Indian Country did not originate in Texas; or the Jim Crow South; or the loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment; or the Great Migrations of Southern black Americans to Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Newark, and New York City; or the Cold War–era rise of the Sunbelt. Warfare, broken treaties, circumscribed sovereignty, land theft, forced removals, reservation and boarding school confinement, and economic and cultural paternalism cleared a path for the growing carceral state to first slither through Indian Country before fusing with a modern, wider mass incarceration crisis rooted in plantations, penitentiaries, and the rise of global capitalism. The history of Indigenous incarceration further illuminates the manifold origins and the vast scale and scope of the American carceral state(s) and how deeply our contemporary crisis is entrenched in a conquest of North America that depended on the theft of Indian land and black labor. Indeed, Native people have not merely experienced similar disproportionate subjection to and deplorable conditions within carceral institutions. More than just an overlooked chapter, the Native story is the American story.14
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Colonial conflicts between Native American and Western European peoples produced the earliest examples of mass incarceration in North America. During the outbreak of Metacom’s (King Philip’s) War in 1675, paranoid English colonists rounded up over one thousand not hostile but peaceful and pro-English, Algonquian Indian people identified as “praying Indians” (given their Christian conversion) and forcibly interned them in concentration camps on various islands around New England. Roughly half of the peaceful prisoners confined on Boston Harbor’s Deer Island died from starvation or exposure prior to the war’s conclusion. This example is significant because, as historian Jill Lepore elaborates, Metacom’s War proved profoundly instrumental in colonists’ first step toward cultivating a uniquely American identity. New Englanders embroiled in the war interpreted their victory as a sign from God, that their mission in the “New World” was righteous. Moreover, victory in Metacom’s War and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples provided colonists a shared experience around which they could more easily unite in common cause. And the incarceration of peaceful Indian people is but one egregious example of English brutality toward their neighbors and original occupants of the land on which they encroached. Years later, in the 1840s, Suffolk County officials quarantined Irish famine refugees on that same Deer Island. Then, in the 1880s, officials converted an almshouse located there into the actual Deer Island Prison, which remained in operation until 1991, over three hundred years after it first held Indigenous prisoners.15
The illegal detention and punishment of Indigenous peoples in the context of war continued after the English colonies became the United States. In 1862, hundreds of Dakota people in Minnesota became prisoners of an undeclared war, in their own homeland, for the heinous crime of defending their people against treaty violations, land encroachment, and abject starvation. After a U.S. military tribunal sentenced 303 Dakota men to death at a rate of one hearing per ten minutes (too slow, according to contemporary reporters), President Lincoln, already busy with the Civil War, ultimately reduced that number to thirty-eight. On December 26, 1862 (not wanting to cast a pall over Christmas Day), U.S. officials in Mankato, Minnesota, orchestrated the largest public execution in United States history, simultaneously hanging thirty-eight Dakota men in front of more than three thousand spectators. “Remember the 38,” Dakota people still recite to this day.
Federal agents escorted the remaining 265 convicted men, along with sixteen women and two children, by steamship to a new prison camp, Camp Kearney, inside the Union Army’s larger Camp McClellan in Davenport, Iowa. Traditional Indigenous societies in North America did not incarcerate people. European jailers introduced cell confinement as a consequence of colonization and conquest.16 Therefore, the Dakota prisoners likely had not previously experienced anything on the order of a European penal institution. For their first year in confinement, the shackled men labored in a prison shop where they made wood carvings, beadwork items, clothing, and mittens to be sold to area U.S. citizens. The women, who were technically listed as prisoners themselves, worked as cooks, nurses, and laundresses. In Camp Kearney’s second year of operation, officials began leasing the Dakota men out to area farmers in Iowa. Dakota prisoners were therefore subject to a convict-lease program before the loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment allowed for one in the Jim Crow South.17 In 1866, President Andrew Johnson finally “released” the remaining prisoners to a new reservation in Nebraska.
Presbyterian minister Stephen R. Riggs, who taught many of the Dakota prisoners to read and write in their Indigenous language, estimated that 120 among them died in captivity before they ever had a chance to start anew in Nebraska.18 That figure is not surprising given the treatment they received. Many froze to death after prison officials removed all the stoves from the prison barracks. And still white settlers in the area complained that the Indian “devils” were “clothed, warmed, and fed at Camp McClellan, when they ought to be hung.”19 “Although we are alive right now, they will never like us, and for us that’s too difficult to live with,” Wakanhdi Topa wrote to Riggs in May 1863. “We realize that whoever sees us, and no matter what we say to try to defend ourselves, the white people will think of us as dogs.”20
In their letters, the Dakota prisoners often expressed regret. Some wrote about how much they missed their wives and children. “Since last summer, we have not seen our children, wives, and relatives, and we feel it’s too difficult of a burden to bear,” Four Lightning wrote in 1863.21 Some blamed themselves and promised to never drink alcohol again. Some offered to do something to make things right. Some discussed reading the Bible and praised the Holy Spirit. Some expressed fear that they would freeze to death. Some mentioned how people had just vanished from the prison and that bodies were buried in unmarked graves. Some mentioned that some of the women had been raped. Some worried that President Lincoln’s death would hasten their own demise. Throughout their collective and tragic ordeal, however, they maintained their innocence. “I was, then, at the battle because they were killing women and children, that’s why I went there,” First Born Son asserted, not long after receiving news that his wife had disappeared.22
There is a certain gallows wisdom captured in the Dakota prisoners’ letters to people on the outside. These were men and women who had experienced extraordinary suffering on the grand stage of human history. But their fortitude throughout custody should not overshadow their desperation. These were men and women in profound distress. They had watched people die all around them. They were prisoners in their own ancestral homeland. They were prisoners for defending their ancestral homeland. Still, even under the darkest of circumstances they imagined a way forward and a better future for Indian people. Writing in 1864, Dakota prisoner Thomas Good-Good hoped that, “Although those persons imprisoned here come to an end, our next generation of children will look for something different, that’s what I think—it is so.” Tragically, Thomas Good-Good could not have known at that time that the next generation of Dakota and other Indian children would be subjected to a different, but no less catastrophic, brand of confinement.23
Recalling his childhood experience in California’s Fort Yuma Indian School during the 1910s, Quechan/Mojave tribal elder Lee Emerson disclosed, “If you were a repeated runaway, they’d catch them and put shackles on them, ball and chains. I always think that, perhaps, they got the idea from the territorial prison right next to us.” He was hardly being melodramatic. Such punitive measures reflected prevailing turn-of-the-century assertions that coercive assimilation into “the main stream” of America would rescue Indians from their supposedly uncivilized cultural patterns and doomed destinies. Therefore, not only did federal authorities physically shackle young Indians to distant off-reservation boarding schools; they also figuratively incarcerated them within a colonizing state’s relentless impositions on how and where Native people could and should belong in the now firmly entrenched United States.24
Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt designed Indian off-reservation boarding schools to “kill the Indian, and save the man.” In 1878, he established the first Indian boarding school program at Virginia’s Hampton Institute, a school for black freedmen. Pratt found his Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, and Caddo pilot program test subjects in a prison at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. They were in prison for defending their ancestral homelands in and around Indian Territory. In 1879, Pratt opened the boarding school dearest to his heart in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—a boarding school that practically functioned like a prison, where students donned drab uniforms, labored in the maintenance of the institution, and faced corporal punishment for offenses ranging from attempted escape to speaking an Indigenous language. In highlighting what she terms a “shadow narrative,” Jacqueline Fear-Segal suggests that the “living experiment” at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School “mimicked and parodied a system of surveillance pioneered in prisons and was intrinsic to Carlisle’s mission to destroy Native cultures.”25 The federal government founded subsequent Indian boarding schools, such as Flandreau and Chilocco, according to this model. By 1900, roughly two-thirds of all Native American children were being “educated” in overcrowded federal boarding schools.26
Boarding schools were but one brand of Indian confinement at the turn of the century, however. The reservations from which students came—in some cases through categorical abduction—also functioned as spaces of surveillance, confinement, and, as Thomas Biolsi notes, a settler-colonial variant of Foucauldian subjection.27 Likewise, “The lands reserved for Indians in treaties with federal and state governments became their prisons,” Robert White observes, “and their resulting destitution inaugurated an era of utter dependency.”28 This phenomenon manifested precisely when reservations were taking shape either as new homelands or reconstituted ancestral homelands, thereby creating what Fred Hoxie identifies as a prison versus homeland rhetorical binary.29
At the turn of the twentieth century, Native people typically needed permits and official sponsorship to leave their reservations. Such documents described the bearer physically, stated his destination and reason for journey, and would “assure every one that he was worthy of confidence.” Reservation agents occasionally exploited travel papers as an opportunity to practice cruel and bigoted bureaucratic humor. “TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN. The bearer of this paper is a Ballyho Indian named Ah-wo-ke or High Feather, commonly known as Lazy Jake. He is without exception the worst fraud and petty scoundrel it has ever been my misfortune to meet,” one note read. According to Progressive Era Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Leupp, travel permits had been necessary for deterring “the wanderings of an element who were merely restless without evil intent.” In fact, travel permits ensured population control. During the late nineteenth century, the Office of Indian Affairs barred Indian people from visiting other reservations on grounds that such practices were “injurious.” Even when abiding Indians received passes as a reward for good behavior, especially that of industriousness, they were routinely subjected to police escorts.30
Congress, however, envisioned reservations only as temporary solutions to its enduring “Indian problem.” The point had always been to eventually integrate Native people into what historian Fred Hoxie identifies as a second-class brand of United States citizenship.31 With the 1924 Snyder Act, which extended United States citizenship to or over (depending on one’s perspective) Native people, the American settler state finished its colonial, unilateral, (il)legal, and ongoing project of remaking peoples of Indigenous nations into American (Indian) citizens and, by extension, subject to the United States criminal justice system. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, some Native people who did not properly assimilate became confined in asylums and sanitariums, such as South Dakota’s Hiawatha Insane Asylum or Michigan’s Lapeer State Home and Training School for the “feeble minded,” which during the first half of the twentieth century routinely forced Indigenous women who failed psychological examinations into a sterilization program.32
In the aftermath of World War II, the federal state inverted its reservation confinement policy approach. Its new goal became one of prodding Native people to leave their reservations and join “mainstream” American society. On January 1, 1952, against the backdrop of America’s Cold War trend toward sociocultural consensus, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) formally introduced its national Voluntary Relocation Program to support the movement of Native people from rural Indian Country to Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and numerous other metropolises that eventually comprised a new urban Indian Country. Many urban Indian migrants demonstrated remarkable ingenuity and resilience as they forged new possibilities for Indigenous futures and new places for Indian belonging. Others who could not secure steady employment and had no money to return home complained that they had become trapped in labyrinthine concrete metropolises.33
Within this series of settler-custodial machinations and maneuvers, it is important to emphasize that Indian people did not passively accept the United States’ guiding hand, or iron fist, of paternalism. It is therefore also important to animate the human Indigenous prisoners who, during the 1960s, organized for prisoners’ rights and played a role alongside other subjugated peoples as producers of prisoner consciousness during the rapid expansion of the carceral state.34 As historian Robert Chase suggests, “These histories of prisoners’ rights movements reveal that there was a great legal, political, and social struggle that sought to check and challenge the construction of carceral states.”35 Alongside other disfranchised racial groups, Native American prisoners in the postwar period practiced strategies of visibility and audibility that made their bodies seen and voices heard through participation in riots, written exchanges with fellow prisoners, and public outreach events. They can be positioned within what historian Dan Berger acknowledges as a wider movement of prisoner activists who were just as determined to critique the state—in this case the settler state—as they were to demand rights within the state.36
“Dear Sir: What about us?” one Choctaw prisoner wrote to a BIA official in 1962. “For the past ten years I’ve lived the biggest part of the time behind these walls of Oklahoma State Penitentiary. I look around and see about me Indians after Indians. A few more years in this Oklahoma institution I believe will no doubt look no different from an Indian Reservation,” he predicted. “I am a first time loser. A person would think I am a criminal at heart and Soul. It’s not true. I am a Full Blood Indian … Why I am here?” Upon his upcoming release, he would have no family to rejoin—only a “suit of cheap khakies and a single ‘five dollar Bill’ to see me through until I can get any kind of job.” After requesting an opportunity to go on the urban relocation program, he outlined past struggles, including the loss of both parents during infancy. He wondered if he would be “turned loose in this land of plenty without a job, an outcast of the American so called society, later to be driven to desperation by poverty, a pauper destitute of food and back to an institution?” “I’m tired of being locked up,” he concluded. Oklahoma relocation specialist Jack Jayne cited this particular prisoner as an example of one with a bad attitude—one who needed to “prove themselves” for one year after release to be eligible for relocation. However, it is not hostility but “desperation” (to use the prisoner’s own term) that resonates loudest when reading this letter.37
As Native American people became further subjected to the carceral state, federal officials imagined that prisons could function less as spaces from which Native people would return to their Indigenous communities in rehabilitated form and more as rotaries, through which rehabilitated prisoners would spin outward toward new lives in urban metropolises. In 1967, the BIA coordinated with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to create a new $30 million parolee release program within the BIA’s blend of urban relocation programs. In October, four pilot programs took effect in Englewood, Colorado; Sandstone, Minnesota; El Reno, Oklahoma; and McNeil Island, Washington, before later expanding to several prisons in California. The idea was to send parolees and releasees to major cities where the BIA was already operating urban relocation offices and where Indian people could find steady work and a chance at a new life. To be sure, work was the central theme of the letters that poured into Commissioner of Indian Affairs Robert Bennett’s office from incarcerated Indigenous people looking for a new start. Because Bennett (Oneida) was the first Indian person to serve as commissioner of Indian affairs since 1871, Indigenous prisoners likely felt a closer connection with him and perhaps harbored elevated hope that he would be more inclined to help. Letter authors acknowledged that their situation was directly connected to employment, or the lack thereof. They understood that they were essentially positioned to fail upon release to the general population. They knew steady work was their only way out.38
Failing to appreciate the structural effects of colonization on Indian people’s lives, federal policy makers implicated reservations as the source of Indian social maladjustment. Some Native American prisoners agreed. In 1967, a Shoshone Haskell graduate imprisoned in California on credit card fraud wrote Commissioner Bennett in advance of an upcoming parole hearing: “To date, I have written 124 letters to various business concerns, employment agencies and individuals with 100% negative results. I am appealing to you as a last hope Commissioner.” Because the California penal system allowed only one sheet of paper per day, his letter continued the next: “Since being encouraged by the federal government to leave the reservation-type of life, I have experienced nothing but repetitious prison prison39 confinement.” After mentioning that there were few education and work opportunities on his Wind River reservation in Wyoming, he explained, “Being Indian, I am caught between two cultures—the white man’s and the Indian’s—at home in neither. I learned early in life to depend on the government instead of my own resources. It fed me, clothed me, housed me, and educated me.… Once at odds with the law it seemed any chance I might have had was gone.” Indeed, this was not his first time in prison. Last time out he received some oil and gas money from his tribe, but after it ran out the “vicious cycle began all over again.” If Bennett could help him secure a job in a new urban setting, the parole board would release him, and it would be “the starting point of a whole new life for me.” “I need your help Commissioner,” his letter concluded.40
Some Indian prisoners struggled to take that level of initiative—not out of comfort with their situation but because so few people were willing to help and because of an overwhelming sense that the system was designed to keep them right where they were. Rudy Cleghorn, an Otoe World War II and Korean War veteran, University of Kansas graduate, and parole counselor at Oklahoma’s El Reno Reformatory, wrote that Indians are the “least understood of all racial groups” and that he “became disgusted with listening to so many Indian stories, so much depiction of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without a contemporary significance.” He first observed among his charges attitudes of hopelessness that, upon his further reflection, were more accurately helplessness, rooted in officials’ ignorance over how to help Indian offenders. “Knowing that there is a firm wall of resistance to overcome,” he found success when he began approaching El Reno’s Indian prisoners not as individuals but as a group.41
In addition to counseling against alcoholism, Cleghorn encouraged an embrace of Indian culture as a path toward self-improvement. For example, he invited a representative from the Tulsa Pow Wow Club to visit with the El Reno prisoners. Cleghorn was confident that the Pow Wow Club could provide support for parolees who preferred to try life in Tulsa, as opposed to tribal communities where old problems, temptations, and sources of pain persisted. This must have made an impression in that the prisoner group requested permission to start their own powwow club. While the prisoners began requesting costume material from family members back home, Cleghorn sought approval for prisoner participation in an upcoming powwow in nearby Anadarko. Also, while trying to improve their own lives and future prospects, the prisoner group started a fund to sponsor a needy Indian boarding school student after reading a New York Times article that emphasized “Indian squalor in the Great Society.”42
Several Indian prisoners expressed a deep concern that a return to reservation life would only result in a return to prison. By contrast, a distant big city offered anonymity and a new start. A twenty-five-year-old Lakota man wrote U.S. representative and fellow Lakota citizen Ben Reifel (R-SD) to suggest that the “Reservation offers little, with respect to jobs, education and a worthwhile livelihood.” In a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Reifel did not disagree when he mentioned that too many young Indian men and women were landing in prison as a result of minor offenses. He was confident that the federal government could “salvage most of them.”43
While Indian parolees sought better opportunities once outside of prison, incarcerated Indian people continued fighting for improved conditions within. Throughout several western carceral institutions, this eventually manifested as a distinct brand of Indigenous prisoner consciousness. Referring to a recent visit by a BIA representative to advertise the relocation and Adult Vocational Training programs, a Flathead man imprisoned in the state penitentiary at Walla Walla, Washington, mentioned that the visit marked the first time “in all my years of confinement” that anyone had ever visited the prison to “discuss matters pertinent to we Indians.” After explaining that it was difficult from inside prison to stay abreast of social developments in the “free society,” he requested support for establishing a bimonthly program to not only discuss Indian matters with BIA representatives but also to suggest possible solutions to Indian people’s problems: “None of us are interested in continuous incarceration and welcome any aid available through the Bureau, to stay out of these institutions.”44 Likewise, in the Susanville, California, correctional center, Indian prisoners formed the Antelope Indian Circle. This group promoted “self-help attitudes” and the study of Indian culture and contemporary problems. “We are not wasting time complaining,” they wrote. “We are actively doing something positive and constructive.”45
California’s notorious San Quentin State Prison was home to perhaps the most active and activist Indigenous prisoner group. In 1969, under the banner “UNITY is the Cry!” San Quentin’s American Indian Cultural Group began pressing its own newspaper, which both was distributed to and gathered news from Indian groups in other state and federal prisons. The group published Indian prisoner poetry, disseminated information on rights and resources for paroled and released Indian people, and hosted regular visits from outside Indian activists, such as Adam Nordwall (Ojibwe) and Walter Lasley (Potawatomi). The group concerned itself with Indian cultural revitalization, too. They watched movies about Indians, listened to tape-recorded speeches by Commissioner of Indian Affairs Robert Bennett, and even gained permission to host powwows at “Saint Q.” Navajo princess Shirley Harrison, alongside over sixty visiting dancers representing over twenty Indian nations, attended a special powwow to mourn Robert Kennedy’s assassination. “Never before has the prison’s lower yard abounded with so many bright colors,” a San Quentin News reporter wrote.46
San Quentin’s Indigenous prisoner activism has persisted up to the present. During a powwow celebration and ceremony inside San Quentin in 2013, a Kumeyaay prisoner named Tony revealed how he once endured solitary confinement for refusing to cut his braids. “My braids are my prayers,” he explained, “they make me an Indian, they remind me of my home, they are my power, and I refuse to cut them.” A man not known for expressing such vulnerability, Tony could connect his experience with fellow Native American people from one hundred years prior who were forced to cut their hair in a different venue of forced confinement, that of boarding schools.47
Tony was just one example of the settler-custodial state’s larger pattern of punishing Indian prisoners with solitary confinement—“the hole”—for refusing to cut their hair, which according to most Native American cultural traditions holds special spiritual significance. In the Nebraska State Penitentiary, Indian prisoners who had been subjected to solitary confinement for refusing to cut their hair banded together and, with the legal aid of the Native American Rights Fund, won the U.S. District Court case Indian Inmates of the Nebraska Penitentiary v. Vitek (1974). This victory set precedent for the 1978 Indian Religious Freedom Act, which granted access to calumets, sweat lodges, and Sun Dances, among other spiritual objects and practices, for incarcerated Indigenous people. Because of their successful lawsuit, the Nebraska State Penitentiary Indian prisoners were also among the first to gain consent for the establishment and usage of a sacred sweat lodge in prison.48
In addition to those who fought to maintain their cultural connections within the context of confinement, some members of San Quentin’s Indigenous prisoner community experienced a cultural awakening for the first time. As one journalist put it, “For some Native Americans, San Quentin has become their first reintegration into their cultural identity throughout the years.” Indeed, for such prisoners, rehabilitation does not merely mean preparation for reintroduction to civil society; it can also mean first introduction to Indigenous community. “It’s for them to get well and to identify as human beings with something hundreds of years old, but new to them,” suggested San Quentin’s Native American chaplain and spiritual advisor, Hector Frank Heredia.49
By the end of the 1960s, as Indian prisoners continued forming activist groups and connecting or reconnecting with Indigeneity, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was outgrowing its community-focused purpose in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Before becoming the most prominent Indian activist group of the twentieth century, AIM first gained importance in 1968 as a result of its street patrol, which surveilled police officers who surveilled Indian people along Minneapolis’s Franklin Avenue. However, the movement actually began in nearby Stillwater’s Minnesota Correctional Facility, inconspicuously nestled along the idyllic St. Croix River. Within the walls of “Stillwater,” two of AIM’s principal founders, Dennis Banks (Leech Lake Ojibwe) and Clyde Bellecourt (White Earth Ojibwe),50 sought release from the pain of imprisonment through lessons in their Anishinaabe culture. As Banks recalls, Twin Cities police routinely “rounded us up like cattle and booked us on ‘drunk and disorderly’ charges.” The state then subjected Indian prisoners to “slave labor,” such as cleaning sports stadiums. Doing time was almost a “rite of passage” for Indians, Banks suggested. The prison experience and the histories of Native American people he read radicalized him and convinced him to work on behalf of his community upon release. “Sitting in that jail cell,” he wrote, “I began to understand there was a hell of a goddamn movement going on that I wasn’t part of.”51
Clyde Bellecourt experienced a similar cultural awakening inside Stillwater prison. In the midst of a hunger strike, he was on the verge of suicide when a fellow Ojibwe person, Eddie Benton, introduced him to inspirational books on Indigenous history and spirituality. Embracing his people’s religion strengthened Bellecourt’s spirit, and soon he and Benton organized a group of forty-six Indian prisoners that regularly met to discuss Indian history and culture.52
Indigenous prisoners like Banks and Bellecourt were part of a larger movement of prisoners who rallied around their cultural identities. “For Chicanos, African Americans, and American Indians,” historian Alan Gómez writes, “the violence of the prison was simply another episode in a long history of legal and extralegal injustices characterizing domestic and foreign policy during the 19th and 20th centuries.”53 Unlike some urban Chicanos incarcerated in the rural Southwest who carried Chicano radicalism with them into prison, however, these future AIM leaders first connected with, and then cultivated, Indigenous radicalism within prison. Regardless of when their respective experiences with identity politics began, both groups developed an urgent prisoner consciousness within prison walls. For incarcerated Indigenous people, in particular, increased subjection to carceral states, coupled with the devastating effects of the federal termination policy and daily challenges of federally sponsored urban living, amounted to a shared experience that transcended sovereign tribal spaces. This further contributed to a unity of purpose within shifting Indigeneities that spanned imagined geographies.54
Upon release from prison in 1968, Clyde Bellecourt found a kindred spirit in Dennis Banks, and together they, alongside other members of the Twin Cities Indian community, founded AIM. In 1969, the group found inspiration to expand into a national movement after a delegation visited the Indians of All Tribes occupation of the dilapidated and defunct Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco Bay. At Alcatraz, “Red Power” activists compared the cold, barren prison to Indian reservations that also lacked modern heat and water systems and felt like prisons where Native people suffered in isolation. As Point Ten of the Indians of All Tribes’ “Proclamation to the Great White Father” put it, “The population has always been held as prisoners and kept dependent upon others.”55
Interestingly, if prisons gave birth to AIM, they also almost destroyed the movement when, in the aftermath of the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation, numerous leaders went into prison or exile.56 Going forward, AIM remained connected to incarcerated Indigenous people. In 1980, Edward Dreamer became the first Native American prisoner to hold a title in the San Quentin Boxing League when he punched his way to the lightweight championship. He donated his trophy to AIM’s Survival School in Minneapolis as a thank you for the Christmas care packages students sent to Indian prisoners in San Quentin.57
When locating the roots and historical contours of Red Power, then, we might consider not only Indian college students and disillusioned urban relocatees but also Indigenous people who were most severely bound up in the settler state. Just as historian Dan Berger emphasizes spaces of black incarceration as an important site of the black freedom struggle while elevating black prison activists whom the wider movement took for granted, the origins of AIM and the efforts of incarcerated Indigenous people show us a deeper, relatively invisible, dimension of the 1960s to 1970s Red Power movements.58
Indigenous prisoners of the carceral state were producers, and not mere products, of a nationally emerging prisoner political consciousness that transcended racial, ethnic, and geographic boundaries. Moreover, just as postwar Indian urbanization and the subsequent Indian anti-urban critique connected Indigenous peoples to both each other and the wider American urban crisis, mass incarceration chained young Native people to the wider growth of the racialized custodial state. Thinking of historian Paul Rosier’s work, such experiences further animated the “American” half of the American Indian identity. Yet the Indian half of that designation, too, gained new gravity and meaning during the 1960s. This was more than an effect of Alcatraz and AIM. It was also more than a consequence of the failures of urban relocation and cultural mainstreaming. Many incarcerated Native people came from reservations and first developed an appreciation for Indian culture while inside prison. Effectively, Indian prison groups played an important role in an expansive Indigenous cultural renaissance that encouraged Native pride.59 Summarizing the 1960s and 1970s prisoners’ rights movements writ large, Alan Gómez writes, “The prison rebellion years were not simply flashpoints; they were the result of shared experiences and the creation of political projects and organizing initiatives; they were not only part of the larger social movements circulating around the country and globe, they constituted an important element of anti-colonial struggles that in turn created a revolutionary praxis and politics of dignity and freedom; a political positioning grounded in the everyday experiences of violent technologies of state control, and the creativity freed when refusing to conform or be broken.”60
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Incarcerated Indigenous peoples, whether prisoners of war or prisoners of the settler-custodial state, actively worked to resist and overcome their conditions, often through correspondence campaigns with people on the outside or other people on the inside. The Dakota prisoners of war wrote over 150 letters to people in positions of power. Prisoners of the Cold War custodial state wrote to both powerful people on the outside, such as Commissioner of Indian Affairs Robert Bennett, and subjugated people on the inside, such as fellow Indian prisoners at other prisons. Prison experiences for many Native people amounted to a shared experience across tribal lines as the 1960s and 1970s Red Power generation’s cultural identity took shape. This new generation of Red Power activists might have connected their experiences in custodial confinement with nineteenth-century prisoners of war and confined subjects of reservations and boarding schools. So, while subjection to rising mass incarceration unmade their potential for first-class citizenship within the United States body politic, it made or remade their potential for demanding human and political rights as people of sovereign nations.
It is worth noting that the modern American carceral state most discernibly and forcefully manifested during the 1960s. This was precisely a time when Indian nations and various activist groups vocally refused to cede any more land and resources and most discernibly and forcefully began demanding self-determination as an overarching policy initiative and asserting sovereignty as their primary goal and political framework. But if Native people refused to fully embrace United States citizenship and the settler state’s ongoing efforts at coercive cultural conditioning, then the settler state could make them go away not only through (un)employment in cities but also through employment of and within prisons. To be sure, by the 1960s, the United States had already demonstrated a long history of appealing to confinement as a means to stop Indian people from being Indian and to compel them to get with the settler program.61
While Native American people clearly belong in discussions on the disproportionate number of minority groups subjected to mass incarceration, their inclusion carries special meaning. Lengthy prison sentences for nonviolent crimes do more than just preserve Native American people’s subordinate position within the United States’ racial hierarchy; they also prevent them from remaining on their land, which, Patrick Wolfe reasons, is the most practical and powerful way to thwart the advancement of settler colonialism. As Wolfe explains, after colonized and enslaved African American people outlived their utility and achieved release from bondage during and after the Civil War, the settler society, determined to solve its “negro problem,” appealed to the repertoire of strategies it learned while attempting to solve its “Indian problem,” most notably spatial sequestration.62 There is no starker and more explicit form of spatial sequestration than prison confinement. And perhaps there is no more meaningful link between the historical incarceration of black lives and the historical legacy of Indigenous military defeat, dispossession, and removal in the United States.63 Ultimately, connecting incarcerated Indigenous peoples to their histories first as foreign prisoners of war and then as citizen prisoners of the carceral state(s) facilitates a deeper understanding of how settler colonialism has functioned in Indian Country and beyond and how vast the scale, effect, and meaning of mass incarceration has grown.
Yet, illuminating such connections is worth something more than that—something a bit less academic. According to Navajo Nation Chief Justice Emeritus Robert Yazzie, true justice “rejects the process of convicting a person and throwing the keys away in favor of methods that use solidarity to restore good relationships among people. Most importantly, it restores good relations with self.”64 Indeed, the good self cannot function, let alone thrive, in isolation. Rather, it is made by its relationships—to land, to family, to clan, to community, to nation, to humankind. Shared histories of confinement and trauma connect contemporary Indigenous prisoners with their ancestral communities, while imbuing their efforts at survivance with deeper purpose and meaning. Such connections produce the antithesis of incarceration, isolation, and invisibility. Regardless of its myriad manifestations across space and time, incarceration begins with separating individuals from their communities. By telling these stories, we can reconnect incarcerated Indigenous people’s human legacies, if not their human bodies, with their communities.
Notes
1. “Rioters Tell Newsmen Causes for Outbreak at State Prison,” Daily Oklahoman, July 29, 1973, 4; Les Brooks, “McAlester Prison Riot,” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=MC002. On the unconstitutional conditions of confinement at McAlester, see the Federal District Court Case Battle v. Anderson (1974), Eastern District, Oklahoma, docket number 72–95.
2. Clyta Foster Harris, “A History of the Oklahoma Prison System, 1967–1983” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1985), 2.
3. A majority of Indigenous prisoners at McAlester suffered from “alcoholism, severe cultural shock, or economic and social demoralization.” See R. D. Folsom, “American Indians Imprisoned in the Oklahoma Penitentiary: ‘A Punishment More Primitive than Torture,’ ” American Indian Law Review 2, no. 1 (Summer 1974): 85.
4. “Top AIM Leader Says He Endorses McAlester Prison Riot,” Daily Oklahoman, July 30, 1973, 5.
5. Walter Echo-Hawk, Study of Native American Prisoner Issues, a Native American Rights Fund study prepared for the National Indian Policy Center, George Washington University (Washington, DC, 1996); Marcus Henderson, “Native Americans Are Overlooked in Mass Incarceration,” San Quentin News, August 10, 2016, https://
6. Philip M. Klasky, “Bringing back the Drums: Native American Inmates at San Quentin Prison Revive Their Cultural and Spiritual Traditions,” News from Native California 27, no. 2 (Winter 2013), http://
7. United States Sentencing Commission, “Quick Facts: Native Americans in the Federal Offender Population.”
8. A focus on Indian prison labor adds complexity to the important Indian land and black labor dimension of how we explain the expansion of the American state and eventually empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For an excellent study that turns the Indian land and black labor dynamic on its head, see N. D. B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
9. Elizabeth S. Grobsmith, Indians in Prison: Incarcerated Native Americans in Nebraska (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 31.
10. “American Indians Killed by Cops at Highest Rate in the Nation, but They’re Invisible in the Media,” Daily Kos, October 21, 2016, http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/21/1585414/-American-Indians-killed-by-cops-at-highest-rate-in-the-nation-but-they-re-invisible-in-the-media?detail=facebook; “Rights Panel to Look into ‘Border Town Discrimination,’ ” Last Best News, August 20, 2016, http://
11. Here I am gesturing to Heather Ann Thompson’s watershed article, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97 (December 2010): 703–34.
12. Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 197. According to Patrick Wolfe, settler colonialism generally advances according to a logic of replacement that erases Indigenous peoples from the land and replaces them with settlers. See Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409. For an excellent and innovative study on the criminalization and incarceration of Indigenous women, see Salish sociologist Luana Ross’s Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).
13. Here I intend a play on “settler colonialism” and the primary definition of “custodial,” which refers not to parental responsibility (although that definition carries some meaning here) but to imprisonment. My agenda is to bring carceral states into discussions on settler colonialism in Indian Country and to bring Indigenous peoples into histories of carceral states.
14. On historiographic debates concerning the origins of the United States’ mass incarceration crisis, see Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 283n31.
15. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998). See also Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). On how New Englanders would go on to literally write Indians out of existence in New England histories, see Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
16. Echo-Hawk, Study of Native American Prisoner Issues, 4.
17. On the legal loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, see Michele Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).
18. The Dakota Prisoners of War Letters, trans. Clifford Canku and Michael Simon (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013), xi–xiii.
19. Davenport Public Library, “The Two Sides of Camp McClellan,” http://
20. Dakota Prisoners of War Letters, xiv.
21. The Dakota Prisoners, 9.
22. The Dakota Prisoners, 39–40.
23. The Dakota Prisoners, 129.
24. Regardless of land claims, the modern American state, as the geopolitical entity we imagine today, was not fully formed prior to its military conquest of sovereign Indian nations in the trans-Mississippi West. Interview with Lee Emerson (Quechan/Mojave—Quechan tribal historian), 1974/1977, in Clifford E. Trafzer, ed., Quechan Indian Voices (Riverside: California Center for Native Nations, 2012). On the negative discursive power of social, cultural, political, and economic expectations for Native people during the turn of the century, see Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). On boarding schools’ custodial characteristics, see Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).
25. In Fear-Segal’s analysis, Carlisle exercised power according to Jeremy Bentham’s proposed panopticon model, which Michel Foucault discusses at length in his classic work Discipline and Punish. “To experience the demanded inner transformation, Indian students, like prisoners, were required to participate in the process of their own correction and consciously reject their previous lifestyle and behavior,” Fear-Segal writes. See “The Man on the Bandstand at Carlisle Indian Industrial School,” in Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences, ed. Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 101–2, 109.
26. On boarding schools, see Child, Boarding School Seasons; K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Kevin Whalen, Native Students at Work: American Indian Labor and Sherman Institute’s Outing Program, 1900–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016); and John R. Gram, Education at the Edge of Empire: Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexico’s Indian Boarding Schools (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015).
27. Anthropologist Thomas Biolsi explains how, during the establishment of the reservation system, federal bureaucrats seeking to expand the state apparatus relied on four administrative processes that reflect the Foucauldian concept of “subjection”: empropertiment, determination of “competence,” blood quanta registration, and genealogy documentation. Through a process of surveillance and coercion, federal administrators undermined tribal kinship units and instead molded Lakota people into knowable and legible “modern” individuals. Biolsi ultimately sees this as amounting to a centripetal shift in which Native people who formerly benefited from specialized, relatively powerful roles on the nation’s periphery became caught in the gravitational pull of the nation’s socioeconomic core. In a more cynical interpretation, Biolsi argues that to consider this a “civilization” project is to overstate its ambition. Rather, he asserts that federal policy makers’ goals had more to do with individualizing Indian people in order to prepare them not for eventual, meaningful citizenship but rather to prepare them for limited, predetermined participation in metropolitan capitalism. The title of his article on this subject is most certainly a nod to Michel Foucault’s “birth of the clinic” and “birth of the prison” analyses. See Thomas Biolsi, “The Birth of the Reservation: Making the Modern Individual among the Lakota,” American Ethnologist 22, no. 1 (February 1995): 28–53.
28. Robert H. White, Tribal Assets: The Rebirth of Native America (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 3.
29. Frederick Hoxie, “From Prison to Homeland: The Cheyenne River Reservation before World War I,” in The Plains Indians of the Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Iverson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 55–75.
30. Francis E. Leupp, The Indian and His Problem (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 221–23.
31. See Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
32. “Michigan Indians and the Indian Service—Annual Report, Indian Field Service, Michigan Area,” April 30, 1942, William Zimmerman Office Files, box 2, folder “Misc II,” RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter NARA). On the Hiawatha Insane Asylum, also known as the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, see Carla Joinson, Vanished in Hiawatha: The Story of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016).
33. On the urban relocation program, see Douglas K. Miller, Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); and Nicolas G. Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration & Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
34. On the emergence and contours of prisoner consciousness and prisoners’ rights movements, see Berger, Captive Nation; Robert T. Chase, “We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 73–86; and Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Pantheon, 2016). Thompson also explains how state surveillance led to the criminalization of urban space, while police became the principal representatives of the state in impoverished and racialized communities. See Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters,” 708.
35. Chase calls for “returning the focus to the prisoners and by chronicling the prisoners’ rights movement through the lens of prisoner-initiated civil rights complaints and social protest.” See “We Are Not Slaves,” 75, 86.
36. Berger suggests that, “As prison rebellions informed one another, they became woven into the larger fabric of the era’s radicalism,” Captive Nation, 3–6.
37. Letter from Oklahoma State Penitentiary prisoner, March 24, 1962, RG75 Records Relating to Employment Assistance Programs, compiled 1949–1973, box 10, folder: Penitentiaries and Parolees, State, NARA.
38. Department of Interior News Release, October 17, 1967, and Acting Chief Branch of Employ Assist. Joseph Gaulthier memo, January 24, 1967, RG75 Records Relating to Employment Assistance Programs, compiled 1949–1973, box 169, folder: Parolee Release Program: General Part 1, NARA.
39. I interpret the repeated use of “prison” as a pun.
40. Shoshone Prisoner to Robert Bennett, April 6–7, 1967, RG75 Records Relating to Employment Assistance Programs, compiled 1949–1973, box 10, folder: Penitentiaries and Parolees, State, NARA.
41. “Indian Group Meetings,” Cleghorn to AE Pontesso, El Reno Prison Warden, August 1, 1966, RG75 Records Relating to Employment Assistance Programs, compiled 1949–1973, box 10, folder: Penitentiaries and Parolees, State, NARA; Cleghorn Obituary, El Reno Tribune, October 7, 2007.
42. “Indian Group Meetings,” Cleghorn to AE Pontesso, El Reno Prison Warden, August 1, 1966.
43. Incarcerated Lakota person to Benjamin Reifel, February 7, 1964, and Reifel to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, March 23, 1964, RG75 Records Relating to Employment Assistance Programs, compiled 1949–1973, box 10, folder: Penitentiaries and Parolees, State, NARA.
44. Incarcerated Flathead person to William Finale (Acting Assistant Commissioner of Indian Affairs), June 22, 1968, RG75 Records Relating to Employment Assistance Programs, compiled 1949–1973, box 169, folder: Parolee Release Program: General Part 1, NARA.
45. San Quentin American Indian Cultural Group Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 2 (1969), RG75 Records Relating to Employment Assistance Programs, compiled 1949–1973, box 169, folder: Calif. Prison Program, NARA.
46. San Quentin American Indian Cultural Group Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 1 (December 1968), RG75 Records Relating to Employment Assistance Programs, compiled 1949–1973, box 169, folder: Calif. Prison Program, NARA.
47. Klasky, “Bringing back the Drums.” As of March 2017, San Quentin confined over two hundred Native American prisoners, with over a dozen sitting on death row. See Marcus Henderson, “Native Americans’ Fifty Years of Struggle,” San Quentin News, March 27, 2017, http://
48. Elizabeth S. Grobsmith, “The Impact of Litigation on the Religious Revitalization of Native American Inmates in the Nebraska Department of Corrections,” Plains Anthropologist 34, no, 124 (May 1989): 136. According to a study by the Navajo Nation Corrections Project, recidivism among American Indians is dramatically reduced by participation in traditional religious ceremonies. See Klasky, “Bringing back the Drums.”
49. Henderson, “Native Americans’ Fifty Years of Struggle.”
50. In 1975, the state of South Dakota charged and convicted Dennis Banks of assault with a deadly weapon and rioting for his role in organizing American Indian Movement protestors against police brutality during a 1973 confrontation with police in Custer, South Dakota.
Convicted with a possible fifteen year sentence, Banks fled to California while on bail. Once in California, Governor Jerry Brown provided him asylum after the governor received a petition with 1.4 million signatures stating that Bank’s life might be in danger if he were to return to custody. For the next nine years, Banks remained in exile, first in California, under Governor Brown’s protection, and then the Onondaga Nation provided him sanctuary in New York. With the 1982 election of George Deukejian as governor, Banks lost his California sanctuary, but he found protection on the Onandaga reservation near Syracuse. Within a year, however, Banks voluntarily returned to South Dakota where he received a three year sentence. For his politicization, Banks found himself entangled with the criminal justice system throughout his life. He was bound up in intentionally protracted court cases in 1974–1975, in exile from 1975–1984, and then incarcerated for eighteen months. Prior to this, Banks was imprisoned in Stillwater, Minnesota, for just under three years, beginning in 1966, for a grocery store burglary.
Clyde Bellecourt essentially grew up in detention centers in Minnesota during the mid-1960s for numerous burglary charges, and eventually ended up in Stillwater State Prison, until his release in 1968. He was imprisoned again in the mid-1980s on drug charges.
51. Dennis Banks, with Richard Erdoes, Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 59–60; Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press), 129. According to Nicolas G. Rosenthal, AIM formed to draw attention to police brutality, but in some places association with the Red Power movement resulted in more police brutality at the hands of retaliatory police officers. See Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country, 85–86. Indigenous prisoners who condemned prison “slave labor” fit within Robert Chase’s study on prisoners during the 1980s and 1990s who argued that prisoners are not slaves. See Chase, “We Are Not Slaves,” 85. In a parallel example, Edward J. Escobar discusses how fraught interactions between Mexican American citizens and the Los Angeles Police Department contributed to a Mexican American political identity. See Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
52. Clyde Bellecourt, interview with author, 2006. Digital recording in author’s possession.
53. Alan Eladio Gómez, “ ‘Nuestras Vidas Corren Casi Paralelas’: Chicanos, Independentistas, and the Prison Rebellions in Leavenworth, 1969–1972,” Latino Studies 6 (2008): 69.
54. On Chicano prisoner radicalism, see Robert T. Chase, “Cell Taught, Self Taught: The Chicano Movement behind Bars—Urban Chicanos, Rural Prisons, and the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 5 (2015): 836–61; and Gómez, “ ‘Nuestras Vidas Corren Casi Paralelas,’ ” 64–96. On the concept of imagined geographies, see Thomas Biolsi, “Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space, and American Indian Struggle,” American Ethnologist 32, no. 2 (May 2005): 239–59. Historian Dan Berger emphasizes mutual ideological and strategic influence and exchange between prisoner rights advocates outside of prisons and activist prisoners within. See Captive Nation, 93.
55. “The Alcatraz Proclamation: To the Great White Father and His People,” in Dissent in America: The Voices that Shaped a Nation (New York: Pearson, 2006), 665–66.
56. Mike Mosedale, “Bury My Heart,” City Pages, February 16, 2000, http://
57. Henderson, “Native Americans’ Fifty Years of Struggle.”
58. Dan Berger discusses how the Nation of Islam advocated freedom of religious worship and practice for black Muslim prisoners, including pork-free diets, east-facing cells, and exemption from vaccinations. See Berger, Captive Nation, 58. On prisoner religious rights, see also Toussaint Losier, “… ‘For Strictly Religious Reason[s]’: Cooper v. Pate and the Origins of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” Souls 15, no. 1–2 (2013): 19–38.
59. On the postwar anti-urban critique, see Steven Conn, Americans against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Paul C. Rosier emphasizes how the effects of United States citizenship fundamentally changed Native people’s relationship to the federal state as they increasingly factored into the wider experiences of the American body politic. See Rosier, Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). On Indian participation in the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, see Daniel M. Cobb, Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).
60. Gómez, “ ‘Nuestras Vidas Corren Casi Paralelas,’ ” 88.
61. On Native American activists’ movements for treaty rights, sovereignty, and self-determination, see Cobb, Native Activism in Cold War America.
62. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 404.
63. The centuries-long erasure of Indian people from their land made possible the twentieth-century suburban sprawl that allowed “white flight” away from black Americans who dared to occupy urban space alongside white Americans.
64. Henderson, “Native Americans Are Overlooked in Mass Incarceration.”