“Within This Architecture of Oppression, We Are a Vibrant Community”: Indigenous Prairie Prisoner Organizing During Covid-19
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Within an anti-colonial abolitionist framework, Nancy Van Styvendale examines the three hunger strikes that took place in Saskatchewan jails during 2020-2021. She uses two analytics— refusal and relational accountability — to elucidate how Indigenous Prairie prisoner organizing during covid-19 functioned both to refuse the lethal violence of the system and to enact Indigenous laws of relational accountability, thus articulating an anti-colonial abolitionist vision of a world beyond prisons.
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Contributors
Nancy Van Styvendale
Nancy Van Styvendale is a white settler scholar, associate professor, and associate dean (Research) in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. She is director of the newly established Indigenous Prison Arts & Education Project (ipaep) in the Faculty of Native Studies and the co-founder and coordinator of Inspired Minds, a creative writing program for incarcerated people in Saskatchewan and Alberta. She is member of Free Lands Free Peoples, an Indigenous-led, anticolonial penal abolition group focused on public education and prisoner justice organizing in the Prairies. She does community-engaged researchin the field of Indigenous literatures, with particular commitments to Indigenous prison writing, penal abolition, arts-based programs in prison and community-engaged/community-based education.
