Settler Colonialism and Carceral Gendered Violence


Danielle Bird, University of Saskatchewan

Academic research. government reports, and commissions of inquiry reveal that Indigenous people are incarcerated at higher rates than their non-Indigenous counterparts (Office of the Correctional Investigator 2023) and underscore that Indigenous Peoples are more likely to be victims of violent crime and are subjected to increasing levels of interpersonal violence (Rizkalla et al., 2021; MMIWG-FFADA 2019). The ongoing recognition of Indigenous peoples’ incarceration has resulted in a cannon of literature that provides a diverse range of perspectives that link Canada’s racist practices and policies, including the effects of residential schools, to individual pathologies (e.g. intergenerational and/or historical trauma) which are considered conducive to criminalization (RCAP 1996; TRC 2015; MMIWG-FFADA 2019). These types of explanations for Indigenous incarceration are not surprising given how the “neoliberal punitive doxa” has infiltrated every aspect of settler colonial states, resulting in the wide-spread criminalization of the poor (Wacquant 2009). However, such explanations have yet to unsettle inherently flawed foundation from which the criminal justice system in Canada continues to operate (Cunneen and Tauri 2019) and fails to interrogate the role that settler colonialism plays in Indigenous peoples socio-economic marginalization in the state building projects that require securing access to Indigenous lands (Nichols 2014; Stark 2016; Blagg and Anthony 2019). This paper draws up critical Indigenous feminisms (Nickel and Snyder 2019) which acknowledge that race, class, gender, and heteronormative patriarchy within the context of settler colonialism, informs the criminological discourses and the ongoing hyper-incarceration of Indigenous women in settler colonial Canada (McGuire and Murdoch 2021). However, this paper extends this analyses and argues that colonial gendered violence is also imperative in providing nuanced understandings of the continuity of Indigenous men’s victimization, criminalization, and hyper-incarceration in settler colonial Canada. I suggest that the discipline of criminology must reckon with issues of gender, sexuality, and white heteronormative patriarchy as they relate to Indigenous men’s criminalization. I also acknowledge the internal polemics within Indigenous feminist scholarship and suggest that Indigenous feminisms must also strive to consider the ongoing “un-gendering” of Indigenous men and critically engage with the idea that colonial gendered violence is an often overlooked aspect in the hyper-incarceration of Indigenous men. This paper aligns with the conference theme “Challenging Hate: Sustaining shared futures” and asks the social collective to consider the what our communities can look like when we reprioritize relationships in a way that does not overlook the real work that must take place to attain anti-colonial Indigenous futurisms.

This paper will be presented at the following session: