From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing

Introduction

What Is Carceral Writing? In a “small, juvenile female cage” with “green cement floor, faded yellow cement walls and ceiling,” Yvonne Johnson surveys her prison cell from a thin plastic mattress (Wiebe and Johnson 368). She is awaiting a jury’s verdict in a North Battleford prison after providing testimony against her brother for rape. As she observes her surroundings, she notes the names of its past occupants inscribed around her. The markings rise out from their illicit spaces and begin to speak a history: “Their names are everywhere , scratched, cut deep into the bunks, the yellow walls. Relatives I recognize from storytelling, or a chance meeting, family friends whom I may have met once on Red Pheasant. If I worked at it, my name here would be recognized as a Johnson of the John Bear family” (368). As she pieces together a history from these scrawlings, she laments, “Sad … to search prison walls for news of one’s own people; to become like an archaeologist trying to read the stones of tombs about the lives of your own ancient dead” (368). The names left behind are a record, a proxy history of intersecting lives and lost kinships. That Johnson, who spent most of her life in Butte, Montana, recognizes the names scratched into a North Battleford prison wall underscores the prevalent role that penal and regulatory institutions have played in the recent histories of Aboriginal people. Gesturing toward a 1 Introduction powerful oral history, Johnson’s recognition also indicates a collective awareness and memory that exist independently of the written form. As would seem fitting, the prison walls have become a medium for this history , a narrative that emerges from the undersides of bunks. The markings signify a counter-discourse, a quiet and intractable conversation carried out among this structure’s occupants. As this passage from Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe’s Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman suggests, the prison is not just an apparatus of detention and punishment, but a structure signifying the colonization, criminalization, and suppression of a people. The personal histories of indigenous people in Canada are so heavily entangled in carceral institutions that it is difficult to discuss the former without the latter. This relationship is starkly reflected in the staggering numbers of Aboriginal inmates. In Canada, Aboriginal people constitute the largest incarcerated minority in federal, provincial, and territorial correctional facilities. While they make up roughly 3 percent of the general population, they account for 18 percent of the federal prison population (Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator 11). This disproportion is far greater in the Prairie provinces and Ontario, where Aboriginal prison populations are seven to ten times greater than the provincial average (Statistics Canada 16). The prologue to this overrepresentation is the political and economic disempowerment of Aboriginal groups. The disproportionate rate of incarceration is thus emblematic of the historically fraught relationship between First Nations people and the state. With its parallel, insidious presence in the recent histories of Aboriginal people, the residential school has also been likened to a prison. These institutions played a regulatory and punitive function that instilled a similar sense of cultural guilt. While their intrusion into the lives of their occupants was not the result of individual violations of the Criminal Code, their operations resembled those of prisons. Children entering residential schools were typically stripped of their personal effects, clothed in uniforms , and renamed or assigned numbers. These practices instilled institutional order and docility in the occupants and at the same time effaced their prior identity. Both the residential school and the prison used surveillance as a means of control. In his memoir Indian School Days, Anishnabe author Basil Johnston describes being under constant watch: The eyes began their surveillance in the morning, watching the washing of hands and faces. The eyes followed all movements in the dressing of the beds; the eyes were transfixed on the backs of worshippers during mass. Throughout the day the eyes traced the motions of hands at table; the eyes glared at the figures bent and coiled in work; the eyes 2 • Introduction tracked […] the movement of feet during play; […] the eyes censored letters received and letters written. The eyes, like those of the wolf, peered in the dark in watch over still, sleeping forms. The eyes were never at rest. (138) Even the most private activities, such as bathing and sleeping, Johnston reveals, were subject to...