The Politics of Confinement: Indigenous Homelands, Carceral Imperialism, and the Making of the Deep North

Abstract

This dissertation examines Indigenous and settler-colonial geographies and politics, and their relationship to processes of incarceration and other forms of confinement. Anchored in Očhéthi Šakówiŋ history, it examines carceral state formation within a broader analysis of sites that promoted Indigenous geographic and bodily confinement by the U.S. and Canadian settler states during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These sites included military forts and jails, reservations and reserves, and boarding and residential schools. The geographic area of the study is a place Indigenous peoples call the Deep North, a cross-border region comprised of hundreds of Indigenous homelands, four U.S. states (Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota), and three Canadian provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba). This region has the highest rates of Indigenous incarceration on the continent. Using historical and critical methodologies, this project demonstrates that while incarceration of Indigenous peoples in North America resembles the incarceration of other minoritized peoples, it has a distinct historical genealogy that can be traced to coercive colonial practices designed to eliminate Indigenous lifeways, knowledge systems, and tribal identification to dispossess Indigenous lands.