The University of Arizona Press

June 18, 2024

Colonial oppression, systemic racism, discrimination, and poor access to a wide range of resources detract from Indigenous health and contribute to continuing health inequities and injustices. These factors have led to structural inadequacies that contribute to circular challenges such as chronic underfunding, understaffing, and culturally insensitive health-care provision. Nevertheless, Indigenous Peoples are working actively to end such legacies.

In Indigenous Health and Justice, edited by Karen Jarratt-Snider and Marianne O. Nielsen, contributors demonstrate how Indigenous Peoples, individuals, and communities create their own solutions. Chapters focus on both the challenges created by the legacy of settler colonialism and the solutions, strengths, and resilience of Indigenous Peoples and communities in responding to these challenges. It introduces a range of examples, such as the ways in which communities use traditional knowledge and foodways to address health disparities. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter “Indigenous Peoples’ Involvement in the U.S. Justice System, Trends, Health Impacts, and Health Disparities” below.

To more fully grasp the significance of strides made in recent decades to introduce Indigenous cultural and spiritual practices into correctional facilities, these practices must be understood within the context of colonialism. The Indigenous experience with settler-colonial states through systemic means of oppression is a long one. Countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia have historically passed and upheld national and state or provincial laws aimed at dismantling Indigenous cultural identities and traditions through religious suppression—instituting bans on practices and rites expressive of Indigenous spirituality, obstructing access to sacred sites, and outlawing possession of ceremonial objects such as peyote and sacred pipes (Irwin 2006).

Attempting to simplify Indigenous religious beliefs and practices for generalizable consumption is a daunting and nearly impossible task. Generally, most Indigenous Peoples around the world view their everyday cultural ways of being and living as being spiritually purposeful and significant. Hence, culture and spirituality (or religious practice) are inextricably connected because one structures the other. Unlike Euro-Western notions of religion, which impose a separation between God and the world we exist in, Indigenous spirituality and religious orientations see a Creator or multiple sacred deities as a part of the world. This difference in the perception of religion and the human relationship to the “holy” is but one aspect of the Othering process employed by Westerners to cast Indigenous Peoples as primitive, ahistorical, unsophisticated, uncivilized, unstable, and savage nonhumans. This was a means to justify colonial tactics of genocide (e.g., subjugation of Indigenous Peoples, atrocious acts of violence, removal from homelands, and cultural assimilation) that were employed in order to lay claim to Indigenous land and natural resources for the establishment of settler-colonial expansion, wealth, and prosperity (Nielsen and Robyn 2019).

Indigenous individuals have only been granted U.S. citizenship within the last century through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which also conferred the right to vote. After that, it took another half century before all Native citizens were afforded protection of the right to practice their religious, spiritual, and cultural beliefs, with the 1978 passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA). Between 1993 and 2000, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) were passed to increase these protections. Regarding RFRA and RLUIPA, a guidance document produced by the Native American Rights Fund (2016) and intended for Indigenous people in correctional facilities explains, “Both statutes prevent the government from substantially burdening [an inmate’s] religious practice unless it has a compelling reason to do so in [the inmate’s] particular case,” and that prisons may only burden or hinder religious practices if they have “no other, less restrictive alternatives available.” Admittedly, this is a very condensed presentation of some of the historical strides made by the U.S. government to suppress and then protect and preserve Indigenous traditional religious beliefs and practices, but this contextual information is pertinent for understanding the advances made from the 1960s forward.

The 1960s and 1970s marked a social movement in the United States that was pushing for the right of Indigenous individuals who were incarcerated to exercise their Native religious practices. In the early 1960s, Clyde Bellecourt, an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) man, met a young Anishinaabe spiritual leader named Eddie Benton-Banai when they were both serving time in Minnesota’s Stillwater prison (Reha 2001). Bellecourt and Benton-Banai, known for their founding roles in the American Indian Movement, formed the American Indian Folklore Group while incarcerated, to help incarcerated Indigenous people heal by learning about Native history, epistemologies, culture, and spirituality through pan-Indian frameworks (Tighe 2014). Tighe (2014, 5) describes this effort as a “model for Indian cultural renaissance within prisons.” Bellecourt affirms that ceremonies are an integral component of the healing process that can support individuals involved in the criminal justice system to make positive changes in their lives, and credits how establishing a spiritual base in his own life helped him to overcome his battle with alcoholism (Reha 2001).

With the aid of the Native American Rights Fund, one of the oldest and largest legal organizations committed to defending the legal rights of Indigenous people and nations, Indigenous individuals incarcerated in Nebraska won a federal court consent decree in Wolff v. McDonnell (1974), which allowed them to practice their religious and cultural beliefs in prison. This opened the way in Nebraska for sweat lodges to be conducted, Native clubs and spiritual collectives to be formed, and elders to serve as spiritual advisors and cultural-based counselors inside correctional facilities (Irwin 2006). Irwin (2006, 42) notes that the consent decree “established an important precedent for native prisoners in other states.”

Traction on this issue continued to grow in other parts of the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Incarcerated Indigenous people were increasingly bringing suits against prison administrators for denying their rights to religious freedom. In the Southwest, the Navajo Nation appointed a Navajo spiritual advisor who eventually was conducting ceremonies in nineteen prisons throughout the region (Echo-Hawk 1996). Incarcerated Indigenous women formed a spiritual organization within a Montana state prison in the early 1990s and perceived their unification as threatening to prison staff (Ross 1998). As a way of weakening the close bonds formed through the organization, the women felt staff strategically targeted Indigenous women who were labeled as “troublemakers” and then written up for “trumped-up charges” (Ross 1998, 243) which resulted in their transfer to a maximum-security facility. White women incarcerated in prison interviewed by Ross also noticed the same pattern, identifying it as “prejudiced” practice (265). At that time, Indigenous women made up 25 percent of the prison population while making up 6 percent of the Montana state population. In addition to the institutional discrimination experienced by incarcerated Indigenous women, Ross (278) notes the direct racist remarks about “Indians” and “Indian culture” made by prison staff and incarcerated white individuals to her and incarcerated Indigenous individual. By the time RFRA was passed in 1993, a large number of successful suits were being filed by Indigenous individuals incarcerated in prison, who were protesting infringement of their religious and spiritual needs and advocating for the right to bring traditional tobacco pipe and sweat lodge ceremonies into the prison complex (Irwin 2006).