Care, Coloniality, and Indigeneity in Saskatchewan’s Carceral-Corrections Industry

This dissertation examines the way people care for one another within the context of incarceration, specifically in Saskatchewan, where the overwhelming majority of prisoners in provincial correctional facilities are Indigenous and staff are predominantly white, and where there is an assemblage of carceral-correctional institutions – a carceral-corrections industry – that has historically operated to facilitate settler-colonial expansion through sequestering Indigenous people and subjecting them to techniques and technologies geared toward reformation (aka “correction”). Drawing on twenty-two months of fieldwork, including participant observation in public forums, court rooms, and academic/industry conferences, archival research, and interviews with formerly incarcerated people and correctional staff, this dissertation attends to relations of care between and among those caught up in the carceral- corrections industry, either via conflict with the criminal justice system or through employment within it – what I term here “carceral care”. In so doing, it moves beyond monolithic representations of the settler state, focusing on the people who animate and mediate it, the roles they assume, the discourses they employ, their day-to-day practices, and the meaning they make of all this. This unsettles structural analyses of Indigenous over-incarceration and highlights thepersistence of both coloniality and Indigeneity, locating the agency of Indigenous political and social actors – including prisoners – within an industry geared toward undermining Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and wellbeing (both collective and individual). The reality of caring relations within institutions of confinement – which are animated equally by the impetus to cage and punish (carceral) and the commitment to rehabilitate (corrections) – is not a straightforward story of oppression and resistance, of staff versus prisoners, of settler versus Indigenous peoples. This dissertation is my attempt to honour and account for the varied, complex, and emergent forms of carceral care – to document instances of care-as-violence, acts and relations that save, support, and sustain, and all that lies between. Caring relations between and among prisoners and staff are simultaneously marked by paternalism, maternalism, racism, loathing, dehumanization, and fear of contagion as well as empathy, humour, respect, and reciprocity. They evidence lines of fracture, failure, multiplicity, ambivalence, and, crucially, illuminate possibilities of life beyond settler-coloniality.

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