“We want action now”: Indigenous Spirituality, Prison Activism, and Social Movement Mobilization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In mid-March 1983, two Indigenous men began a spiritual fast at Kent prison near Agassiz, British Columbia, protesting the prison’s unwillingness to provide access to significant spiritual items. Soon, other outside communities including legal teams, Indigenous women’s organizations, prison justice advocates, feminists, and anarchists got involved as well. Using the Kent incident in 1983 as a launch point, this article considers how and why Indigenous spirituality became such a significant factor in shaping prison activism in these years. We suggest that Indigenous spirituality had the power to draw together and focus a wide range of political activism rooted in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. What happened at Kent was a continuation of social movement activism that stretched back to the 1960s. Understanding those connections not only explains why the events took place at Kent as they did, but also helps to bring into focus a wider cast of characters who were involved in furthering activism around Indigenous spirituality. Abstract: À la mi-mars 1983, deux hommes autochtones ont entamé un jeûne spirituel à la prison de Kent, située près d’Agassiz en Colombie-Britannique, en guise de protestation contre le refus de la prison de leur donner accès à des objets importants liés à leur spiritualité. Rapidement, des communautés externes, y compris des équipes juridiques, des organismes de femmes autochtones, des défenseurs de la justice carcérale, des féministes et des anarchistes se sont également mobilisés. En utilisant l’incident de Kent en 1983 comme un catalyseur, cet article examine comment et pourquoi la spiritualité des Autochtones est devenue un facteur si déterminant de l’activisme carcéral au cours de ces années. Nous soutenons qu’elle avait la capacité de rassembler et de canaliser un large éventail d’activismes politiques issus des communautés autochtones et non autochtones. Les événements survenus à Kent s’inscrivent ainsi dans la continuité de l’activisme lié aux mouvements sociaux qui remontent aux années 1960. Une meilleure compréhension de ces liens permet non seulement d’expliquer le déroulement des événements à Kent, mais aussi de jeter un éclairage sur l’ensemble des personnages qui ont participé à la promotion de l’activisme en faveur de la spiritualité autochtone.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".