Sweating in the Joint: Personal and Cultural Renewal and Healing Through Sweatlodge Practice by Native Americans in Prison
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous peoples are over-represented in both American and Canadian prisons, especially when compared to the size of their population in general.A number of scholars argue that such high crime rates are not the result of individual behavior alone but stem from a social and historical context of colonization and oppressive race/ethnic relations (Ross 1998, Waldram 1997, Grobsmith 1994).In addition, many assimilationist procedures continue when Natives enter the criminal justice system.Native offenders are not identified in terms of their cultural heritage but are lumped together under the all-encompassing homogenized label of "Native American."The prison system itself and the rehabilitative ideas therein are based on Euro-American models of criminality, mental health, and rehabilitation that continue to alienate the Native offender from his or her cultural and personal identity and assimilate him or her into the ideals and constructs of a dis-serving dominate culture.Drawing on the work of Reed (1990), Luana Ross suggests that prison programs modeled for Euro-American society may be another way to control Native people."Rather than focusing on the societal structure as the primary problem, Native prisoners are diverted by rehabilitative programs that search for internal, personal deficiencies" (137).Sweat lodge ceremonies offer one means through which Native inmates can resist this assimilation.Such practices allow Native inmates access to cultural forms and social discourses that may be instrumental in (re)transforming individual and communal self-definition, experience, knowledge, and identity towards a more positive, self-confirmed end (Axtell 1985, Anderson 1991, Tinker 1993).In a sense, personal renewal and cultural renewal go hand in hand.Such renewal, however, is not guaranteed.Situational, personal, and social variables inevitably influence the effectiveness of any spiritual practice.This dissertation will explore: 1) the ways in which the legacy of colonization and oppression affect Native American inmates, and 2) whether the sweat lodge practice provides these inmates with a means of resistance to systems of oppression and assimilation, and, if so, how this resistance is accomplished.The pertinence of this project is directly related to three distinct areas of study: Religion in Prison, Native American studies, and Ritual Theory.While
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it