Sweating in the Joint: Personal and Cultural Renewal and Healing Through Sweatlodge Practice by Native Americans in Prison
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
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".