Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence (29 page)

When my daughter becomes afraid of her boyfriend
I will tell her it’s wrong

Someday, my grandchildren will live in a world
Where they won’t have to be told “it’s wrong!”

Frances M. Blackburn (Northern Arapahoe)

Chapter 9

Prisoner W-20170/Other

STORMY OGDEN

According to the California Department of Corrections this was who I was for eight years of my life. For the first five years, I was locked behind their prison walls; the last three years I was under the supervision of the state parole office. However, there is more to me than that.

I
write this chapter as a California Indian woman, a recognized member of the Tule River Yokuts tribe, my grandmother’s people. I am also Kashaya and Lake County Pomo, my grandfather’s people. I also write as an ex-prisoner of the state of California, housed at the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) located in the southern part of the state. I am also a survivor of colonization.

The colonizers brought with them two tools of mass destruction—the Bible and the bottle, which were both forced upon Native people. In addition to using these tools of genocide, the colonizers criminalized the traditional ways of behavior and conduct of Native people and sought to control indigenous people through their laws. Enforcement of these foreign laws meant Native people were locked up in a spectrum of punishing institutions, including military forts, missions, reservations, boarding schools, and, more recently, the state and federal prisons.
¹
In North America, the groups that are most likely to be sent to jail and prison are the poor and people of color. A large proportion of these people who end up behind bars are indigenous. On any given day, one in twenty-five American Indians is under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system, a rate that is 2.4 times that of whites.
²
American Indian women are particularly targeted for punishment. During 1988 in South Dakota, almost half of the women imprisoned (44 percent) were American Indian, yet they comprised only 7 percent of the state’s population according to the 1990 census.
³

Angela Davis and Cassandra Shaylor describe the prison industrial complex (PIC) as an intricate web of racism, social control, and profit.
⁴
The experience of racial subordination, repression, and economic exploitation is not new to the Native people of these lands. From the missions to the reservations, the Indians of California have struggled for survival in the face of an array of brutal mechanisms designed to control and eliminate the region’s first peoples.

Built on the ancestral lands of indigenous people, the U.S. prison industrial complex has contributed to the devastating process of colonization. It is essential for scholars and activists to understand the colonial roots of the PIC and to make visible the stories of Native prisoners.

My People/Our Lands

My Indian heritage is Yokuts and Pomo. We have creation stories that will always connect us to these lands of our ancestors, and we continue to live on these lands today. The Yokuts inhabited a three-hundred-mile-wide range, which included the San Joaquin Valley and adjoining foothills.
⁵
The Yokuts were agriculturalists and held the most fertile land in California. The Yokuts people retain our history and maintain there were at least seventy tribal communities before contact with Europeans. The Pomo people occupied approximately seven widely separated localities in the coastal ranges north of the San Francisco Bay. The hallmark of our tribal identity is the Pomo language, which has connected these geographically divided communities.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the area that became known as California had the largest and most diverse indigenous populations of any area in North America. Native California was perhaps the most diverse in ecology, social structure, and history. According to Rupert and Jeanette Costo, California Indians were highly skilled explorers of North America and enjoyed a sophisticated knowledge of their environment, which they had developed over thousands of years.
⁶

Our elders tell us that the Natives of California lived in well-ordered societies. Every part of their tribal society was enriched and maintained through religious and traditional laws. Religion was the primary method of social control, with conflicts handled mainly through sanctions, not confrontation and warfare.
⁷
The indigenous nations of California were governed by their own laws. The laws were established over hundreds of years; our oral histories and songs teach us this.
⁸
Individuals accepted these laws because they ensured collective survival. When violations occurred, the rule was restitution instead of retribution. Exile from the tribe was an extreme penalty.

In Utmost of Good Faith

The UTMOST GOOD FAITH shall always be observed towards the Indians; their land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in justified and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity shall from time to time be made, for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.
⁹

Tribal nations have always had strong legal systems. Through storytelling, song, and dance, rules and laws were passed from generation to generation. The laws became customs that were ingrained in the very lifeblood of the people. Everyday behavior had its own rules of conduct, which the people understood and embraced.

In contrast, the U.S. criminal justice system in Indian Country is overly complex and difficult to understand. Its governing principles are contained in hundreds of statutes and court decisions. Due to these laws, almost every aspect of the internal and external relations of Indian people became the target of control by the U.S. government. As a result, American Indians are more likely to come into conflict with the criminal justice system at an earlier age. This early involvement in the criminal justice system is an outcome of colonization. Native offenders are often incarcerated in federal prisons instead of state or local facilities because of federal criminal jurisdiction over many Indian lands.

There were no prisons in North America before the arrival of the Euro-Americans. Prisons were created for people who broke the European laws. White European Puritans created prisons and the laws that put people in them. As institutions of social control, prisons should be viewed in context with the policy of assimilation and the lack of acceptance of Native spiritual and cultural ways.

The U.S. government began to interfere with traditional tribal justice systems in 1885, when Congress passed the Major Crimes Act, 18 U.S.C.A. 1153. This act gave federal courts jurisdiction over crimes committed by Indians against Indians in Indian Country, in complete disregard for international law, treaty law, and Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. The effect of this has been to diminish tribal sovereignty. Many other legal intrusions followed. Nearly every form of Indian religion was banned on the reservations by the mid-1800s, and extreme measures were taken to discourage Indians from maintaining their tribal customs.
¹⁰
Control and destruction of our lands and culture continued for generations.

In January 1895, a large group of Indian prisoners was confined in Alcatraz, a military installation on a harsh island of rock in San Francisco Harbor. These prisoners were nineteen Hopi “hostiles” who opposed the forced education of their children in the government boarding schools. As late as the 1930s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs enforced the “Indian Offenses Act,” which forbade Indian religion, assigned English names to replace Indian ones, and even outlawed Indian hairstyles. As the criminal jurisdiction of the United States increasingly imposed itself on Indian nations, the government relied on three arguments to support its jurisdiction over Indian Country without the consent of Indian nations:

1. The Plenary Power Doctrine, which asserted that Congress had absolute power to assert authority over Indian nations. This clearly contradicted internal law, as well as Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which expressly states that all treaties between Indian nations and the U.S. government have supremacy over any law Congress might enact. Congress has asserted that it may unilaterally abrogate a treaty without the consent of the nations—parties to the treaties.
   ¹¹
   
2. The Federal-Indian Trust Doctrine, which is defined as being a unique moral and legal duty of the United States to assist Indians in the protection of their property and rights. This doctrine is supposed to work in the best interest of the Indian nations. However, this is where the concept of the
   paternalistic
   “Great White Father” in Washington comes into play. In this regard, we have been treated as children, unable to make our own decisions. This has been devastating for Indian nations.
   
3. The Doctrine of Geographical Incorporation, which claims that since Indian lands (such as reservations) are located within the boundaries of the United States, the United States holds tide to all of the land and they also have the absolute right to assert legal jurisdiction over this land.
   ¹²
   

These three arguments can be seen as being instruments of racism and forms of social control. The continuing role of the U.S. justice system in colonizing Indian people is visible in the large numbers of Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Alaska Natives who have been convicted in the white man’s courts for hunting, fishing, and subsistence gathering in accordance with their customs. Those laws often violate indigenous treaties and rights. According to Luana Ross, “Native worlds were devastated by the course of their forced relationship with Euro-Americans and their laws.
¹³

Many Native Americans have also been targeted because of their political activism. More recently, Native youth activists and warriors in the United States and Canada have been imprisoned because of their involvement in defending Native burial grounds and sacred sites, because they try to defend fishing and hunting rights, or because they oppose corporate exploitation of their lands.
¹⁴

The Colonial Roots of Prison Labor

For five years, I worked as a clerk in the California prison system. Like a slave, I had no choice about the work I did, nor was I paid fully for my labor. The thirty-two dollars a month that I earned had to pay for overpriced feminine products, soap, shampoo, and toothpaste in the prison commissary. Prison labor, rooted in the history of slavery and colonization, plays an important role in the economics of incarceration. The prison industrial complex has a twofold purpose: social control and profit. Like the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex interweaves government agencies with business interests who seek to make a profit from imprisoning the poor and people of color. Like any industry, the prison economy needs raw material. In this case, the raw materials are people—prisoners. Prisoners generate profits for the companies that build and house prisons. They also generate profits by providing a cheap, plentiful, and easily controlled workforce.

In the past two decades, prisons in California have shed the pretense of rehabilitation in favor of large warehouse-style prisons that provide few opportunities for education or training. Instead, prisoners are exploited as a cheap source of labor, both to maintain the prison itself and to bring in income through prison industries. In fact, they often keep prisoners in their cells for twenty-three hours a day. Prison wardens are clear that they are not here to
rehabilitate
, but only to punish. Clearly, history is repeating itself.

While researchers have identified the origins of prison labor in the enslavement of African Americans in the southern states, the history of Indian slavery has been overlooked. Economic exploitation and forced slave labor are not new to Native peoples, especially the indigenous people of early California. If we are to map the origins of the prison industrial complex in California accurately, we must look at the history of forced labor in the Golden State. When the colonizers arrived in eighteenth-century California, they stereotyped Native people and assumed that they were weak and only useful for labor. The Spanish and Mexican invaders valued the Indian people as an essential workforce necessary to build their missions, presidios, and pueblos and to work in the fields.