Remapping Native Relationships to Land and Undermining the Prison Industrial Complex

• In Event: Refusing Settler Colonial Pedagogies of Place

Abstract

This paper takes the position that remapping Native relationships to land is a viable tactic for thwarting settler colonialism and undermining the prison industrial complex. In order to accomplish this argument I perform a critical analysis of what it means to map space and how mapping has facilitated the ongoing project of settler colonialism. In this paper I read mapping as a pedagogy from which we learn about borders, distance, and isolation. I build on the existing critical work of cartography as a technology of colonial violence and argue that mapping is a mode of teaching the logics of carcerality. The logics of carcerality in this paper will be discussed in the context of confinement and will make connections between how Indian reservations and prisons are mapped. I contend that if Native relationships to land are remapped it could contest settler colonialism’s essential goal of eradicating Indigenous peoples from the land and simultaneously unhinge the logics of carcerality that undergirds the prison regime. This paper seeks to engage with discussions of critical geography, Native American studies, and prison studies in order pose questions about what decolonizing our conceptions of place can offer prison abolition in terms of new strategies for resisting the prison industrial complex. Ultimately I argue that the prison regime exists as a result of Native dispossession and that remapping Native relationships to land combats settler colonialism and undermines the prison industrial complex.

Author

• Stephanie A Lumsden, University of California, Los Angeles