AMST 401
Policing Nations: Indigenous Nations and the Carceral State Spring 2022
Division II Difference, Power, and Equity
This is not the current course catalog

This course examines the birth of the prison on Indigenous lands – how the settler carceral state emerged from the legal and political architectures of conquest as well as from Transatlantic slavery. It examines the continuities between the prison, the reservation, the barracks, the plantation, Boarding Schools and foster homes as modes of incarcerating Indigenous life and movements for liberation. To do so, we will be engaging with Indigenous legal theory, movements, and writings on the carceral state, including writings from incarcerated Indigenous intellectuals, Boarding School and foster care survivors, and feminists. Our approach will be rooted in the interdisciplinary practices of Native American and Indigenous Studies, American Studies, legal studies and political theory. This course strives to provide a history of the present through examining the relations, structuring presuppositions, discourses and material edifices of conquest and genocide on Turtle Island and for Indigenous nations in settler states across the globe. We will end by thinking with Indigenous feminist mappings of abolition and futures beyond the prison house of the settler state. The pedagogical aims of this course will be to illustrate the role of conquest, anti-Indigeneity and settler law in producing the contemporary prison system, and to introduce students to the broad canon of Indigenous legal theory and Indigenous legal traditions that do not proceed from carceral premises. It will aim to facilitate skills in primary source analysis, in proficiency with legal theory, in independent research, and critical analysis of different forms of the carceral state.