Indigenous Incarceration and Settler Colonial Genocides

O n January 4, 2021, over 90 women and men confi ned within Saskatchewan's provincial correctional centres staged a peaceful hunger strike to protest the inhumane conditions 1 inside jails and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Cardinal, 2021a).In a media release, Cory Cardinal, one of the organizers imprisoned at the Saskatoon Correctional Centre (SCC) called for the Saskatchewan's Minister of Corrections and Policing to resign for a failure to protect staff and prisoners within Saskatchewan's jails from a series of COVID-19 outbreaks (Cardinal 2021a; also see McMillan, 2021).In his letter Cardinal links the current socioeconomic realities aff ecting Indigenous peoples to ongoing settler colonial oppression and settler colonial genocidal policies and practices.As Cardinal (2021a) states:We are inmates of not only institutions of incarceration but every other institution that has dominated us for years.We are inmates of poverty, of high suicide rates, of disease, and of overrepresentation in the justice system...This cycle of systemic oppression must be broken and must be recognized for what it is: a modern-day act of genocide meant to eradicate a vulnerable people.Cardinal's analysis echoes existing scholarship that argues that the overincarceration of Indigenous people in settler colonial contexts is an obvious form of ongoing genocide (Ross, 1996, pp.125-141; Marques and Monchalin, 2020, pp.79-102;Palmater 2020).Within these works, the authors link sexual and gendered colonial violence to cultural and physical acts of genocide which directly target Indigenous peoples' ties to one another and the land.Settler colonialism targets Indigenous people for removal from the land through the logics of elimination (Wolfe, 2006, p. 387).This is apparent in the ongoing carceral violence Indigenous people are subjected to by Canada's criminal justice system (Offi ce of the Correctional Investigator, 2020; Zinger, 2023).Indigenous people are not only subjected to settler colonial carceral violence through their interactions