This analysis of urban Indigenous women’s experiences on the Homeland of the Métis and Treaty One (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada), Treaty Four (Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada), and Treaty Six (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada) territories illustrates that Indigenous women have recently experienced coercion when interacting with healthcare and social service providers in various settings. Drawing on analysis of media, study conversations, and policies, this collaborative, action-oriented project with 32 women and Two-Spirit collaborators demonstrated a pattern of healthcare and other service providers subjecting Indigenous women to coercive practices related to tubal ligations, long-term contraceptives, and abortions. We foreground techniques Indigenous women use to assert their rights within contexts of reproductive coercion, including acts of refusal, negotiation, and sharing community knowledge. By recognizing how colonial relations shape Indigenous women’s experiences, decision-makers and service providers can take action to transform institutional cultures so Indigenous women can navigate their reproductive decision-making with safety and dignity.

This essay argues for the importance of Native literature's insights to discussions of contemporary carceral conditions and, more importantly, the need for an indigenous feminist approach, one that sees the sexist and heteronormative impacts of settler colonialism as not only an outcome of, but also integral to, ongoing dispossession and neoliberal capitalist regimes of state and empire. While many scholarly discussions of carceral power leave little room for discussions of resistance, I argue both McNickle's The Surrounded and Hale's "Claire" imagine and articulate spaces and practices of freedom even though their texts are set in the most overtly assimilationist eras of the twentieth century: allotment and termination. In these spaces of freedom, for a fleeting moment, the protagonists are able to regroup, strategize, and simply "be indigenous," shedding the shackles of the "criminal breed" or the uniform of the runaway ward. In ambiguous, if not pessimistic endings, both writers suggest that hope lies in the next generation's ability to seize these moments, find these spaces, and reembody cultural practices of freedom that honor life and the land. Articulating an indigenous feminist analysis of carceral conditions in settlercolonial contexts, both texts thus see as an answer to those conditions an indigenous feminist resurgence that recenters kinship obligations and indigenous legal orders.

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