From Incarceration to Restoration: National Responsibility, Gender and the Production of Cultural Difference

Abstract

The Criminal Code of Canada contains a sentencing provision aimed at offering alternatives to incarceration for Aboriginal peoples. One of the intentions of this provision is to take national responsibility for the over-incarceration of Aboriginal peoples. Using official documents, the objective of this article is to address the possible meaning of national responsibility that is shaped by the emergence of this legal intervention. The objective is to explore how even as it attempts to address national responsibility in law, the nation remains fundamentally committed to an understanding of colonial history in which it is not guilty of wrongdoing and hence arrives at an official stance that suggests that the Canadian state is not responsible for the continued ramifications of colonialism. This article also demonstrates that the practices of control and containment which are central to the criminal justice system require cultural difference paradigms as their ideological impetus.

Do law reforms matter? Exploring the victimization− criminalization continuum in the sentencing of Aboriginal women in Canada

“…14 Sentencing experts pointed to empirical evidence indicating that sentencing judges do not treat Aboriginal offenders more punitively, but rather many Aboriginal offenders are convicted of serious offences and have significant treatment needs, rendering community-based sentences inappropriate (Roberts and Melchers, 2003; Stenning and Roberts, 2001). Moreover, law reforms do little to tackle the complex intergenerational social problems resulting from government policies of forcible removal of Aboriginal peoples from their traditional lands, economic dependency and cultural assimilation that underpin violence, poverty, and substance abuse in Aboriginal communities (Murdocca, 2009). In the years following the enactment of Bill C-41, the Supreme Court of Canada was asked to interpret section 718.2(e) upon appeal from lower court rulings in the sentencing of Aboriginal peoples convicted of serious offences.…”

“There Is Something in That Water”: Race, Nationalism, and Legal Violence

“…Examples of cultural diversity projects include provisions to be made for individuals “to take cultural breaks in order to participate in, for example, the spring hunt” (Fowler, n.d.). As I note elsewhere, the impact of colonization on Aboriginal peoples is often anchored and transformed in law as being a fundamental problem of cultural difference (Murdocca 2009). This transformation works through a political rationale that has been described as “culturalized racism” that both obscures the ways in which cultural paradigms support the operation of racism in law and policy and conceals the function of responsibility on the part of individuals and nations (Razack 1998, 61).…”

“…This narrative about cultural difference functions to delineate the lines between respectability and degeneracy. Cultural difference, employed as a political rationality, also shapes many attempts at responsibility and compensation (Murdocca 2009). What results, and the government response to the water issues in Kashechewan is no exception, is a view that the negative impact of colonization and its legacy on Aboriginal peoples is a fundamental problem of cultural difference.…”

Violence at the Intersections of Women’s Lives in an Urban Context: Indigenous Women’s Experiences of Leaving and/or Staying With an Abusive Partner

“…The well-known overrepresentation of Indigenous women and men in prisons (Murdocca, 2009; Wesley, 2012) was also reflected in the experiences of the study participants. Many of the men and several of the women in the study had been incarcerated because of violence.…”

“…The unique characteristics of state–Indigenous relations, including, for example, the history of stigmatization and the racialization of Indigenous women in Canada, the significantly high rate of incarceration of Indigenous women in Canadian prisons (Murdocca, 2009), and the ongoing surveillance of Indigenous mothers by the state (Denison et al, 2014; Fallon et al, 2015; McKenzie et al, 2016), profoundly affected the Indigenous women in this study and their experiences of violence. The effects of these contexts were particularly evident in the child welfare and criminal justice systems.…”