These states use stolen Indigenous land to fund prisons State trust lands generate millions of dollars for carceral facilities and programs every year, largely from extractive industries like oil and gas drilling. These states use stolen Indigenous land to fund prisons - High Country News Steven Amos feels hopeful for once. He’s finishing a drug and alcohol treatment program, living in a halfway house, and working a new job, doing carpentry. “I love anything outdoors,” he said. “I’m happy I’m not locked up.”
A member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, Amos, age 53, grew up with the snow-capped Rocky Mountains set like a painting behind his childhood home in Ethete, Wyoming, on the Wind River reservation. He loved hunting and fishing along the Little Wind River, but his family — as well as many Wind River neighbors — had no running water, sometimes no electricity, or enough to eat. The reservation’s stunning landscape conceals more than a century of theft and neglect by the United States, whose officials stole Arapaho land, then doled it out to ranchers, real estate moguls, miners, and public institutions, while forcing the tribal nation to scrape together a future any way it could. One of Amos’s most searing childhood memories is watching police beat up his father. “They call it generational trauma,” he said, “It keeps going and going and going, and people don’t want to confront that. They want to sweep it under the rug.” He received his first prison sentence when he was 19 years old, and drifted in and out of jails and prisons for decades after that. Some of the carceral facilities where Amos was sent are paid for, in part, with Arapaho land and resources, through activities like oil and gas extraction and cattle grazing. To build America, the U.S. government enacted laws to redistribute Indigenous lands they had taken. Some land was given to individuals and corporations to build homes or private empires, through laws like the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act, while the Morrill Act offered up freshly seized land as capital for states to establish what became known as land grant universities. Separately, the legislation that transformed frontier territories into states — known as Enabling Acts — contained handouts of land that state governments could use to pay for public institutions. Those offerings are generally called state trust lands and continue to be used to fund public institutions, mostly K-12 schools, but also universities, hospitals, and penitentiaries. Last year, in Wyoming alone, nearly 409,000 acres of former and current Arapaho, Shoshone, Goshute, Bannock, Crow, Cheyenne, and Sioux land now held by the state as state trust lands, produced at least $8 million in revenue for the Department of Corrections. At least 200 acres of land inside the boundaries of the Wind River Reservation are also earmarked to provide revenue for corrections. To acquire those lands, the U.S. paid less than $1.5 million to tribes through legal treaty agreements. However, more than a third of the lands were taken through military action with no reimbursement to Indigenous nations for their stolen territories. “There’s a direct link between incarceration and the history of land theft our communities have endured,” said Sunny Red Bear, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and associate director of organizing for NDN Collective. “Our ancestral lands were taken, disrupting our traditional ways of life and governance. Displacement led to economic hardship and social challenges that have made our communities more vulnerable to the criminal justice system.” Across the U.S., Indigenous people are incarcerated at a rate four times higher than white people, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit research organization dedicated to addressing over-criminalization. In South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana, about a quarter or more of the state prison population is Indigenous, even though Native people make up less than a tenth of each state’s population. Nationally, Native youth are incarcerated at a higher rate than Hispanic, Asian, and white people combined. “The priorities are not to build treatment centers; they’re not to help with the healing our communities are needing,” said Red Bear, who has helped lead efforts to pressure officials in Rapid City, South Dakota to address discriminatory policing. “The redirecting of these funds could be used for so many different things including affordable housing, or substance abuse programs, or mental health programs, or youth programs, or restorative justice programs or reentry programs.” -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34982): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34982 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/111005645/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
