Chapter 18 Ethics of Representation / Ethics and Representation Dads Doin’ Time, Incarcerated Indigenous Writers, and the Public Gaze

The City and the Story

That the majority of the writers who took part in the Dads Doin’ Time project were of Indigenous heritage is representative of the fact that in 2016–2017 in Saskatchewan, nine out of ten male admissions to detention centres were Indigenous (Zakreski 2018, para. 1). This is a statistic that has risen by more than 20 percent in the province in the last twelve years, indicating not only a significant disparity in policing and the severity of charges being laid against Indigenous people, but also a growing issue specific to Saskatchewan provincially, as well as to Saskatoon more specifically (para. 6).

As Jana Grekul and Patti LaBoucane-Benson (2008, 68) note, for Indigenous youth in the Prairie provinces, “the gang acts as, or promises to act as, a substitute for family, filling the void left by family backgrounds marked by violence, substance abuse and crime.” They continue that for many Indigenous youth and families in the prairies, “gangs are real, youth are being recruited into this lifestyle on the streets and in prisons, leaving school and family behind to take on the gangster identity” (65–66). Allison Piché (2015, 204) gestures to a kind of “fluidity between the prison and the community” for Indigenous youth in Saskatchewan, who “linked absent fathers to misguided masculinities which too often result in gang involvement.” Piché’s observation accounts for the cyclical nature of gang involvement—a generational invocation that many of the writers in the Inspired Minds program had an intimate familiarity with—and also draws attention to the connections between gang involvement and the disruption of Indigenous familial structures, a topic that permeated and indeed provided the basis for the entire Dads Doin’ Time project at large.

Writing in Confining Spaces

Understanding the decolonial significance of an installation like Dads Doin’ Time can only be achieved through acknowledging colonial circumstances that have influenced or mediated the reception or presentation of artwork, particularly writing, that comes out of carceral spaces. Fights over an incarcerated writer’s right to publish and profit from the publication of their work have been largely fought in public arenas over the years, with writers often unable to advocate for themselves or their work. Nevertheless, there exists a body of literature from which examples of the socio-political reality of Indigenous prison writers can be gleaned. To this end, the poetry of Leonard Peltier, a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) jailed for life for the murder of two police officers during an incident on Pine Ridge Reservation, is invaluably illuminating on a number of levels.2

While the verdict in Peltier’s case is often viewed as controversial (Nation Talk 2015), the writing he has produced during his incarceration tells of injustices against Indigenous people that are irrefutably true for many—such as targeted over-policing, racial discrimination both in and outside of carceral facilities, the toxic nature of colonial-national identity, and the multifaceted repercussions of being deemed “criminal.” His poetry in particular is seen as being concerned with a history that encompasses more than his own personal experience, and his responses to the charges and biases under which he operates daily reflect not only a rationalization of his own criminal actions, but a larger rationalization for anti-colonial resistance efforts as well. In his poem “Aboriginal Sin” (1999, 16), Peltier gestures to the complications of public perceptions of Indigenous people: “We Indians are all guilty/ guilty of being ourselves. / We’re taught that guilt from the day we’re born. / We learn it well.” His writing from the carceral institution in which he is serving his life sentences aims to destabilize notions of “guilt” and the shame that comes with it, casting his rhetorical gaze back out at the systems which have confined him throughout his life rather than focusing on some inherent moral inadequacy in himself. It is worth noting that beyond the anti-colonial potential of Peltier’s poetry to provide him with the agency to share his own story on his own terms, and to reveal the realities of his marginalization even within the prison system, the nature of his work also actively disrupts a generic expectation of prison writing wherein confession, reformation, and forgiveness are prioritized concepts. Many engagements with the writing of currently or formerly incarcerated writers, even in the city of Saskatoon specifically, have been rooted in the sharing of redemptive story arcs that narrate a criminal’s fall from grace and eventual reformation and vindication.

The Inspired Minds program similarly asks its participants to think critically about, and question, the circumstances of their incarceration, including an awareness of their own implications in the system, rather than foregrounding a singular need for personal or public atonement in their writing. Enabling and encouraging this flexibility in the contents of participants’ written works insists that the finished products reflect a lived experience with the carceral system which is as nuanced and unique as each of the individuals that produced them, essentially refuting monolithic stereotypes regarding Indigenous peoples and incarcerated individuals alike. This said, while creative writing and arts-based educational programming does have the potential to offer counternarratives or points of departures for new ways of thinking and doing differently, Piché (2015, 210) notes that such programming cannot “in and of itself meet the diverse and changing needs of First Nations, Inuit and Métis offenders.” Piché instead insists that, short of restructuring or dismantling the entire carceral system, one must at the very least strive for a restructuring of what constitutes “success” for inmates as well as the institutions. Rather than relying on recidivism rates alone as a measure of prosperity, Piché (2015, 210) suggests a “need to recognize that less measurable returns, such as self-confidence, healing, skills, and understanding, also make a difference to individuals and community” in carceral settings.

With the spirit of this alternative kind of success in mind, the participants in the Dads Doin’ Time project were encouraged to engage critically with questions about the colonial underpinnings of their confinement and rely on one another to provide varied perspectives on complex theoretical topics. For instance, Nancy Macdonald’s (2016) article in Maclean’s magazine, in which she notes that criminologists have begun to consider Canada’s prisons as “new residential schools,” led to fruitful discussion not only about the ongoing relations that exist between settler colonialism and the criminal justice system but also about the effects of the residential school system and carceral system alike on the establishment and maintenance of the Indigenous family structure. Many of the writers in the program were able to draw direct and personal connections between the residential school system and their current imprisonment, with topics such as lack of access to cultural materials and ceremonies, the inability to speak traditional languages, and the loss of familial connection figuring heavily into the discussions. Specifically, the physical separation of parents and children, not just through incarceration but through the insistence of no-contact visits at the SCC was a parallel with residential schools that hit close to home for many writers.

The men also talked about how the problem of physical separation is compounded by the intrusion of the child welfare system into Indigenous families—a system that, as Kanien’keheka law professor Patricia Monture-Angus observes, “feeds the youth and adult correctional systems.” Both institutions, she points out, “remove citizens from their communities, which has a devastating effect on the cultural and spiritual growth of the individual,” while it also “damages the traditional social structures of family and community” (1995, 194). Deena Rymhs (2008, 4) cites Monture-Angus in her assertion that “the child welfare system creates future offenders while eroding the social and cultural fabric of indigenous communities”—a point that echoes Jessica Ball’s statement about the paradoxical relationship between the carceral system and the transmission of “father roles” (2009). Rymhs invokes Michel Foucault’s theory of carceral institutions as the source of delinquency and hence of imprisonment to position the trajectory of Indigenous individuals and families—from residential schools into the child welfare system and onward to correctional centres—on a carceral continuum embedded in “the multiple and often overlapping sites of discipline that define delinquency and that naturalize the power to punish” (2008, 4).

The intersections of race, class, gender, and parenthood ended up becoming key sites of creativity as well as resistance and mobility for the writers in the Inspired Minds program. One of the contributions to the show included a writer’s letters to his own father alongside letters to his child, who by virtue of his incarceration, he had never met or interacted with. The positive relationship illuminated between the writer and his own father (as indicated by talk of pride and love in the letter), alongside his non-existent relationship with his own child, indicates a break in the chain of knowledge transmission. This was illustrated just as much in the letters as by the physical presentation of the letters alongside each other in the gallery space. The artists’ use of this public platform to share direct messages to his family members initiates a dialogue, showing the dialogical potential of prison writing.

Much like Peltier, it is not merely a discussion regarding their own confinement that the writers of the Inspired Minds program contribute to in the creation of their individual works; their eventual outputs can be seen as contributing to a much larger conversation directed by the production of prison writing in Canada. Rimstead and Rymhs (2011, para. 4) note a history beginning in the 1960s wherein Indigenous prisoners in Canada have used the penal press, among other things, “to raise the intellectual and political consciousness of other prisoners.” They cite letter-writing campaigns undertaken by Indigenous inmates to both support Indigenous land claims in Brazil and to advocate for Peltier’s release, as constituting “a political imaginary that exceeds the boundaries of the nation-state” (2011, para. 5). The act of writing then becomes a practice through which inmates can grapple with the ramifications of the crimes they have committed. Writing in this context has intellectually liberatory potential that can be seen as both a decolonial and an anti-carceral process.

Writing and Community

The Inspired Minds program contributed to anti-carceral efforts by offering writing workshops to incarcerated men as a way to facilitate creative expression and critically reflect on their circumstances and socio-politics both in and outside of the carceral space. One of the most significant initial elements of any Inspired Minds class was making the space, wherever it was located, into one where people felt safe sharing and being vulnerable. Unlike most Inspired Minds classes, which typically took place in a single unit, including writers only from that unit within the prison, this particular set of workshops invited participants from all across the facility, allowing for potential community building to transcend the boundaries and borders put in place by the institution. This choice constituted a remapping of community boundaries on the terms of the writers, rather than communities constructed by the makeup of the prison itself.3 Doran Larson (2011, 5) claims that promoting community building among prisoners in correctional facilities has the potential to force the prison itself to “undergo radical metamorphosis into a civil institution that serves as an engine of progressive civic engagement.”

The classroom that housed the creative workshop of the Dads Doin’ Time pieces was meant to mimic Ludlow’s concept of a “contested space,” or one “that is not necessarily defined by conflict, but which includes room for conflict” (2004, 5). The space was meant to provide room to challenge and encourage individual ideas and understandings. This is not always easily accomplished in carceral contexts, and so one of the many ways that a sense of community was achieved in the classroom was through an activity that asked the men to anonymously share their hopes and fears about the project with the intent of revealing that many had shared concerns. In the exercise, some worried about the reception of their works by their families, while others expressed insecurities about their levels of education in relation to their peers, but the most common response was a fear of vulnerability and facing judgment from the others in the room. Unlearning this sense of distrust among peers, particularly when participants were only offered a “safe” but “contested space” once a, was aided in part by the creation and implementation of a set of community guidelines written by the participants themselves and based on the hopes and fears laid out by members in the initial activity. What resulted was a group of men holding themselves and each other accountable not only for their behaviour, but also for the production of genuine and thoughtful messaging for their children.

The editorial model, both informed by Inspired Minds’ already established practices as well as additional steps specific to the project and the writers personally, aimed to make any necessary alterations to the pieces as enabling as possible to the writer. This largely involved writers choosing the content of their writing in the tone, genre, and voice that they pleased, with only very minor interjections for clarity. All changes suggested were reviewed and accepted by the writers themselves during a lengthy series of editorial sessions that included working with the original piece, transcribing the piece into a digital format, and continuing to bring the artwork or writing back to the artist for approval. The goal was to ensure that the final products would be far more representative of the writers’ experience than of the editor’s literary expertise, and to allow the writers to have more control over how (visually as well as compositionally) their work would be seen in the gallery.

This last piece became important to The Dads Doin’ Time project—while a public gallery space meant wider visibility, as well as family accessibility to the writing, it did inevitably mean that the writers would not be able to attend the show to represent themselves or their work to the viewing audiences. In keeping with Andrea Walsh’s (2002, 250) assertion that meaningful cultural dialogue in a gallery space could not occur until “the dominant perspective was dismantled,” a conscious attention to everything from the paper, font size and typeface of the displayed works, to the gallery we chose to display the works in, became significant aspects of our editorial model. While it remains true that a writer, regardless of demographic, cannot entirely control the reception of their works by inherently subjective audiences, the particular public risk for speaking out remains very real for incarcerated writers.

Making the Space

In determining where the show would be held and how we would go about presenting it, we benefited from connections with the Saskatoon Community Youth Arts Programming (or SCYAP), which owns a gallery space in the heart of downtown Saskatoon and operates on aims very similar to those upheld by both Str8UP and Inspired Minds. As a part of their mandate, SCYAP (2011) seeks to “offer street-level, youth-centred solutions to crime, unemployment and youth homelessness by utilizing youth’s artistic interest and inclination as a tool for personal development and redirection toward healthier, happier and more productive lives.” It was already a space that functioned at a community level to provide opportunities to many Indigenous artists and youth across the city. It was and remains a space that regularly validates the legitimacy of Indigenous voices and Indigenous art and provides a broader audience for the distribution of that art than would usually be achievable by individual artists on their own. Walsh (2002, 254) asserts that “the relation between legitimacy and visibility becomes a fundamental part of the politics of seeing and representing” Indigenous art. The utilization of formal gallery space aids in providing both a sense of legitimacy (in an artworld and public context) and also a significant level of visibility, both in that the stories and intimate experiences with the criminal justice system are being widely viewed, and in that the art show acted as a catalyst for media coverage on the project, as well as the systemic issues that led to the need for the project, by local news outlets such as the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.

As Walsh (2002) argues, however, everything from who is invited to display art in Canadian galleries to how and why artwork is made public has been largely determined by governmental or institutional processes steeped in ethnocentric bias—including a deep colonial history. The gallery, as a space, is dominated by what Walsh (2002, 247) refers to as a Eurocentric “scopic regime” that is “manifest through social power structures that restrict and enhance the physical or cultural processes of sight” operating in “spaces of difference.” Often these aesthetic expectations dictate what is not considered art, illuminating what Walsh suggests; art is considered stylistic only if it adheres to particular principles. Under this scopic regime, art that differs from what is considered the central subjective “norm,” is either not considered to be art, or is art which does not meet the expectations of those select few who circulate it. The valuing of Indigenous creative works by the reductive scope of ethnocentric definitions of “quality” is a practice that Creek-Cherokee literary scholar Craig Womack (1999, 17) argues pulls the Indigenous works from their deeply entrenched political and historical contexts and assesses them instead through a lens which lacks any kind of cultural specificity.

In much the same way that Indigenous writing was largely excluded from the field of literature until the 1950s and 60s, Indigenous artworks in Canada’s gallery and museum scenes were for decades relegated to the realm of artifact or examples of “primitivism.” Echoing the marginalization of prison writing, the insistence of a “primitive” aesthetic in Indigenous art suggests a limited range or capacity on behalf of Indigenous artists, rooted in reductive historical and colonial interpretations of Indigenous peoples and cultural practices. What constitutes “good,” or “gallery-worthy” art is determined, decided upon, and enforced primarily by institutions that have not always been forthcoming to Indigenous writers and artists, and it is easy to see the gallery as a space that also upholds colonialism, even if not as overtly as the prison system. Rather than focusing on Indigenous art as a product or object lacking the defining markers of “quality” from a Eurocentric perspective, Dads Doin’ Time challenges well-accepted historical narratives while also shifting attention from the “Aboriginally-produced object” onto “Euro-North American spectatorship and beliefs.” The pieces ask the audience to be critical of their own experiences while engaging actively with those they cannot relate to.

Sto:lo scholar Dylan Robinson (2017) points out that the material and physical structures of the modern gallery (which he refers to as “starchitecture”) work to “apprehend Indigenous belongings with their gaze” (98). He further argues that the gallery is a space that has “oriented the settler colonial palate toward a cornucopia of ethnographic salvage and ‘informant knowledge,’” which make exhibitions like Land, Spirit, Power (1992), Indigena (1992), the works of artists like Rebecca Belmore, and even our much smaller Dads Doin’ Time, sites that repudiate the expected narratives surrounding the writers personally, and also challenge the externally imposed limitations on their artistic capacities (Robinson 2017, 98). The work of illuminating the lived experience of being in a carceral institution, and the concomitant images or realities which often remain opaque or inaccessible to those whose privileges allow them to avoid physical or even intellectual engagement with prisons and their inhabitants, can be in some ways read as a remapping of the space.

Doreen Martinez (2012, 546) discusses the disruption of the “tourist gaze” on Indigenous traditional territory and suggests that the insertion of Indigenous language and writing into previously understood places as one which forces its readers to participate in the “recognition of new maps, that is, new ways of understanding locations of culture.” The writing of the men involved in the Dads Doin’ Time project asks readers to engage in remapping the prison and their understandings of the reality and social identity of the writers whose experiences they have been granted access to. As a general rule, galleries function as neutral spaces within which viewers acknowledge, whether consciously or not, the artist as a human being like themselves. Yet this fundamental awareness of a shared humanity is not always a given in relation to works produced by incarcerated artists, who are, to again borrow Rymhs’s (2008, 49) terminology, not on a “neutral footing” with those who view their work.

The project at large was concerned with the role of art in the contestation of identities externally defined but subsequently internalized. What is art’s role in contemporary cultural revitalization? And in what ways do culturally specific representational practices and receptions challenge mainstream assumptions? The contributors to Dads Doin’ Time produced works that spoke to these very broad questions. Discussions around the definition of “fatherhood” as a concept but also a lived role allowed the writers to explore their feelings around an identity that is imposed on them from the outside but also generated by their experience of themselves as fathers. The overwhelming association of pride with parenthood, even when the writing otherwise indicates a perceived failure or shame, speaks to what Rymhs (2008, 10) describes as the “collective enterprise and struggle” that Barbara Harlow has associated with prison writing. The resultant sense of solidarity has the potential to encourage writers and, by extension their audiences, to question normative understandings of literature, as well as of love and parenthood.

Asking the writers to reflect on their experiences of parenthood and incarceration also allowed them to see themselves as having meaningful advice or knowledge to share, even though their circumstances may have led to the perception that they were lacking in some way. Additionally, when one considers the Eurocentric bias implicit in mainstream expectations regarding art, we can see the role this writing has to play in both the disruption of the perceived public identities of Indigenous incarcerated writers, and the establishment of a discursive space that advocates for Indigenous autonomy. And certainly, the idea that the show is taking place at all, on such a large scale, with media coverage and at a legitimate gallery is indicative of challenging mainstream beliefs.

Community in Writing

The writers involved in the Dads Doin’ Time project encouraged each other to conceptualize fatherhood on Indigenous terms, and to consider what threatens to be lost in the breaking up of Indigenous families. Positioning themselves as experts and purveyors of knowledge to their children and to the wider public contradicts misconceptions, not only about Indigenous peoples, but about prison writers more broadly. Repudiating what Gerald Vizenor (1990) deems the “terminal creeds,” or the settler beliefs that the core structure of the Indigenous family is damaged, shows the disruptive power of carceral writing workshops and educational programming.

Brainstorming sessions in early workshops included a series of questions to aid in finding a place to begin the work together as a group of facilitators and participants. “Sound bytes” of wisdom about parenthood were also recorded during workshops and played intermittently throughout the exhibition: What does it mean to be a father? When you get out of prison, what is the first thing you would like to do with your child? And what is the difference between a father and a dad? All questions intended to engage critically with the realities of incarceration, and also see beyond its sometimes totalizing influence. The sound bytes produced interesting ideas or concepts from which some of the men in the class took inspiration.

The artwork created workshops held at the SCC, some of which went on to be displayed in the Dads Doin’ Time show, took various forms and meanings. Some participants wrote letters, others took up beading pieces both for display and to be given away to members of the workshop to acknowledge their participation. Devon Napope’s poem for his daughter, “1 Broken ♥ to Another,” addresses the poet’s child directly: “To my beautiful daughter, my butterfly . . . / I’m sorry Daddy wasn’t around / Always in jail or out of town. Gone without a sound / I was a kid having a kid. Please forgive me for what I did.” Napope’s poetry commands a sense of autonomy over the relationship he has or hopes to have with his daughter, but also stands to illustrate Ball’s 2009 claims regarding the socio-cultural transmission of father roles (“I was a kid having a kid”). Without directly naming the system, he can be critical of the role that various political processes have played in his own lack of guidance on how to become an engaged parent.

Other contributors chose to speak about parenthood and their carceral experience more conceptually, like Steven Loewen, whose poem “Vultures” accumulated the most visitor feedback. Loewen used the image of vultures circling their already injured prey to describe the interactions he has had with the criminal justice system, as well as the effects that that interaction has had on his family. He describes his life as a “game / The vultures love to play.” Loewen’s metaphor is telling for a few reasons: the suggestion that his life is a game to be played by others is one that highlights the lack of agency he feels in his interactions with the criminal justice system—the feeling of being preyed upon—and is also critical of the flippancy with which crimes in Indigenous communities are often handled. He warns: “Beware of vultures / Wearing suit, uniform and robe / They cultivate lies, to remove man from home / In the name of tough-on-crime, family suffers till end of time” (ll. 8–11). Loewen’s use of extended metaphor throughout the poem to draw connections between the systems he must regularly navigate and survive and ruthless carrion eaters picking away at a speaker could just as easily be representative of Loewen as of any other man in the workshop. The final lines of the poem might even inspire critical self-reflection in their audience: “Vultures are bred, the jails are fed / Society turns a blind eye / They believe in crime not survival / Punishment and not revival” (2016, ll. 46–49). The poem implicitly asks readers to question their own role in this metaphor. This poem, like many that ended up in the gallery space, had informative qualities by sharing a lived reality with the public as it asked that same public to consider themselves in relation to it.

Scholar Rey Chow (1991, 3) writes that “metaphors and other apparatuses of ‘seeing’ in writing become overwhelmingly important ways of talking, simply because ‘seeing’ carries with it the connotation of a demarcation of ontological boundaries between the ‘self’ and the ‘other,’ whether racial, social or sexual.” Loewen’s use of metaphor as a mechanism of expression enables writers to engage in critical discourse without necessarily facing the immediate repercussions of outright criticism of the institution in which they are obliged to live.

The dangers of engaging in prison writing or artwork are many. Prisoner-author Gregory McMaster (1999, 51) identifies the “constant dilemma” of the incarcerated writer, namely, to figure out “how to effectively educate and inform the public about lived prison realities, without insulting or alienating the very people we are trying to encourage.” In tracing the history of prison publications, Robert Gaucher (1989, 7) notes that editors experienced similar problems: “Confined by the isolation of incarceration, faced with the prospect of pleasing both administration and fellow prisoners, constrained by often unintelligible censorship demands . . . editors had to walk a tightrope of conflicting demands and expectations in a situation where failure could have serious consequences.” Gaucher is speaking of the “golden age” of the prison press, during the 1950s and early 1960s—but, as he points out, these difficulties have not gone away.

There is an interestingly fraught parallel here between the dangers that prison writers face, and the scrutiny faced by those who attempt to publish that writing. It is fraught primarily because, as non-Indigenous academics, Nancy Van Styvendale, Allison Piché, and I are by no means as vulnerable to the “serious consequences” that Gaucher invokes for our participation in the project, as the writers are. An ethical editorial approach has to account for this hierarchized difference—in race, culture, gender, and class. Rymhs (2008, 53) also adds “the physical and ideological limitations the prison places on the incarcerated writer” that also complicates the position from which they write, as well as their relationship to those who intervene (ethically or otherwise) in the presentation of their writing publicly.

Conclusions

While we cannot make sweeping claims to any kind of transformative or universal response or impact that involvement in the project may have had on participants, or on the members of the viewing audience, or the prison system at large, we can look at the Dads Doin’ Time show as a marker of the capacities of educational programming in correctional facilities across the country.

Our means of judging audience responses to the exhibition were limited, but included gathering oral testimonies, and having visitors fill out feedback sheets. The feedback we received was encouraging. One local educator wrote that “exploring the effects of incarceration on fatherhood was incredibly eye-opening and an amazing force against racism, prejudice, and continued colonial violence”; another viewer assured the writers that their words conveyed “much power and love for your children”; and many commented on the need for more regular cultural programming of this nature in Saskatoon. We cannot draw a direct correlation between this one art show, or one set of workshops, or even one group of writers, and a reduction of recidivism rates in the city, which has previously served as the most tangible marker of “successful” passage through the criminal justice system in a variety of contexts. However, we can read the overwhelmingly positive responses to the exhibit, which, in the words of one viewer, had the ability to make viewers “re-think the value of presence [and] care [and] intention in regards to family and kinship.” This response points to the power of the exhibit to alter public perceptions of prisoners, if not specifically their capacity as parents. What this indicates is that the writers from the SCC and Str8UP succeeded in finding and establishing a footing in a discursive space that has transformative potential—one that asks its readers to “re-map” their understandings of incarceration, as well as fatherhood behind bars (Martinez 2012). To reiterate, simply participating in a program is not enough to meet the diverse needs of the growing Indigenous inmate population in Canada. To this end, however, the function of educational programming as a means of drawing out relationships between people, as well as relationships between author’s and their own experiences is invaluable.

In “Abolition from Within: Enabling the Citizen Convict,” Doran Larson (2011, 6) argues that one of the benefits prisoners value most about writing classes “is simply the time they spend in an environment of mutual support and respect among other inmates,” adding that “men in prison have to work daily at establishing and maintaining their reputations, preserving allegiances, and watching for new dangers.” The responsibility that these writers bear, particularly when thrust into the public sphere, to represent themselves and also a mounting population of criminalized Indigenous peoples across the country, is immense. Rymhs (2008) sees prison writing as having the ability to incite exponential social change. The Dads Doin’ Time show revealed the intricacies of realities that many do not know about, while humanizing and legitimizing those experiences to the public.

The scopic regime conceptualized by Walsh and upheld by the gallery and art industries is one that could be seen as a kind of readable paratext in spaces displaying Indigenous artworks that actively engage in challenging the very parameters that seek to inhibit them (2002). It is significant to note, however, that seeing the colonial framework of the artworld as a paratext still relies upon the very politics of difference. Although the scopic regime remains present, it was actively and purposefully usurped in order to create space for Indigenous voices to be privileged. The Dads Doin’ Time shows the impactful potential of programs where incarcerated fathers see themselves as fathers and encourage a creation or maintenance of familial bonds despite institutional interventions, through the insistence of things like no-contact visits.

Prison writing has the power to urge readers—as novelist Thomas King (2003) does repeatedly in his 2003 Massey lecture, “The Truth About Stories”—to own the stories presented to them. King tells his own version of a familiar Indigenous creation story, about a woman who fell from the sky. “It’s yours,” he ends. “Do with it what you will. Tell it to friends. Turn it into a television movie. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now” (2003, 29). The works displayed in the gallery asked the same of their viewers. The writing of participants in the Inspired Minds and Str8UP programs similarly display the ravaging effects of public and institutional narrative and insists, on its own terms, that the “story” regarding Indigenous prisoners and their intellectual and familial capacities be rewritten.

Notes

1. 1 The Inspired Minds program was founded by Nancy Van Styvendale and the SCC’s Cultural Coordinator, Diann Block, in collaboration with Allison Piché, then a master’s student at the University of Saskatchewan. The program has since brought on countless volunteer facilitators and has produced at least two collections of writing and drawings under the title Creative Escape.

2. 2 It is necessary to acknowledge that Leonard Peltier has been implicated in the murder of Anna Mae Aquash, a fellow AIM member who was killed in the same year he was arrested. A recognition of his potential involvement casts his self-proclaimed innocence, as well as the notoriety his perceived innocence garnered for the publication and dissemination of his autobiographical writing, in a new and far more complex light.

3. 3 Returning to my previous assertions about Saskatoon’s particular gang violence issues can gesture toward the many elements that factor into the strategic positioning of prisoners in certain units and can also illuminate some of the cultural and social lines along which the residents are made to be divided.

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