Decarceration through Self-Determination: Ending the mass incarceration of Indigenous Peoples in Can

Fifty percent of women in prison are Indigenous.3 This level of mass incarceration of Indigenous people in prison follows on the heels of over 100 years of residential “schools” (which were schools in name only), and continues alongside the family policing of the “child welfare system” (including the practices referred to as the Millennium Scoop). [...] In the decades to come, these bans resulted in mass 15 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part arrests and trials, and significantly undermined the 1 Origins to 1939,” The Final Report of the Truth and traditional laws and cultures of west coast Indigenous Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 1 (2015), at Peoples. [...] In this report, we aim to amplify their voices in the dialogue on the immediate need for decarceration of Indigenous people, and the corresponding need for an increase in resources in Indigenous communities to prevent and respond to the colonial harms that have fueled the mass incarceration of Indigenous people. [...] Canada’s history of incarcerating Indigenous Peoples is not in compliance with the UN Declaration and the obligation to incorporate Indigenous rights and freedoms is fundamental to creating a just, democratic, humane, equal, and non-discriminatory system of law and policy and stop the overincarceration of and unnecessary deaths of Indigenous Peoples in prison.” 43 The federal United Nations Declar. [...] DECARCERATION THROUGH SELF-DETERMINATION 19 Recognition of the mass incarceration In the most recent Supreme Court of Canada of Indigenous people by the Supreme decision, R v Sharma, Justice Karakatsanis provided an account of the long history of calls to action, Court of Canada the judicial response and the continuing failure to halt the escalating rate of over-representation of The mass incarcer.