Criminalizing the Colonized: Ontario Native Women Confront the Criminal Justice System, 1920–60

Abstract

Over the past decade, Aboriginal women’s conflicts with the law and their plight within the penal and child welfare systems have received increasing media and government attention. Framed by the political demands of Native communities for self-government, and fuelled by disillusionment with a criminal justice system that has resolutely failed Native peoples—both as victims of violence and as defendants in the courts—government studies and royal commissions have documented the shocking overincarceration of Native women. At once marginalized, yet simultaneously the focus of intense government interest, Native women have struggled to make their own voices heard in these inquiries. Their testimony often speaks to their profound alienation from Canadian society and its justice system, an estrangement so intense that it is couched in despair. “How can we be healed by those who symbolize the worst experiences of our past?” asked one inmate before the 1990 Task Force on federally sentenced women.2 Her query invokes current Native exhortations for a reinvention of Aboriginal traditions of justice and healing; it also speaks directly to the injuries of colonialism experienced by Aboriginal peoples.