Introduction

Abstract

The introduction traces the troubled state of Indigenous incarceration in the United States and across the globe, as well as the origins of the Kailua Prison Writing Project at the Women's Community Correctional Center. The then warden, Mark Kawika Patterson, introduced Hawaiian programming in his trauma-informed care initiative to address the kinds of trauma experienced by the women inside, ranging from personal to collective historical trauma. Historical trauma is particularly deleterious for Native Hawaiian women, who are disproportionately represented among the prison population. State violence is the malefactor in Hawai‘i as the linkages of multiple forms of interpersonal violence and trauma with settler colonialism are palpable in the contemporary landscape. Expressivity (poetry, life writing, and performance) counters the demarcation of a civic death for those incarcerated and emphasizes the specificity of inside women's voices in Hawai‘i.