Aboriginal healing lodges in Canada: still going strong? Still worth implementing in the USA?

ABSTRACT

Aboriginal healing lodges are a means of accommodating Aboriginal customary law in the Canadian correctional system by providing holistic culturally appropriate services to Aboriginal offenders. They combine Aboriginal healing practices with non-Aboriginal correctional practices as determined by Canadian law and Correctional Service Canada policy. Some are operated by Aboriginal Nations/organizations and some by the Correctional Service Canada. The co-optation of healing lodges through federal correctional policy is contrary to the intent of Canadian law. This combination of state disregard for the law and cultural appropriation provides lessons for Indigenous American groups contemplating more involvement in correctional services. In the USA, the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 and policies regarding private prisons may help or threaten the implementation of healing lodges. In both countries, state laws and policies seem to be subverting Indigenous sovereignty but this makes healing lodges even more valuable. Just as healing lodges could enhance community capacity building in Canada, Indigenous American healing lodges could assist with community capacity-building, as well as reducing recidivism rates. Healing lodges thereby have the potential to increase indigenous sovereignty in both countries, political climate permitting.

KEYWORDS:

• Aboriginal peoples
• Native Americans
• corrections
• healing lodges
• colonialism

Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge the excellent suggestions and insights of three anonymous reviewers. They ensured this was a more comprehensive and critical discussion of the issues, and a much better article all round.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As Archambeault (2003, 10–11) points out, naming of Indigenous peoples in the USA is a contentious issue with serious political repercussions that can and has caused conflict among the country's Indigenous people. Rather than review his excellent discussion of the issue in this article, I recommend the reader to his writings (especially 2003, 2014), and will use the inclusive and relatively neutral term “Indigenous people” to refer to American Indians, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives (including Inuit), Native Hawaiians and people of Indigenous ancestry in all the categories that Archambeault describes, unless there is a specific reason to identify the group.

2. In Canada, federal prisons hold adult prisoners sentenced to two years or more; provincial institutions hold prisoners who are sentenced to two years less a day. In the USA, the sentencing is based on the jurisdiction of the court in which the individual was at trial, not the length of the sentence.

3. The Violence Against Women Act of 2013 was supposed to fix this lack but also has weaknesses so that, for example, it does not cover stranger rape against Indigenous women. As well, it puts even further restrictions on tribal sovereignty by reinforcing the Indian Civil Rights Act (1968) as well as requiring that the accused get a jury trial (Zhang 2015).

4. Riley (2007) argues that liberal scholars face a paradox as they work to accommodate pluralism but also argue against the exercise of inherent sovereign rights by tribal governments through traditionally-based practices that may limit individual civil liberties.