Actual identities of First Peoples are not reflected in common language despite the fact that understanding how Aboriginal peoples understand themselves is essential to efforts to ameliorate conditions which lead to imprisonment.

Returning to the statistics on over-representation, this point about the importance of identity is made clear. Available only for the prairie region are some more specific statistics about the Aboriginal population in federal prison. Of the 67 women serving a federal sentence in May of 2000, 53 identified as “North American Indian” while 14 identified as Metis and 3 as Inuit (Borrowman 2000: 1). The over-representation of First Nations women (that is “North American Indians”) is most pronounced in the prairies as they accounted for 47.1% of the federally sentenced women population and 79.1% of the Aboriginal offender population. Patterns of over-representation across Aboriginal people indicate that at least in the Prairie Region, the incarceration rates of First Nations women suggest that further study is essential so we understand why the representation is skewed in this particular way. Additionally, ameliorative efforts should be directed specifically to First Nation populations. AS the women are Cree, Saulteaux, Ojibwe and so on; it emphasizes the need to think beyond general naming categories.

Acknowledging Colonialism:

A white settler society is one established by Europeans on non- European soil. Its origins lie the dispossession and near extermination of Indigenous populations by conquering Europeans. As it evolves a white settler society continues to be structured by a racial hierarchy. In the national mythologies of such societies, it is believed that white people came first and that it is they who principally developed the land; Aboriginal peoples are presumed to be mostly dead or assimilated. European settlers thus become the original inhabitants and the group most entitled to the fruits of citizenship. A quintessential feature of white settler mythologies is, therefore, the disavowal of conquest, genocide, slavery, and the exploitation of the labour of peoples of colour. In North America, it is still the case that European conquest and colonization are often denied, largely through the fantasy that North America was peacefully settled and not colonized.

Dr. Sherene Razack, 2002 (1-2).

Over-representation cannot just be understood as a peripheral tragedy, one in a continuing experience Aboriginal people would describe as colonialism.⁸ The Commissioners of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba discussed the complexities of colonial relationships and their impact on today:

Cultural oppression, social inequality, the loss of self-government and systemic discrimination, which are the legacy of the Canadian government’s treatment of Aboriginal people, are intertwined and interdependent factors, and in very few cases is it possible to draw a simple and direct correlation between any one of them and the events which lead an individual Aboriginal person to commit a crime or to become incarcerated. We believe that the overall weight of the evidence makes it clear that these factors are crucial in explaining the reasons why Aboriginal people are over-represented in Manitoba jails (86).

It is the legacy of colonialism that underlies the over-representation of Aboriginal peoples in the Canadian criminal justice system. The dilemma, however, is that current Canadian human rights regimes do not expressly acknowledge colonialism as a form of discrimination.

The gendered specificity of colonialism is an essential component to understanding the present day situation of Aboriginal women in prison which one legal scholar has called a “glaring sexual inequity” (Gibson 1990: 227). Kim Anderson in her ground-breaking work, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood, traces in detail the impact of colonial relations on Aboriginal women (2000: 58, 62-65, 68-71, 75-78, 83-85, 91-94,97-98).⁹ Her concluding comments on the devastation colonialism has wrought demonstrates the reason why understanding colonialism must be essential to understanding the discrimination Aboriginal women in prison experience. Anderson explains: