Aboriginal Inmates Go on Hunger Strike in Regina, Winning Access to Cultural Practices

Behind the fences, gates, and thick walls of the aging Regina Provincial Correctional Centre (RPCC) in Saskatchewan, 15 inmates began a hunger strike Monday morning. Living in a high-risk unit, allegedly with gang affiliations, the inmates turned away their food so they could instead have access to cultural programming to help them heal with First Nations customs.

"They don't let us smudge or go to sweat lodges or pipe ceremonies; they deny us all our cultural rights," inmate Joshua Bird told the Regina Leader Post.

"They think they're making the jail a safer place by locking us away, but actually they're making us more violent and taking our human spirit away."

Later that same day, executive director of corporate affairs for the Ministry of Justice Drew Wilby explained that hunger strikes, especially to this extent, were rare but safety in the facility is top priority.

"It's a high-security, high-safety-risk unit. All of the individuals there have significant gang affiliations or they were put there because of behaviour within the facility as well as a concern about compatibility with other inmates," Wilby explained.

After local media attention and meetings with the inmates, the correctional centre staff and the inmates came to a compromise Tuesday afternoon. In an email to VICE, a representative for the Ministry of Justice said a smudging unit had been planned in advance of the hunger strike and would be operational within a week. The offenders will also get a microwave and an extra $10 per week of their own money to spend in the canteen. The other request of the inmates, access to the outdoors, was not granted.

The Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies (CAEFS) executive director Kim Pate says that although solved quickly, it shouldn't have been an issue in the first place. CAEFS has worked with women in similar situations usually in federal facilities. Pate explained according to our Charter of Rights and Freedoms Section 15 people should have access to their religious practices and cultural practices whether or not they are in a correctional facility.

"Even in the most secure environments there are elders who have, will, and continue to provide opportunities for individuals to participate in ceremonies. There isn't an excuse unless the elders, him or herself, are saying they don't want to perform the ceremonies for whatever reason," says Pate.

"In this situation I suspect, although I don't know for certain, that the overcrowding issues, the cuts to programs and services generally, are limiting access to many provincial territorial and federal prisons right now."

A report released just five months ago by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives echoed Pate's suspicions. The report, called "Warehousing Prisoners in Saskatchewan: A Public Health Approach," said Saskatchewan's prison system is among the most highly strained in Canada, with provincial jails housing nearly twice the number of inmates they were designed to hold. To accommodate the "crisis" classrooms, gymnasiums, workshops, and even visiting rooms are being turned into dormitories, and most of the province's cells are being double bunked, the report warned that triple-bunking is a "distinct possibility in the future." At the RPCC the report found some inmates had no washroom facilities in their cells. Inmates were left waiting for hours to be brought by a guard to a washroom, some using their garbage cans as an alternative. It also pointed to cancellation and discontinuation of programs, including cultural, because the rooms they would be done in were given a new purpose.

Pate says that in light of the hunger strike "it generally triggers… a concern that there is a much deeper and longer standing problem within that prison and usually it means that the rights have not been adhered to for some time."

Stacey Swampy has seen a lot of changes in the justice system. The former inmate spent more than 20 years navigating his way through the foster care system, welfare system, young offender facilities and eventually both provincial and federal correctional facilities.

"My dad was a bootlegger so I saw people come to the house 24 hours a day, seven days a week… I started drinking when I was nine," Swampy told VICE, adding his downturn really took hold after his father's death when he was 13.

"I started drinking more. I started doing drugs more. I picked the wrong role models. The people I looked up to were coming out of the jail system. They had tattoos all over them, good shape, (and) women chased them… I started to live like those people."

After spending the majority of his life in different kinds of facilities, Swampy started to connect with his culture from behind the bars.

"The ceremonies inside the system gives us the idea of who we are. If I wasn't allowed to attend ceremonies when I was in the system, I would probably be doing a life sentence or probably six feet under right now. The ceremonies that are in the system helped me deal with the traumas that I carried all of my life," says Swampy.

Unfortunately Swampy's story is less the anomaly and more likely the norm.

A 2013 report by the Office of the Correctional Investigator found that while aboriginal people make up about four per cent of the Canadian population, 23.2 per cent of the federal inmate population is aboriginal, the provincial system parallels similar statistics. The incarceration rate for aboriginal people is ten times higher than non-aboriginals and that over-representation just continues to grow. Since 2000 the federal aboriginal inmate population has increased by over 56 per cent and the overall aboriginal representation rate for inmate population has increased from 17 per cent to over 23 per cent. In just the prairies between 2010 and 2013 corrections saw nearly 40 per cent of all new federal inmate growth and most was led by aboriginal offenders, who now comprise more than 45 per cent of the prairies' inmate population.

With the insight of 20 years in the system and now 10 years of sobriety, Swampy said it's critically important that First Nations people in and outside of the judicial system start connecting with their culture.

"The ceremonies show you what you need to be doing for yourself. It shows you how to be responsible, it shows you how to be accountable. Then you start to have that self esteem that we don't have (since residential school), that pride in who you are," says Swampy, who works alongside the Str8 Up program in Saskatoon, Sask. to help women and men exit the gang life, adding that it's the only way to break the legacy of self destruction left by residential schools.

"That's what ceremony does for me, it's given me responsibility which I've never had before. Ceremony has given me accountability which I never had before."