Incarcerated Nations: Confinement, Removal, and Policing on the Colorado River Indian Reservation

The United States incarcerates more people than any country in the world. The nation's prisons and jails hold more than 2.1 million inmates, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains another 500,000 annually. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. taxpayers paid approximately $85 billion per year to cover the cost of mass incarceration in prisons and jails. This economic burden does not include the added expenses borne by families and communities who lose members to prison along with their potential earnings. Scholars often attribute the expansion in American incarceration to the War on Drugs and identify African Americans as the most prominent victims of unjust systems of imprisonment. However, Indigenous Peoples experienced mass incarceration long before the 1980s. American policies removed Indigenous Peoples from sacred homelands to reservations led by Indian agents who intended to alter traditional lifeways. Federal Indian policy imprisoned, impoverished, and surveilled Indigenous Peoples. Removal and reservation policies created long-standing carceral practices justified as necessary within the United States. Removing and incarcerating Indigenous Peoples made land and resources available to American settlers. However, Americans have often overlooked these practices when considering mass incarceration, even though Indigenous Peoples continue to be disproportionately imprisoned compared to other ethnic groups in the United States. By considering how and why the United States imprisoned Indigenous People, this dissertation elucidates the normalization of mass incarceration and explains how settler colonial projects targeting Indigenous Peoples established carceral structures that continue to affect Americans today. An analysis of the Colorado River Indian Tribes provides the ideal setting to interrogate the detention policies of the United States and the role of settler colonialism in the mass incarceration of Indigenous Peoples.