Content warning: This article includes discussions on colonial violence against Indigenous peoples, including the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples and residential schools. The content may be triggering for some. For support, please see the university’s resource page.
An undergraduate course, where McMaster students learned alongside prison inmates, changed the entire trajectory of Stone Rivers’ educational journey.
The course was Indigenous Creative Arts and Drama, taught by assistant professor Savage Bear and facilitated by Walls to Bridges – an education program bringing post-secondary education to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated folks (Bear was also the National Director of the program).
Held at Grand Valley Institution for Women, a prison in Kitchener, the course included equal numbers of incarcerated “inside members” and six “outside members” — McMaster students who would travel to the prison for the course.
Participating in Walls to Bridges helped her realize that “people who are incarcerated are everyday people, they could be a family member, a friend or co-worker, or myself,” Rivers said. “They are everyday people.”
The experience sparked her passion for prison advocacy and prison research. “I feel like they’re a forgotten population,” Rivers said. “It’s kind of like they get locked up and [forgotten]… I really want to give them a voice.”
Since that first course, Rivers has become a collective member of Walls to Bridges, where she works with the collective to organize classes, facilitator training and other projects such as transformative justice initiatives. In the summer of 2024, she worked as a research assistant on Bear’s prison research project. Last year, she graduated from the Indigenous Studies undergraduate program at McMaster and started her Master of Indigenous Studies here.
In her master’s research, Rivers is looking at the impact of incarceration on Indigenous motherhood.
Rivers laying in sweetgrass in Mattagami First Nation, her home community.
Rivers, who is Anishinaabe and a member of Mattagami First Nation, said that as an Indigenous mother, she sees how hard it is to continue the culture from the outside. “So I look at what it must be like as an incarcerated mother being able to continue that culture while incarcerated, during incarceration or while imprisoned. It’s very challenging.”
For her research she is including a literature review and a case study on Indigenous mothers who are incarcerated in prisons designated for women.
Some of the specific things she’s examining include the Correctional Service Canada Mother-Child Program, which allows children to be placed with their mothers in prison until the age of five; why Indigenous women are placed at higher security levels, which prevents them from having access to minimum-security programming, and prison regulations that prevent access to elders, ceremonies and culture. At GVI, for example, Elders and ceremony are available, but the access is up to the discretion of the Correctional Service Canada of who gets to access these and how often.
Rivers examines residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, child welfare, and incarceration as connected forms of colonial separation. Her central concern is how incarceration continues this pattern by separating Indigenous mothers from their children and interfering with the kinship relationships through which care, identity, and knowledge are carried between generations.
“Incarceration means removing mothers from their children, families, communities, and the land, and it is heart wrenching,” Rivers said.
Access to culture
Rivers has been surprised by the lack of existing research concerning Indigenous mothers and motherhood. “There’s not a lot out there,” Rivers said. “They’re intergenerational trauma survivors. Their families have been part of the residential schools.”
Rivers hopes her research will contribute to Indigenous decarceration by challenging the assumption that incorporating Indigenous culture into prisons are the answer. “Providing access to culture inside prisons does not undo the harm of separating Indigenous mothers from their children, families, and communities,” she said. “Indigenous communities need the resources and self-determination to care for our own people and keep these relationships ongoing.”
And she notes that it can’t be pan-Indigenism, but culture-specific. “First Nations, Métis and Inuit cultures have their own ways of being, languages, songs, food,” and stories,” she said.
“We cannot accept Indigenous over-incarceration as inevitable and focus only on bringing culture into prisons. Separating Indigenous mothers from their children disrupts the relationships through which culture is lived and passed on.”
In addition to her research work and advocacy, Rivers now volunteers at Grand Valley Institute, and attends a weekly Indigenous drumming circle there, with about 70 people.
In that hour, Rivers said, you see people from all walks of life come together to sing and play music as one. Those who have access to ribbon skirts wear them. Children from the Mother-Child program play in the circle.
“It’s so beautiful and healing. And that’s the thing about Indigenous culture. It heals people from the inside out.”