Thread by @ChoctawFreedmen

The reason why we even have federal prisons or a federal justice system at all today is because that was the way the US government was able to criminalize Native people/territories and begin weakening tribal sovereignty. The “feds” are actually a fairly recent invention.

And federal prisons and incarceration were literally invented as a way to control and criminalize not only Indigenous individual people but Indigenous sovereign nations as well. Leavenworth Federal Prison was the first ever federal prison and was opened in 1896.

With the introduction of the Major Crimes Act of 1885, US criminal laws expanded to all Native peoples on and off the reservations, increasing the federal government’s reach into Indian crime in Indian Territory, policing people for behaviors that may have been perfectly legal.

With the conception of Indigenous people and traditional Indigenous customs as “savage,” Native people were treated as deviant, and American legal customs treated “normal, everyday behaviors of Natives as offenses, as many traditional tribal codes became “illegal.”

By 1906, 70% of Leavenworth’s prisoners were originally from Indian Territory and Oklahoma. In the 1890s and early 1900s, Native Americans in what we call the "United States" were not U.S. citizens, and had little to no protections under U.S. law. This included Freedmen.

However, these Indigenous people were still being arrested and tried under US law for crimes committed on INDIAN TERRITORY (NOT US TERRITORY) as non-US citizens. As you can imagine, this would have a detrimental impact on Indigenous people, including Black Natives.

I mean really think about this. You have some Freedmen and other Natives all across the North American continent being arrested by the US govt for behaviors that may have been considered perfectly legal under their tribal laws on their own tribal territory, all while not even

being considered US citizens. This was a truly insane time. And in this majority-Indigenous prison, prisoners would be punished for infractions as small as talking, which was reportedly never allowed in the prison. You have to wonder if maybe prisoners were barred from

talking because they would have been able to communicate with one another in their own Indigenous languages that white guards would not have been able to understand. Prisoners were sent to solitary for talking, laughing, using foul language, marching out of step, etc.

During an interview about the prison,Robert W. McClaughry, the prison warden, was asked what inmates could expect if they got out of line. His response was, “Leavenworth is hell.”

The best part of this all is that the Major Crimes Act was really a part of a larger scheme of weakening tribal sovereignty and assimilation, in an attempt to convince tribes to accept land allotments, as their sovereignty weakened. And only a few years later, the Dawes Act

and the Curtis Act forced many tribes throughout the US to allot their reservation land and disband tribal governments. Federal criminalization was really just a larger part of the colonization and western expansion regime.

But it also hurt so many real and tangible people. Leavenworth truly was hell and Native men and women, as well as other people (both Black and white) who were arrested for “crimes” in Indian Territory and on federal lands suffered for these schemes.

Throughout the next couple of months, were going to post stories of prisoners at Leavenworth, both of Freedmen and other Indigenous prisoners and some of non-Indigenous Black prisoners as well. These stories deserve to be told.

So many prisoners “died” while incarcerated and they cannot be forgotten. This prison was seriously evil with how they targeted certain prisoners and it was really just a way to control Indian Territory.

By the way, many of the early prisoners were “working” to build the very prison they were abused in. It was so new that the prisoners were building the prison themselves.

#NativeAmerican #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth #massincarceration #BlackLivesMatter #prisons #history #BlackHistory #NativeAmericanHistory

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