two - Towards a critical Indigenous criminology

Summary

The focus of this chapter is knowledge; in particular, the way(s) in which knowledge – and its production and dissemination – on the one hand provides the basis for the subjugation of Indigenous peoples in settler colonial contexts, while on the other hand supporting contemporary modes of Indigenous resistance and empowerment (Smith, 1999; Nakata, 2002; Sefa Dei, 2002; Alfred, 2005; Wane, 2013). The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to engage the discipline of criminology in a critical conversation about the predilection of the discipline to sideline Indigenous experiences in the formulation of knowledge about crime and social harm; second, to affirm the validity of Indigenous knowledge in understanding crime and social harm, and in the development of effective responses to these phenomena. Our second goal will only ever be partial, given the complexity and multiplicity of Indigenous experiences and perspectives.

Epistemologically, we consider the discursive project of an Indigenous criminology as a way to rupture the sense of comfort and complacency that exists in conventional criminological approaches to the construction, validation and dissemination of disciplinary knowledge in Western educational and policy settings (Sefa Dei, 2002). For this reason we explicitly reject the position taken by some criminologists, such as Weatherburn (2014), that we have learnt nothing from Indigenous research and scholarship on the causes of crime, or responses to it. Instead, we adhere to Hampton's (cited in Gilchrist, 1997, p 70) argument that ‘it may not be a shortage of research that hampers but a shortage of research that is useful from [Indigenous] points of view’.

Criminology, knowledge and ‘othering’ the Indigenous

In his inaugural professorial lecture at Queen's University, Belfast, Phil Scraton (2005, p 3) stated that ‘[n]o group conceives itself as the One, the essential, the absolute, without conceiving and defining the Other. The Other is the stranger, the outsider, the alien, the suspect community: Otherness begets fear, begets hostility, begets denial’ (emphasis in original). There have been many ‘others’ through the relatively short histories of contemporary social democracies, African Americans in the US, the proletariat and lumpen proletariat residing in capitalist economies, the traveller communities of Europe, and women (or at least certain categories of women) residing in Western patriarchies (Young, 2003; Scraton, 2005 pp 3-4).