Source: MT Readings, Buckets 3 & 4
Tags: soul wound, intergenerational trauma, restorative justice, Native American boarding schools, convict leasing, Black Codes, social death, natal alienation, neoslave body, Dennis Childs, Joshua Price, Angela Davis, Luana Ross, Andrea Smith
Bucket 3 examines how the trauma inflicted on ancestors continues to shape present-day communities, with particular attention to Native American experiences of colonial violence, boarding schools, and forced assimilation. Bucket 4 traces how slavery was reconstituted after the Civil War through Black Codes, convict leasing, and the carceral state, producing what scholars call "social death." Both buckets are concerned with how past violence lives on in present structures and bodies, and both point toward alternatives: restorative justice and abolition.
Soul wound
A concept used in Native American communities and adopted by Andrea Smith to describe the cumulative psychological and spiritual damage of colonialism, genocide, and forced assimilation, particularly through the boarding school system. The wound is collective and intergenerational, not individual.
Intergenerational trauma
Trauma transmitted across generations through social, psychological, and epigenetic mechanisms. In the course context, it refers to how the effects of slavery, genocide, boarding schools, and forced removal continue to shape health, behaviour, and community well-being today.
Restorative justice
An approach to harm that focuses on repairing relationships and restoring community wholeness rather than on punishment. Contrasted with the retributive logic of the carceral state.
Social death
A condition in which a person is stripped of social ties, kinship, legal standing, and community belonging. Originally theorised by Orlando Patterson in relation to slavery, extended by Joshua Price to the experience of contemporary imprisonment.
Natal alienation
A component of social death: the systematic severing of a person from their ancestry, kinship network, and cultural heritage. Under slavery, this was achieved through the destruction of family ties. In prisons, it operates through isolation, transfer, and the erasure of social identity.
Neoslave body (Dennis Childs)
Childs's term for the way the Black body is re-enslaved through the carceral system. The "neo" signals continuity, not metaphor: convict leasing, chain gangs, and contemporary prison labour reproduce the material conditions of slavery under different legal authority.
Convict leasing
The system, predominant in the South from the 1870s to the 1940s, in which states leased imprisoned people (overwhelmingly Black) to private companies for labour. Conditions were often worse than slavery because the lessee had no ownership stake in the labourer's survival.
Black Codes
Laws enacted by Southern states immediately after the Civil War to restrict the freedom of formerly enslaved people. Vagrancy laws, apprenticeship statutes, and labour contracts criminalised Black autonomy and funnelled Black people into the convict lease system.
Radical Reconstruction
The period (roughly 1867–1877) during which the federal government attempted to restructure Southern society through constitutional amendments, military occupation, and the enfranchisement of Black men. Its dismantling opened the door to Black Codes and convict leasing.
Second Reconstruction
A term for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s–1960s, framing it as a second attempt to fulfil the promises of the first Reconstruction.
Social construction of Native American criminality (Luana Ross)
Ross argues in Inventing the Savage that the criminal justice system's treatment of Native Americans is not a response to actual crime rates but a product of colonial ideologies that construct Indigenous people as inherently deviant.
Andrea Smith (Week 6, "Soul Wound"): Native American children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in boarding schools designed to "kill the Indian, save the man"
The schools enforced English-only policies, Christian worship, and Western dress while punishing Indigenous language, spirituality, and cultural practices
Physical and sexual abuse was widespread
The trauma did not end with the schools. It was transmitted to subsequent generations through disrupted parenting, substance use, community fragmentation, and loss of cultural knowledge
Luana Ross (Week 6, Inventing the Savage): colonialism constructed Native American identity as inherently criminal
The legal system imposed Euro-American norms of property, family, and behaviour onto Indigenous communities, then criminalised the resulting "deviance"
Policing on reservations (Dian Million, "Policing the Rez") operates as an extension of colonial control, not as community safety
(Week 6) Examines how Native American lands have been designated "national sacrifice areas" for military testing, resource extraction, and waste disposal
The environmental destruction is a form of ongoing colonial violence tied to the same spatial logic discussed in Bucket 2
Connects ancestral trauma to present-day environmental racism
The course positions restorative justice not as a soft alternative to punishment but as a fundamentally different theory of harm and repair
Rooted in Indigenous justice traditions that pre-date colonisation
Miskoo Petite Sr. (Week 6): practical example of Native American justice systems on the Rosebud Reservation, focused on rehabilitation rather than incarceration
Angela Davis (Week 3, Chapter 6 of Are Prisons Obsolete?): abolitionist alternatives to prison draw on restorative principles
The 13th Amendment abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime"
Southern states exploited this exception immediately: Black Codes criminalised unemployment, movement, and assembly for Black people
Convict leasing channelled newly criminalised Black people into forced labour for private industry
The system was enormously profitable for states and corporations, creating an economic incentive for mass criminalisation
(Week 5) Childs traces the continuity from the slave plantation to the chain gang to the modern penitentiary
The "neoslave body" is not a metaphor: the material conditions of forced labour, confinement, and dehumanisation are structurally reproduced
The prison is not a post-slavery institution but a continuation of slavery by other legal means
(Week 5, Chapter 1: "Crossing the Abyss") Price applies Patterson's concept of social death to contemporary incarceration
Prisoners experience natal alienation: severed from family, community, and social identity
Incarceration produces a form of civil death that persists after release through felony disenfranchisement, employment discrimination, and social stigma
(Week 5, Are Prisons Obsolete? Chapter 2) Davis draws a direct line from slavery through convict leasing to mass incarceration
The prison is not a reform of slavery but a transformation of it
Abolitionist perspectives on prisons parallel abolitionist perspectives on slavery: both require not just the destruction of the institution but the construction of alternatives
Radical Reconstruction (1867–1877): brief period of Black political participation, land redistribution efforts, and federal protection
Its collapse enabled the rise of Jim Crow, Black Codes, and convict leasing
The Second Reconstruction (Civil Rights Movement) can be read as an attempt to complete what the first left unfinished
Du Bois's abolition democracy framework (Bucket 1) provides the theoretical lens: incomplete abolition produces new forms of domination
(Week 4) Coates traces the economic plunder of Black communities from slavery through convict leasing, Jim Crow, redlining, and predatory lending
The argument connects Bucket 4 (the racial state) to Bucket 2 (spatial imaginary): economic extraction operates through spatial mechanisms
Reparations are framed not as charity but as a debt owed for centuries of material theft
(Week 5) Louis Burnham's "Behind the Lynching of Emmett Louis Till" contextualises Till's murder within the system of racial terror that enforced Black subordination
Lynching functioned as an extra-legal enforcement mechanism alongside the legal mechanisms of Black Codes and convict leasing
Timeline of the Racial State:
Slavery → Emancipation (1865) → Black Codes (1865–66) → Radical Reconstruction (1867–77) → Collapse of Reconstruction / Rise of Jim Crow → Convict Leasing (1870s–1940s) → Civil Rights / Second Reconstruction (1950s–60s) → Mass Incarceration (1970s–present)
The course argues this is not a sequence of separate events but a continuous process of adaptation: each time one form of racial control is challenged, the system reconstitutes itself in a new legal form.
⚠️ The 13th Amendment's exception clause ("except as a punishment for crime") is the legal hinge connecting slavery to convict leasing. Be able to explain how this exception was exploited.
⚠️ "Social death" and "natal alienation" are precise technical terms. Do not use them loosely. Social death is not the same as social exclusion or marginalisation; it refers to the total stripping of social personhood.
⚠️ The course draws a parallel between the boarding school system (Bucket 3) and the prison system (Bucket 4): both are institutions of forced confinement designed to destroy community ties and impose dominant-culture norms. Be prepared to make this comparison.
⚠️ Coates's "Case for Reparations" bridges Buckets 2 and 4. An exam question may ask you to explain how spatial and carceral mechanisms of racial extraction work together.
⚠️ Ross's argument about the "social construction of Native American criminality" applies the same logic to Indigenous peoples that Davis applies to Black incarceration. Cross-racial comparison is the course's method.
Q: What is the "soul wound" and how does it manifest in present-day Native American communities?
A: The soul wound is the cumulative, intergenerational trauma produced by colonialism, genocide, and forced assimilation, particularly through the boarding school system. It manifests today through disrupted family structures, substance use, mental health crises, and community fragmentation. The wound is collective rather than individual, transmitted across generations through broken cultural transmission and unresolved grief.
Q: How does Dennis Childs argue that the prison system is a continuation of slavery rather than a separate institution?
A: Childs traces the material continuity from plantation to chain gang to penitentiary, arguing that the "neoslave body" experiences the same conditions of forced labour, confinement, and dehumanisation under different legal authority. The 13th Amendment's exception for criminal punishment provided the legal mechanism, while Black Codes and convict leasing provided the practical infrastructure for re-enslavement.
Q: What is "social death" and how does Joshua Price apply it to contemporary prisons?
A: Social death, originally theorised by Orlando Patterson, is the condition of being stripped of kinship, community belonging, and social personhood. Price argues that contemporary imprisonment produces social death through natal alienation (severance from family and community), the erasure of social identity, and civil death that persists after release through disenfranchisement and stigma.
Q: How do the experiences of Native Americans in the boarding school system parallel the experiences of Black Americans in the convict lease system?
A: Both are institutions of forced confinement operated by or on behalf of the state. Both aim to destroy existing community and kinship ties (natal alienation). Both impose dominant-culture norms through violence. Both produce intergenerational trauma. The boarding school targeted Indigenous children to eliminate cultural reproduction; convict leasing targeted Black adults to extract labour. Both served the same structural function: maintaining racial control after the formal end of earlier systems (genocide/removal and slavery, respectively).
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