Lacayo is one of the 4.5 million people on probation or parole on any given day in the U.S., almost twice as many people as are currently incarcerated. Community supervision is often thought of as a positive alternative to incarceration. But for many, the strict requirements and intense surveillance turn it into “a secondary form of incarceration,” says Amy Sings in the Timber, an attorney and executive director of the Montana Innocence Project. The consequences for not adhering to the conditions of parole are harsh: A quarter of state prison admissions nationwide are a result of technical violations such as failing a drug test or missing a meeting with a probation or parole officer. “In many instances, in our client populations, there are survival tactics that are criminalized,” reflects Sings in the Timber.

The issue is acute in rural states such as Montana, and disproportionately impacts tribal communities. Native Americans account for 6.5 percent of Montana’s population, but represent 20 percent of the population in men’s prisons and 34 percent of the population in women’s prisons. An ACLU report found that between 2010 and 2017, 81 percent of Native Americans in Montana who were reincarcerated while on probation were charged with a technical violation, not a new crime.

Technical violations send people back to prison because of a lack of support

Complying with requirements of probation or parole can be a high-stakes experience and the system is not set up to help people navigate the complicated network of needs post-release. The threat of punishment makes some fearful to reach out for help, said Lacayo, who is now a community organizer. “[Probation or parole officers] could easily make your life even harder, so it’s very hard to say how you feel,” Lacayo reflected.

There are also a number of practical barriers.

Many conditions of probation or parole require transportation, and in Montana, people may have to drive over an hour on rural highways to reach the nearest probation and parole office. “To be able to even access your supervisor can be impossible in some instances,” says Sings in the Timber.  These long trips are frequent, especially since the Montana Department of Corrections does not accept most urinalysis and drug testing, evaluations, or treatment programs that take place on reservations. Some tribes, like the Fort Peck Reservation in eastern Montana, have a memorandum of understanding with the state that allows tribal members to utilize the tribe’s probation and parole resources to fulfil state requirements. However, this is not a state-wide standard.

Housing is another common requirement of probation and parole, and Montana has 23 housing-related collateral consequence laws that restrict or ban certain forms of housing for formerly incarcerated people with certain convictions. Even pre-release centers — transitional facilities where formerly incarcerated people live under supervision — can be challenging to access, though they are meant to be a stepping stone to independent housing. All pre-release centers in Montana are in urban areas; none are located on reservations. Lacayo also  notes that they are not always designed to be a supportive transitional environment. “When I got to pre-release, one of the directors said ‘Just so you know, I’m not here to be your friend,’” he says. “They have absolute power over you. That’s a very scary thought.” At the time Lacayo lived there, it cost $14 per day. Montanans earn between just 16 cents and $1.25 per hour for employment while incarcerated.

Montana also has 189 employment-related collateral consequences, including bans on many jobs that require occupational licensing, such as commercial truck driving and selling real estate. (One in four jobs in America requires such licensing.) Some of these consequences are mandatory and lifelong, while others are at the discretion of the employer and time limited. Reservations have a separate set of laws, with their own restrictions. Some, including the Fort Peck Reservation, ban anyone with a felony from working for the tribal government, which is often the largest employer in the area. It can be a confusing system to navigate. “The number of employment opportunities are far and few between,” says Sings in the Timber.

Reentry is also expensive. Costs associated with probation and parole — such as mandatory drug tests, restitution, or GPS monitoring — can quickly add up. Compliance Monitoring Services, one of the companies Montana courts use for surveillance, charges up to $360 per month for GPS bracelets, plus a $50 installation fee. If someone can’t afford rent or other fees of probation and parole, the Department of Corrections can garnish their wages, tax refunds, or a tribal member’s per capita payment.

Reentry supports reduce technical violations and recidivism

Social support can be particularly hard to come by as a formerly incarcerated person. A common condition of probation or parole is that you are not allowed to associate with other formerly incarcerated people — especially challenging in small communities or if family members are formerly incarcerated.

Returning to a reservation presents a separate set of barriers. As sovereign nations, reservations do not fall under the jurisdiction of the state. This means that people on probation or parole cannot legally return to their home reservations without extradition waivers, which allowing the state to extradite someone from tribal jurisdiction if a violation occurs. Not all reservations have extradition waiver agreements, however. The Fort Peck Reservation in eastern Montana does, while the Crow Reservation in central Montana does not. Without an extradition waiver, people cannot live on a reservation until they have completed their probation or parole, which may be years.

“It’s almost impossible for [people on probation or parole] without their support system,” reflected Fort Peck Chief Judge Stacie Four Star. “But we see that a lot.” Four Star is pushing for standard memorandums of understanding and extradition agreements statewide, but these ideas have gained little traction.

Recent policy efforts to increase support for formerly incarcerated Native Americans have been unsuccessful. Two bills were introduced in 2019, which would have created a grant program for culturally-based reentry programs and revised an existing reentry housing grant program to require that a certain percentage of funding was allocated to programs serving Native Americans. Neither bill passed. There has been more success with tribal-led programs. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Holistic Defender Program, for example, assists clients to find employment, housing, healthcare, obtain a drivers license, and connects people with mentors, such as tribal elders, to provide cultural support.

The pandemic has expedited the need for improved reentry support. In spring 2020, Indigenous and Latinx activists in Montana, including Lacayo, organized a campaign called Let Them Come Home to advocate for an end to arrests for technical violations, temporarily waive probation and parole requirements, and reduce the number of people in Montana jails and prisons. Despite their efforts, Montana actually released fewer people from prison in 2020 than they did in 2019.

Without meaningful reentry support, technical violations will likely continue and people will continue to be re-incarcerated. “How can you jump through all these hoops and follow the rules if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from or where you can sleep safely?” reflected Sings in the Timber. “We need to take a look at technical violations not as someone willfully doing wrong, but as a strong sign that there is support that is needed.”

The federal government has long attempted to sever tribes from the land — their source of knowledge, culture, and health. Through war and forced relocation, tribes were physically removed. Policies such as the 1887 General Allotment Act forced many to adopt sedentary lifestyles and use Western agricultural techniques. And contemporary legal restrictions on centuries old fishing, hunting, and gathering techniques means that tribes are still limited in how they can gather foods and medicines.

Food sovereignty — efforts to re-create local, sustainable, and traditional food systems that prioritize community need over profits — has been one of the major ways tribal communities are combating disparities driven by colonial policies. Food sovereignty looks different in every tribe, as it is based on community need and tribal tradition, and it isn’t just about food. Swinomish efforts have focused on the impacts of climate change, which is already threatening their community health.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

History led many reservations to become food insecure, and federal support is limited. Hundreds of tribes utilize the Federal Distribution Program on Indian Reservations — which since 1973 has distributed bulk food items to rural Native Americans who don’t have access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-eligible stores — but the food often doesn’t meet basic dietary standards and sometimes arrives spoiled.

Loss of land and traditional foods has caused myriad health problems in tribal communities. Native Americans have the highest rates of diabetes of any racial group, as well as disproportionately higher rates of cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Mental wellbeing has also been impacted: Some scholars argue that colonial violence like displacement and spiritual disconnection from the land has led to cross-generational trauma and unresolved grief for Native individuals and communities.

Climate change is making this worse.

Historically, the Swinomish harvesting calendar revolved around 13 moons. The calendar corresponds to seasonal shifts throughout the year, with each moon bringing a new set of ceremonies and foods to be collected and processed. The first moon of spring, moon when the frog talks, is when herring and smelt are harvested and sitka spruce, red cedar, and Oregon grape roots are collected. In the moon of the sacred time, during the end of December and January, cultural traditions are passed from elders to younger community members.

The seasonal changes associated with each moon are becoming less predictable with climate change. Extreme heat waves in the normally moderate climate stress plants and may stunt root development. Less predictable or extreme tides (whether too high or too low) hamper clam digging and other shorefront gathering.

Public health leaders, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, recognize that climate change has direct impacts on human health. These impacts may be even more acute for the Washington tribe: the reservation is 90 percent surrounded by water, and salmon, crab, and clam are major sources of food. The sea is of intimate importance.

Yet Western measurements of health and climate impact do not take cultural history, interdependence, and connection to the land and non-human world into consideration, often focusing exclusively on individual, physiological health impacts. For example, a toxicologist may look at pollutants in seafood and advise the Swinomish to eat less. Yet when taking into consideration food security, ceremonial use, and transmission of traditional knowledge, the removal of seafood would be detrimental to Swinomish conceptions of health; climate change is threatening the tribe’s autonomy.

To address this disconnect, in 2003, Dr. Jamie Donatuto, the environmental health analyst for the tribe, set out with elder Larry Campbell to develop indigenous health indicators, which they hoped would bring a more holistic and culturally relevant lens to public health policy, climate change predictions, environmental risk assessment, and the tribe’s food sovereignty work. After interviewing more than 100 community members, they determined the Swinomish health indicators to be: self-determination (healing and restoration, development and trust); cultural use (respect and stewardship, sense of place); natural resource security (quality, access, safety); resilience (self-esteem, identity, sustainability); education (teachings, elders, youth); and community connection (work, sharing, relations).

One of the first challenges they wanted to tackle using these indicators was climate change impacts. After gathering data on predicted storm surge, sea-level rise, sediment movement and more, they led a series of workshops with elders, youth, clam diggers, and fishers, to gauge which beaches they should focus their limited resources on. They identified several that were both culturally significant to the tribe and at high risk for climate impacts, and focused their workshops on traditional foods to contextualize these problems.

“It’s not about outreach, it’s not unidirectional. It’s about really engaging them,” Donatuto reflected. Now, based on community input, the tribe is developing clam gardens that are more resilient to climate impacts such as sea level rise, storm surge, and possibly ocean acidification. Clam gardens are a traditional way of managing a beach ecosystem to create optimal habitat for clams while ensuring food security for the tribe. Dr. Donatuto’s team also shared community feedback with the Swinomish Senate, who valued their priorities equally to scientific data when constructing the tribe’s climate change adaptation plan.

Beyond policy changes to address climate change impacts, elders were also concerned about a generational disconnect in traditional ecological knowledge. Using the 13 moons as a guide, in 2015 the tribe developed an informal curriculum to educate youth on the lunar calendar and traditional foods. Though it has attracted interest from local schools, Donatuto stressed that it is a land-based, community-led curriculum. The tribe hosts dinners and other events in which elders and educators lead community members outside to learn, for example, tree identification, how to collect tree resin, and how to process it. Participants not only learn about traditional foods, but learn it through traditional methods of knowledge transmission.

Swinomish food sovereignty and climate change adaptation efforts are reflective of national movements in Indigenous reclamation and resistance. Tribes recognize that in many cases, disparities that face Native communities are borne from and exacerbated by systemic colonial and racial violence, including the devaluation of Indigenous knowledge. So how could the same system that produced these disparities be a source of the solution?

Resistance and reclamation take many forms. The White Earth Band of Ojibwe recently recognized the “personhood” rights of wild rice in an effort to thwart oil pipeline construction through their habitat. Some tribal courts are beginning to draw from traditional gender and familial beliefs instead of U.S. federal law in domestic violence, divorce, and custody cases. And studies have found that Native students in schools that teach entirely in tribal languages are often higher performing than their counterparts that attend English-only schools, including on English language standardized tests.

As these and Swinomish efforts reflect: Revitalization of Indigenous knowledge, politics, and land relations is not just about remembering traditions, but solving urgent contemporary issues.