The School-Prison Trust by Sabina Vaught, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy and Jeremiah Chin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The School-Prison Trust by Sabina Vaught, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy and Jeremiah Chin Sarah E. K. Fong Sabina Vaught, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, and Jeremiah Chin. The School-Prison Trust. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 129 pp. Paperback, $10.00. The School-Prison Trust is a slim but generative consideration of how schools and prison reproduce conquest by hiding state power behind the language of rehabilitation and repair. Coauthored by Sabina Vaught, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, and Jeremiah Chin, the book examines the relationship between schools and prisons through the [End Page 183] lens of Native Studies. This approach reveals the school-prison trust—a constellation of institutions and practices that tie incarceration to education—to be a tool of ongoing colonial warfare. The book draws its narrative and theoretical energy from the refusal praxes of Jakes, an incarcerated Indigenous youth who Vaught came to know through a long-term ethnographic project in a prison school. The book’s narrative arc is propelled forward by vignettes illustrating how Jakes refuses the structuring logics of the school-prison trust, even as he remains captive within it. These vignettes are the authors’ “kernels of thinking,” the sparks for the theoretical arguments and interventions that the book makes. Beginning and ending with Jakes, The School-Prison Trust is as much a meditation on self-determined worlds as it is a diagnosis of the colonial nature of schools and prisons. Drawing on their backgrounds in education and law, Vaught, Brayboy, and Chin engage the fields of Black Studies and Native Studies to develop their understanding of the school-prison trust. They extend extant analyses of the relationship between schools and prisons by grounding their analysis in the history and present of colonialization, racialization, and capitalism. By engaging thinkers such as Cedric Robinson, Katherine McKittrick, and Robin Kelley, the book reveals how the school-prison trust reproduces racial difference and capitalist social relations. Such thinking, alongside Leanne Simpson, Dian Million, and Mishuana Goeman, illuminates the ongoing nature of colonial conquest, particularly as it is enacted through trust relations. Trusteeship, the conceptual foundation of the book, names a practice of conquest that circumscribes Native sovereignty through claims of dependency and incapacity for self-governance. It is a war power that operates alongside purchase and theft to obtain Indigenous lands. For Vaught, Brayboy, and Chin, it is a “more sophisticated technique” of conquest animated by paternalistic relations and wardship. One of the book’s primary contributions is the assertion that trusteeship is endlessly reenacted through the school-prison trust. This complex of carceral, educational, and rehabilitative institutions works to dispossess Indigenous people of the land, children, and futures by claiming that Native people are incapable of governing at the level of family and nation. Within the school-prison trust, the prison and pupil are one in the same. The prisoner must be educated, and the student must be contained. Vaught, Brayboy, and Chin convincingly argue that the school-prison [End Page 184] trust targets Native women and children especially, precisely because their very being poses an existential threat to the colonial order. The concept of the school-prison trust is useful for deepening our understanding of the colonial function of pedagogical, carceral, and rehabilitative practices. The book’s main strength, however, lies in its attention to flickering yet powerful moments of refusal that reveal the frailty of the school-prison trust. By centering Jakes as a practitioner of refusal, the authors illuminate the lines of flight that rupture a seemingly closed institutional complex and insist on an Indigenous present and future. In the face of ongoing colonial warfare enacted through schools, prisons, and their pedagogical praxes, The School-Prison Trust affirms Native youth and women as potentially anti-colonial actors. The introduction lays out the colonial ideologies and juridical terms upon which the school-prison trust is built: discovery, property, and trust. Discovery imagines and codifies land, people, and knowledge as vacant and un-owned. This justifies colonial accumulation and domination. Discovery—which appears to extinguish Indigenous rights and relations to land, knowledge, and children—is the cornerstone of property and property law in the United States. This logic asserts that when land...