A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

• An Indigenous literature class at an Oregon prison helps incarcerated women explore identity and find healing through Tommy Orange’s novel about urban Native Americans.  

• Duquesne University students spent a semester with incarcerated individuals at Allegheny County Jail using Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” as a means to discuss justice and “squash the beef.”

• Open Campus has launched its annual year-end fundraising campaign, with donations matched up to $1,000 per individual through December 31. Open Campus is offering a thank you gift to College Inside subscribers who make a donation of $75 or more. We will send you a mug printed with an original work titled, “Reaching Back,” designed by Alvin Smith, an artist incarcerated in Michigan. You can read more about Alvin’s art here and donate here.

“The best way to learn is from stories”

All we got right now are reservation stories, and shitty versions from outdated history textbooks. A lot of us live in cities now. This is just supposed to be like a way to start telling this other story.

 —Tommy Orange, “There There”

A dozen women thumbed through paperback copies of “There There,” with its bright orange and yellow cover, in a college classroom at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon. They went around the table sharing their thoughts on Tommy Orange’s 2018 Pulitzer-nominated novel, which follows a cast of characters whose lives ultimately intersect at a powwow in Oakland, California.

For Erin Juge, this was more than a reading assignment; it was an attempt to better understand her Native identity. She referenced a passage where Orange, a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, describes how powwows draw Native Americans from across the country, with families traveling in caravans, station wagons, and the backs of Ford Broncos. They come from reservations and cities, from pueblos and urban centers, because, as Orange wrote, “we made powwows because we needed a place to be together.” 

When Erin Juge read about the powwow caravans, she saw not just a cultural gathering but a metaphor for her own journey to connect with her heritage. “I really liked how the book was talking about how people come from far and wide to celebrate the coming together of our people,” said Juge, who is Fort Peck Assiniboine. “It really made me think of when I was younger, and I was trying to find my place in the world. When my mom took me to my first powwow, I didn’t feel like I fit in there.”

That’s the kind of connection Carma Corcoran, an adjunct professor at Portland State University and an enrolled citizen of the Chippewa Cree Nation, hoped her students would make when she chose Orange’s novel for her Indigenous literature course. Corcoran said was drawn to Orange’s authentic storytelling, which vividly portrays the challenges urban Natives face as they navigate complex identities. 

Corcoran isn’t a typical literature professor. Her research focuses on the growing numbers of Native American women in prison and how traditional ways of knowing and healing could help break the cycle of incarceration. Teaching Indigenous literature to incarcerated women is a natural extension of her work examining how incarceration interrupts women’s lives, she said.

Corcoran said she’s teaching a class in “truth telling.”

For the women in the class who identify as Native American, the class is an opportunity to learn things about their culture and history they may not know, Corcoran said. For non-Native students, it provides a deeper understanding of Indigenous experiences and perspectives both at home and globally.

The class, part of Portland State’s bachelor’s degree program at Coffee Creek, is one of a series of humanities classes the college has developed focused on Indigenous, African American and Chicanx/Latinx literature supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. For Corcoran, this kind of curriculum is essential in prison education; incarceration profoundly impacts her students’ sense of identity. “At the end of the day, we all want to know who we are,” she said.

Read the rest of the story by Charlotte West. 

Related coverage: Native Hawaiians are overrepresented in prisons. Here’s how cultural education could help.

Slings and arrows set aside in Allegheny County Jail-based ‘Hamlet’ workshops

Page 117, Act II. 

Shawn Daniels lifts himself out of a rigid chair, walks to the middle of the room and launches into a soliloquy. He’s reciting lines from the titular character in the Shakespeare play, “Hamlet,” to a group of around 20 students at the Allegheny County Jail. 

It’s just after 9 a.m., but no one seems tired — especially Daniels. 

He moves around the drab room that stands in for a Danish castle, catching eyes with everyone seated and inflecting his voice. 

“Am I a coward?” he softly asks. “Who calls me villain?” 

The scene ends and the floor opens for feedback. Susan Stein, one of the teachers in the room — and the only one with a theater background — asks the class, “What did you get from that?” 

“He’s ashamed,” someone answers. Stein agrees and coaxes two more performances out of Daniels: first with the anger ratcheted up, then faster. “Don’t think, just go,” she says. 

By the third run-through, Daniels is stamping his feet against the floor and cradling his face in his hands. 

This is what happens when you meet Shakespeare halfway, Stein said. And this fall, it’s what two Duquesne University courses, attended by both first-year students and incarcerated individuals, have encouraged. 

Students took two courses in tandem, titled “Introduction to Criminal Justice” and “Democracy and Justice.” They spent their mornings together twice a week, studying “Hamlet” through three disciplines: sociology, philosophy and theater. These are not acting classes — the closest thing to a prop in the room is a makeshift skull constructed from wads of paper and masking tape. Rather, the courses involve the kind of intimate character study that requires performance.

Instead of curtain call, the courses culminate in a restorative justice exercise, a practice that encourages open dialogue to address harms inflicted on someone. Before the play’s fifth act, when (spoiler alert!) most of the prominent characters die, an alternate ending is explored in which the characters — played by students from both groups — try to work out their conflicts in a peacemaking circle.

Read the rest of Maddy Franklin’s story for our local partner PublicSource. 

Let’s connect

Please connect if you have story ideas or just want to share your experience with prison education programs as a student or educator. You can always reach me at [email protected] or on Bluesky, LinkedIn, or Instagram. To reach me via snail mail, you can write to: Open Campus, 2460 17th Avenue #1015, Santa Cruz, CA 95062.

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