American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Combining literary and social analyses, this article focuses on an overlooked text, Janet Campbell Hale’s The Jailing of Cecelia Capture (1985), which stands out in contemporary Native American literature because of its focus on the imprisonment of a Native woman. The issues that The Jailing of Cecelia Capture raises remain relevant and critical. The 2015 death of a Lakota woman imprisoned for a bond violation, Sarah Lee Circle Bear, who was found unconscious in a cell in South Dakota, echoes central themes in Hale’s novel. Native writers have made connections between the untimely demise of Circle Bear and that of another young woman the week following: Sandra Bland, an African American woman discovered hanging lifeless in her Texas cell. This article asks, what does this constellation of confinement—characters in Hale’s novel, Sarah Lee Circle Bear, and Sandra Bland—reveal about the continuities and discontinuities, as well as the politics and forces, that influence the incarceration and oppression of Native and African Americans?