Strategies of Survivance: Indigenous Street Gangs and Settler Colonialism

Indigenous peoples globally experience heightened levels of violence and its subsequent trauma resulting, not just from historical impacts of colonization, but continued policies of erasure brought on through settler colonialism. Despite such attacks, Indigenous peoples survive and resist the continued violence and violent erasure on their bodies, knowledges, and territories through strategies of survivance (Vizenor, 2008). This paper examines how Indigenous peoples in Western Canada, specifically those involved in street gang, have created survivance strategies to survive and resist settler colonialism. Focusing on three separate research projects involving Indigenous peoples, who at one time were engaged in street gangs, I show how the participants actively engaged in survivance strategies to survive and build their social capital. Although research is slowly beginning to emerge on the uniqueness of Indigenous street gang experience formation there is still a strong tendency to adopt and adapt to American street gang perceptions. The aim of the three research projects was to engage with those individuals who are/were engaged with an Indigenous-based street gang and those who work with Indigenous street gang members and frame these experiences into the broader literature of colonialism and gang studies to better understand why Indigenous youth are drawn into a street gang lifestyle and the role(s) that the street gang has in creating spaces of survivance across western Canada. The paper is designed to bring to the fore the importance of decolonial approaches to address Indigenous street gangs and challenge the continued criminal justice and public safety rhetoric of street gangs as violent predators who have little connection to their community. To accomplish this, space must be provided to create a counter-narrative to the continued suppressive criminal justice approaches and shift to localized decolonial approaches that view street gangs as sites of survivance within contested colonial spaces.