ABSTRACT
Efforts toward building abolition are frustrated when they encounter the limits of an impoverished settler colonial political imagination. For this reason, decarceral projects must build upon decolonial endeavors that implement the restorative orientation of established Indigenous practices. Such work is best served by appeal to an Indigenous cosmopolitanism, which renews tradition in the urgency of contemporary struggles and fosters diverse solidarities and practices. Framed by such an appeal, this chapter examines decolonial starting points as practiced by the Flying University, a prison education program started by Sol Neely (Cherokee Nation) in Southeast Alaska. Rooted in Lingít Aaní—traditional ancestral lands of the Tlingit people—the chapter offers two critical meditations framed by two excursuses relating to the Flying University: the first meditation adopts an insight from Michel Foucault, that the state is not born as an accomplishment of peace but is codified in the mud and blood of war; the second meditation asks how interpretation can be enacted in the interest of abolitionism—a question that requires phenomenological assessment of the differing political and historical experiences between descendants of victims and perpetrators of colonialism. The chapter calls for a restoration of the logic of the gift against a colonial logic of elimination.
