Considers colonial school-prison systems in relation to the self-determination of Native communities, nations, and peoples

The School-Prison Trust describes interrelated histories, ongoing ideologies, and contemporary expressions of what the authors call the school-prison trust : a conquest strategy encompassing the boarding school and juvenile prison models, and deployed in the long war against Native peoples. At its heart, the book is a constellation of stories of Indigenous self-determination in the face of this ongoing conquest.

Following the stories of an incarcerated young man named Jakes, the authors consider features of school-prison relations for young Native people to ask urgent questions about Indigenous sovereignty, conquest, survivance, and refusal.