Light Fires: Indigenous Prison Arts & Education Project
Housed in the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Native Studies, the Light Fires: Indigenous Prison Arts & Education Project makes post-secondary and arts-based education more accessible to incarcerated people. Our work supports the collective and individual empowerment of Indigenous people behind – and beyond – bars.
Educational programming provided by Light Fires includes for-credit and non-credit streams. In our for-credit stream, we offer Walls 2 Bridges (W2B) classes. W2B is a Canada-wide prison exchange program which brings together incarcerated and non-incarcerated students to take for-credit university classes inside prisons. Within the non-credit stream we offer a variety of classes, workshops and programs. These include: the Inspired Minds: Creative Writing 8-Week Program; the Inspired Minds: miyo pimatisiwin Traditional Arts Workshops; and the Bedtime Stories program.
Inspired Minds: All Nations Creative Writing
Inspired Minds (IM) is a creative writing program for people who are incarcerated in Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Walls 2 Bridges
The Walls to Bridges program brings together university students with incarcerated people to study as peers.
Nancy Van Styvendale is a white settler scholar, Associate Professor, and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Native Studies. She is Director of the Indigenous Prison Arts & Education Project (IPAEP), and a co-founder and coordinator of Inspired Minds, a creative writing program for incarcerated people in Saskatchewan and Alberta. She is member of Free Lands Free Peoples, an Indigenous-led, anti-colonial penal abolition group focused on public education and prisoner justice in the prairies. She does community-engaged research in the field of Indigenous literatures, with particular commitments to Indigenous prison writing; penal abolition; arts-based programs in prison; and community-engaged/community-
