Austin Buddhist Prison Projects

Gatesville, Mountain View Unit

Nancy MacLaine began the project at the Mountain View Women’s unit in Gatesville to support a group of Native American women, one Saturday a month, alternating a study group one month and a prayer pipe ceremony the other months. It is not a Buddhist or meditation group.

Nancy started this with no personal heritage connection with the Native American traditions or prior experience with them because she felt that it was not right for inmates to be separated from their spiritual traditions just because they are incarcerated and they aren’t in the Christian majority. 

There are 15 prisons in Texas with Native American populations and it appears that only 2 have volunteers ministering to them.  But at less than 3% of the population they are hard to locate and muster. There is no longer any official support – there used to be a traveling Native American chaplain under contract to TDCJ, but no longer. 

For Nancy, the bottom line is that no matter the pretext for getting into the prison the real point is to contact an isolated prison population and let them know they are loved, no matter what they did in the past.  This project is intended to show that people in the free world who don’t know them care about them with no agenda to proselytize or convert them.  

Contact.

Nancy MacLaine, Plum Blossom Sangha, nmaclaine @ sbcglobal.net