Sherene H. Razack, ‘Timely Deaths: Medicalizing the Deaths of Aboriginal People in Police Custody’, Law, Culture and the Humanities 7, 2 (2011)

This article is part of a larger study of inquests into the deaths of Aboriginal people in custody. I suggest that the Aboriginal body is considered to be one that is already dead, and thus a body on whom a full measure of care would be wasted. The inquest becomes a place where this “truth” is established. I explore how the deaths of Aboriginal people in police custody have been persistently “medicalized” – that is, attributed to the medical condition of alcoholism, with the inevitable consequence that they cannot be connected to the violence of an ongoing colonialism. Aboriginal death becomes a timely rather than untimely death, the only thing we can expect from a disappearing race.