Formal inquiries into indigenous suicide justify settler colonialism: Mandy Gray, ‘Pathologizing Indigenous Suicide: Examining the Inquest into the Deaths of C.J. and C.B. at the Manitoba Youth Centre’, Studies in Social Justice, 10, 1, 2016, pp. 80-94
Abstract: This paper examines the inquest into the deaths by suicide of two
Manitoba Indigenous female youth while imprisoned in the Manitoba Youth Centre in
Winnipeg, Canada. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the inquest as a discursive
space that relies primarily on expert knowledge from law and psychiatry. It studies
the inquest’s recommendations for preventing future deaths under similar
circumstances. Utilizing Heidi Rimke’s conceptualization of psychocentrism, this
analysis examines how suicide discourse in this inquest reduces various
manifestations of violence to racial defects and places responsibility on the deceased
girls for their inability to have coped with the tortuous conditions of imprisonment. I
argue that contemporary understandings of Indigenous suicide in custody
systematically erase histories of colonial violence and erroneously reduce suicide to
an issue of individual pathology that can be identified and treated through
medicalization, psychiatrization and criminalization.
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