Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Razack, Sherene H.
• Cunneen, Chris
• Porter, Amanda
• Webb, Robert
• Deckert, Antje
• Tauri, Juan

Titel

Both sorry and happy: Inquests into Indigenous deaths in custody

Ist Teil von

• The Routledge International Handbook on Decolonizing Justice, 2023, Vol.1, p.247-255

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Settlers imagine themselves in a triumphalist narrative of a superior race whose superiority is confirmed in an encounter with dead Indians. In this chapter, I consider what the state does with dead bodies in inquests and inquiries into Indigenous deaths in custody, sites I consider to be the equivalent of the defiled graves of Indigenous peoples. A defiled grave is one that is desecrated and violated. To defile is also to sully someone's reputation. The settler must engage in a regular process of desecration if that subject is to know itself as triumphant and legitimate. This chapter discusses what the state does with dead bodies in inquests and inquiries into Indigenous deaths in custody, sites the author considers to be the equivalent of the defiled graves of Indigenous peoples. Settler societies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel are European societies that are founded on the dispossession of Indigenous populations. White-settler states regularly indulge in practices of desecration, from keeping Indigenous bones in museums to heaping indignities on bodies and graves, practices that fulfil the psychic need that Bergland identifies where the settler is constituted anew through feeling both sorry and happy. The Indigenous body that contains the seeds of its own demise is a recurring redemptive narrative, and perhaps nowhere more so than in inquests into the deaths of Indigenous and racialized peoples in legal fora dedicated to the improvement of a population deemed to be insufficiently modern.