Timely Deaths: Medicalizing the Deaths of Aboriginal People in Police Custody

Abstract

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.

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