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  • Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody by Sherene H. Razack
  • Sarah Buhler (bio)
Sherene H. Razack, Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).

Dying from Improvement is a powerful examination of the role that inquests and inquiries into Indigenous deaths in custody play in the unrelenting Canadian settler colonial project. Through a close and critical reading of the transcripts of several inquests and inquiries involving Indigenous men and women who died in police custody in British Columbia and Saskatchewan, Sherene Razack shows that these legal processes function to promulgate an “official story”—that Indigenous people are a “dying race” who are responsible for their own demise and not fit to steward the land. While showcasing this narrative about “vanishing Indians,” inquests and inquiries are simultaneously redemptive sites where settlers perform and produce their identities as benevolent original citizens and rightful heirs of land and power. Thus, Razack shows us that inquests and inquiries function as technologies of governance for the settler state, working to legitimize ongoing dispossession. As Audra Simpson has pointed out, the “fragility of settler nation states” requires constant reassertions of power.1 Dying from Improvement shows us that the inquest or inquiry into an Indigenous death in custody is one mode by which this occurs.

In the opening pages of the book, Razack tells the story of Paul Alphonse, a sixty-seven-year-old Secwepemc man who died in hospital in police custody with a large purple boot print on his chest. While Alphonse’s family members worked hard during the inquest to raise concerns about the violence suffered by Alphonse (violence literally imprinted on his body), and Indigenous witnesses described a long-standing context of police violence against Indigenous people in Williams Lake, British Columbia, the question of the boot print and police violence were peripheral to the focus of the inquest. Rather, the central concern was Alphonse’s “alcoholism and the difficulties he posed for police and health-care professionals.”2

The stories of Paul Alphonse and other Indigenous people who died in custody lead Razack to pose a key question: why are Indigenous deaths in custody almost always understood to be “timely” deaths—unavoidable deaths that no one could have stopped? Razack posits that animating this idea of “timely death” in police custody is the powerful and persistent colonial idea of the “vanishing Indian.” This idea constructs Indigenous people as the remnants of a dying race: a people [End Page 457] unable to cope with modernity despite the best efforts of the settler state to “improve” them and, therefore, dying anyway. This narrative allows inquests and inquiries to turn their gaze away from the outright violence or “killing indifference” of police and health care providers and concentrate instead on individualized pathologies of Indigenous people who died. Thus, inquests and inquiries focus on the details of diseased livers, broken bodies, chronic alcoholism, and problematic behaviours of the men and women who died in custody. Experts who testify speak “not of racism or colonialism but of alcoholism.”3 The trope of the vanishing Indian, Razack argues, also provides a key opportunity for police, health care providers, and others to show that they are benevolent citizens seeking to save an unsalvageable people. Thus, inquests remind settlers that they are responsible for nothing more serious than failing to know how to deal with the impossible challenge posed by the people before them.4

The book is divided into six chapters and a conclusion. Each chapter takes up aspects of Razack’s central claims, outlined above. While each chapter can stand on its own as a complete piece, the chapters draw upon, build on, and illuminate each other to powerful effect. Throughout, Razack exposes the “paradigmatic and foundational violence” meted out to Indigenous peoples in settler society5—a violence that is hidden and denied in the “terrible silences” of official narratives and legal processes.6

In Chapter 1, the “Body as Placeless: Memorializing Colonial Power,” Razack takes up the story of the inquest into the death of Frank Paul, an Indigenous man who died after being dropped off by police in...

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