Dying from Improvement

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Dying From Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody critiques of the Canadian settler state and its legal system especially the treatment of Indigenous people, the unparalleled authority of the police and the justice system, and their systematic inhumanity towards those whose lives they perceive as insignificant. This book examines inquiries and inquests into untimely Indigenous deaths in state custody often tell the same story. Repeating details of fatty livers, mental illness, alcoholic belligerence, and a mysterious incapacity to cope with modern life, the legal proceedings declare that there are no villains here, only inevitable casualties of Indigenous life. Examining the inquiries and inquests reveals disturbing cases of First Nations men and women on reserve and in urban areas who receive grossly inadequate care at medical institutions as well as brutal and inhumane treatment at the hands of police and prison officials. Well-known cases such as the starlight tours along with little known events are presented by Sherene H. Razack, professor in the Department of Social Justice at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. The volume contains a detailed index and an appendix listing Deaths in Custody: Saskatchewan 1995–2013. Show more