The Quotidian and Constitutive Practice of Police Brutality Against Indigenous People

Authors

Elaine Craig, Dalhousie University Schulich School of LawFollow

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

2021

Keywords

Colonialism, Colonial Violence, Police Crime, Police Violence, Racial Terror

Abstract

In Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine Sherene Razack gives voice to the settler colonial violence perpetrated against Loreal Tsingine, a 27-year-old Navajo women who was shot and killed by Austin Shipley. Shipley, a white male police officer, claimed he was trying to apprehend her for alleged shoplifting. The article, which is brilliantly and compellingly written (as is typical of all of Professor Razack’s work) makes several claims. Most centrally, however, she asserts that racial terror – a violence done at both structural and individual levels – is at the very heart of the settler colonial project. In the North American context, the aim of the settler colonial project is the erasure, or in Razack’s words the annihilation, of Indigenous peoples in the interests of white settlement and prosperity. It is a state sponsored and centuries-old endeavour manifested through, for example, land and resource dispossession, cultural genocide, legal discrimination, the carceral state, and the destruction of the social, physical and political infrastructures that serve Indigenous peoples health and safety. Razack begins her analysis by reminding us that settler colonialism is an ongoing project, one that requires the continual imposition of racial terror

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Recommended Citation

Elaine Craig, "The Quotidian and Constitutive Practice of Police Brutality Against Indigenous People", Article Review of "Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine" by Sherene Razack, (2021) J Things We Like (Lots).