Persistence and Memorialisation: Self-harm and Suicide in Reparation Politics in Canada

Abstract

This article addresses the racial and temporal formations that render Indigenous suicide comprehensible in legal and representational regimes of reparative justice in settler colonialism. I trace governmental, non-governmental and community responses to suicide and explore biopolitical and necropolitical reparative governance concerning self-harm and suicide among Indigenous peoples in liberal settler states. I argue that the visual and written archive pertaining to suicide and self-harm is a time-space construction that is fused by a ‘grammar’ of racial difference.2 In particular, I suggest that the frameworks of persistence (continuing despite or because of obstacles) and memorialisation form some of the most significant ways in which inquiries and reports characterise the problem of suicide.