Structures of Indifference examines an Indigenous life and death in a Canadian city and what it reveals about the ongoing history of colonialism. In September 2008, Brian Sinclair, a middle-aged, non-Status Anishinaabe resident of Winnipeg, arrived in the emergency room of a major downtown hospital. Over a thirty-four- hour period, he was left untreated and unattended to, and ultimately died from an easily treatable infection.

McCallum and Perry present the ways in which Sinclair, once erased and ignored, came to represent diffuse, yet singular and largely dehumanized ideas about Indigenous people, modernity, and decline in cities. This story tells us about ordinary indigeneity in the city of Winnipeg through Sinclair’s experience and restores the complex humanity denied him in his interactions with Canadian health and legal systems, both before and after his death.

Mary Jane Logan McCallum is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at University of Winnipeg. She is currently a CIHR New Investigator with the Manitoba Network Environment in Aboriginal Health Research.

Mary Jane Logan McCallum's profile page

Adele Perry is Professor of History at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. She was born and raised in a non-Indigenous family in British Columbia, did hard time in Toronto, and has lived in Winnipeg since 2000. She writes about the nineteenth century, gender, Canada, and colonialism, and is the author of On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871 (University of Toronto Press, 2001), Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (Cambridge, 2015), and the co-editor of four editions of Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women's History. With Esyllt Jones, she coordinated 2011's People's Citizenship Guide to Canada, published by ARP Books. You can find her on twitter at @AdelePerry.

Adele Perry's profile page

• Winner, Indigenous History Book Prize, Canadian Historical Association
• Winner, AUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show (Scholarly Typographic)
• Winner, Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction, Manitoba Book Awards

“In a Canadian hospital in 2008, an Indigenous man was left untreated and unattended for 34 hours and died of an easily treatable infection. A subsequent inquest wrestled with whether to examine systemic racism against Indigenous peoples as a contributing factor in Brian Sinclair’s death, or to focus solely on operational or procedural failures. The historian-authors use inquest documents as their primary archive to analyze how legal processes narrowly define and interpret events to effectively obscure the violence of contemporary settler colonialism. The book situates a global and pervasive history of dispossession and marginalization within a local and specific story of one Indigenous life. [...] A key success is that the authors never lose sight of Sinclair’s complex humanity as a man and family member, and as an urban Indigenous community member within an institution, city, province, and country that too often dehumanizes and ignores Indigenous peoples.”

CHOICE

“An accessible resource, providing undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, historians, and members of the general public a deep and careful study of what the life and death of one man can tell us about the deadly legacy and troubling contemporary prevalence of racism in the Canadian healthcare system.”

American Review of Canadian Studies

"One is to hope that this book is another nail in the coffin of colonialism’s impact on Indigenous people in Canada.”

The Canadian Journal of Native Studies