Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City

WINNER Indigenous History Book Prize, Canadian Historical Association (2019)
WINNER Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction, Manitoba Book Awards (2019)
WINNER AUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show (Scholarly Typographic) (2019)

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 a Professor in the Department of History at University of Winnipeg.

Adele Perry is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba.