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

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:McCallum, Mary Jane Logan, 1974-
Imprint:Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada : University of Manitoba Press, ©2018.
Description:1 online resource (186 pages) : illustrations, maps
Language:English
Subject:
Format: E-Resource Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/12020556
Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:Perry, Adele.
ISBN:9780887555718
0887555713
9780887555732
088755573X
0887558356
9780887558351
Digital file characteristics:text file
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Text in English.
Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on February 20, 2019).
Summary:"Structures of Indifference examines an Indigenous life and death in a Canadian city, and what it reveals about the ongoing history of colonialism. At the heart of this story is a thirty-four-hour period in September 2008. During that day and half, Brian Sinclair, a middle-aged, non-Status Anishinaabeg resident of Manitoba's capital city, arrived in the emergency room of the Health Sciences Centre, Winnipeg's major downtown hospital, was left untreated and unattended to, and ultimately died from an easily treatable infection. His death reflects a particular structure of indifference born of and maintained by colonialism. 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. Structures of Indifference completes the story left untold by the inquiry into Sinclair's death, the 2014 report of which omitted any consideration of underlying factors, including racism and systemic discrimination."--
Other form:Print version: Perry, Adele. Structures of Indifference : An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City. Winnipeg : University of Manitoba Press, ©2018 9780887558351
Review by Choice Review

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. McCallum and Perry argue that "health care is not only, and sometimes not even primarily about biomedicine--it is also about assimilation and integration into the Canadian nation state and the annulment of treaty rights and responsibilities, as well as erasure of Indigenous autonomy, identity and ways of 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. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Gord Bruyere, University of Lethbridge

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review