Structures of Indifference

Reviews

“Situates a global and pervasive history of dispossession and marginalization within a local and specific story of one Indigenous life.” — G. Bruyere, University of Lethbridge, CHOICE

“One is to hope that this book is another nail in the coffin of colonialism’s impact on Indigenous people in Canada.” — Earl Waugh, University of Alberta, The Canadian Journal of Native Studies

“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.” — Karen Ella McCallum, Bridgewater State University, American Review of Canadian Studies

“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.” — G. Bruyere, University of Lethbridge, CHOICE