UWinnipeg’s Dr. Mary Jane Logan McCallum’s award winning book, Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City, co-authored with Dr. Adele Perry, is now available in French. It was translated by Geneviève Deschamps and published by Presses de l’Université Laval.
This translation will help a broader audience across the country understand the story of Brian Sinclair. A middle-aged, non-Status Anishinaabeg resident of Winnipeg, Sinclair died in September 2008 from an easily treatable infection after he was left untreated and unattended to over a 34-hour period in the waiting room of the ER at Health Sciences, Winnipeg.
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. They argue that the only way to make sense of Sinclair’s death, and other untimely Indigenous deaths like it, is to study the larger context of colonial, racialized and gendered violence. The book has been adopted in social sciences and humanities courses across the country as well as in medical schools.
McCallum thanks Deschamps and Laval Press, as well as the University of Manitoba Press, and in particular Jill McConkey. In addition to the French and English editions, Structures of Indifference is also available in Audiobook, narrated by Wesley French.
About The Authors
Mary Jane Logan McCallum is a Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous People, History, and Archives at UWinnipeg. She is also the author of Nii Ndahlohke: Boys’ and Girls’ Work at Mount Elgin Industrial School, 1890-1915, and Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940–1980.
Adele Perry is a Professor of History at the University of Manitoba. She is the author of Aqueduct: Colonialism, Resources, and the Histories We Remember.
